Zoho Mail launched out of private beta and other great user experiences

I have just finished subscribing to a couple of services. The experience has been overwhelmingly positive, despite the negativity surrounding all of us caused by the economic crisis (for my italian readers, see also WebEpoque’s article).
No, really. If I am here posting this article after almost 3 months of silence and with 10 posts published in the last year, there must be something going on.

h2. Zoho Mail: incredible user experience

Let’s talk about the newly launched Zoho Mail. To get a new email account there (mine is fle.., well, you guessed it @zoho.com) you can go through the standard sign up process, filling your preferred username, password, password again, email address, i-am-not-a-robot-check captcha. It’s pretty straightforward, it’s not hard to find more intimidating registration forms around the web.
But there is a big “or” (_big_ semantically speaking, it’s actually a really small option in the page): you can log in using your Google or Yahoo accounts. I clicked on Google and (since I was already authenticated) I was asked if I wanted to allow a third party service (Zoho) to access your Google Account. I clicked yes. I was sent back to Zoho, which asked for my preferred username. The interface brilliantly suggested “flevour”. Pressed one more button and I was in. It obvisouly takes more to describe the process than going through it for real, I think it was a matter of 10 seconds and I could interact with Zoho Mail.

No email verifications, no boring forms to fill, no Google password handed out to a misterious service. Talk about “data portability”:http://www.dataportability.org.
I got my real “whoah!” moment when I visited the settings page and tried to add a new POP account to check mail from my GMail account there (it’s a usual step I take to test a new mail service) The system auto-detects if you are adding a GMail account and pre-fills the POP3/SMTP URL’s and port numbers.

You can see all of this in my freshly video shot screencast (bad resolution, but you can follow the process in the paragraphs above).

All this said, I think I’ll stick with GMail for the moment. I don’t know if I am too GMail addicted, or Zoho Mail looks too Outlook-ish, or a combination of both.

h3. More simpleness. Applied.

!http://flevour.net/files/twitterfeed.png!

I wanted to post a little notice to Twitter whenever I update my blog here, so I landed to http://twitterfeed.com/. Login with my OpenID, quickly setup. Matter of seconds, you are up and running: no boring user registration or whatever. I love how authoritatively they force you to use OpenID and nothing else to register. Kudos to TwitterFeed developers!