Microsoft has publicly offered over $44 billion to acquire Yahoo!.

The offer arrives just in time, since Yahoo! has been struggling financially, this week they announced ‘hundreds’ of layoffs. In the end, they disclosed the number: 1000 jobs.

One of the most awaited features for Gmail is IMAP.

After a few years, the Gmail IMAP access feature will be enabled in your account soon.

Don’t fret if you don’t see “IMAP Access” yet under the Settings menu. We’re rolling it out to everyone over the next few days.

The feature has been activated on some accounts, my Google Apps account which is tied to my domain mail service already has it (screenshot).

There is a fair amount of popular supported email clients, the list comes with detailed instructions on how to configure it.

Yesterday I was listening to The World’s Interview with Andrea Crossan on NPR.

She talked about some panorama photos (Managua, Massaya volcano) that she took while visiting Nicaragua, using a device called the Gigapan.

At first sight, the photos may not be that great, but when you zoom in onto any area of the photo you then realize how much detail is brought to you. It sort of reminds me of Google Earth’s rendering.

“The Gigapan is a simple robotic platform for capturing very high-resolution (gigapixel and up) panoramic images from a standard digital camera. Sponsored by Google, CMU and the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, the Global Connection Project has also developed software which places you inside the panorama and lets you explore.” — Global Connection Project

Andrea Crossan mentioned that there’s a consumer version of the Gigapan to be sold for about $100 some time in March. They’ll even provide support so you can build it yourself.

Cool!!!

While revisiting the domain-branded gmail topic, after reading Ralph’s post on how cool this whole thing is, I went and looked at my ‘Domain Settings’ on Google: They already offer the CNAME configuration. =)

Now, the only issue that remains is that as soon as I access my Gmail-branded url (after entering my CNAME values within MT) gm.blulit.com, it immediately redirects to mail.google.com/hosted/blulit.com…

The domain web pages service (described at Ralph’s) already supports such behavior, but Gmail for domains is not there yet.

“Small moves, Ellie… small moves”

Not long ago, I decided to stop using Flickr. Besides willing to try the new Picasa web service, I had another big reason to move away from it.

There’s a saying in Spanish:

“Nunca digas ‘De esa agua no beberé’, porque en ella te ahogas”

It means: “Never say ‘I will not drink that water’, because you’ll drown in it”.

I am not drowning, but after giving Picasa a try I know now that Flickr is more convenient.

Flickr let’s you browse other users’ photos (as long as they are public, most of them are), and it doesn’t require you to have an account with them to do so, granted: the photos have to be public in order to be accessed without an account, but at least it gives you the option to do this.

I’ve always enjoyed going though many photos from others… there are so many cool photos out there… and they are open to everyone. Why couldn’t Google and Picasa do something like that? Why do I have to force my friends and family to sign up when I want to share one or two photos?

So… there you go.

I bit my tongue, but this made me put both to the test: Flickr won.