According to Google’s TV Raman, their top two ‘accessible’ services are their main web search and the new Google labs accessible search. The rationale?

Web search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections

Right, that’s good and all, but it doesn’t really excuse the dozens of tables that have no summaries does it? And headers really don’t magically make a page accessible.

And as for the new Accessible search:

Accessible Search: Promotes results that are accessible.

I haven’t played with this search enough to see if it does promote accessible results (I’m sure it’s a good service), but again, Google’s own code is a mess. It’s better than the main Google search, but still has huge amounts of inaccessible code.

You should never claim your site is accessible. Code for it as much as you can, test it as much as you can and show you conform to WCAG, but never claim it’s ‘accessible’. And even if you do, at least make sure it passes some automated tests: unlike Google, who barely scrape in at Priority 1.

What’s next — Ten Google? I seriously doubt that, but surely Channel Ten will follow suit soon. The Big Brother site is currently hosted by 3, perhaps Ten plans to focus more on the mobile market rather than the broader web market? Considering that Big Brother was previously partnered with iPrimus, the shift in sponsor could well indicate this strategy.

Google Calender has finally been released to the public, and it looks very slick. But one surprise with it is that the developers behind it have actually created some valid HTML. Google Calendar even has a doctype! Perhaps the days of Google’s notoriously bad HTML is behind them.

Douglas Bowman was involved in the project, which may have had something to do with it. (Possible quote: "by the way guys, c’mon — your web apps are awesome but your HTML sucks!").

On the functionality side, I’m not sure how much impact Google Calendar will have until it synchs with handheld devices. I’m sure they’ll attempt this in the future, and then along with Gmail, Google might actually give the likes of Outlook a real run for its money. Outlook is hardly the be and end all of desktop communication and organisation — but even Doug Bowman sings Google Calendar’s praise over iCal, which is always getting praise from the Mac camp.

Gmail killer?

Obviously Live Mail is an attempt to catch up with Gmail, which has been wildly popular since arriving two years ago and shaking up the webmail world with its spiffy AJAX-driven interface and huge two gigabytes of space.

The process of moving from normal Hotmail to the new Live Mail is very cumbersome. It initially comprises of several screens for setting user preferences.

The sent mail option is quite absurd. Gmail saves everything – why wouldn’t you want to keep sent messages? Not autosaving sent messages is a horrible feature of the 2mb-per-user webmail days that should have been forgotten long ago. And you only get 30 days!

The colour-scheme option is nice, and thus far Gmail can’t compete – but its a very trivial feature (note: I couldn’t help but pick the worst possible colour scheme, as I did with Google Page Maker).

More AJAXery

The name ‘Live Mail’ alludes to a slick AJAX-driven interface, and Live Mail does deliver on this functionality, even down to a very familiar loading alert — a very atypical swirly loading animation (which looks uncannily similar to the Firefox loading icon).

One nice feature of Live Mail is automatic spell checking, complete with Office-style zig-zag red underlining. Right-clicking on a word presents alternative spelling suggestions as you’d expect.

The ‘To’ field has an excellent contacts list feature. It’s a fairly simple feature that lets you select names from your contacts next to the ‘To’ field. Such functionality, albeit very basic, is surprisingly missing from Gmail. You can also email to a group of contacts as they appear in MSN Messenger, another handy feature.

Cramped layout

While there are some good features in Live Mail, the layout is still quite cramped — very frame-driven, much like the desktop Outlook. There is a lot of wasted space around the banners, which could be tightened up. Unfortunately Microsoft are still sticking with the graphical banner ad, even though Google’s targeted text ads are far less imposing, far less garish and far more relevent to users. And they are still pulling in big bucks.

By moving the search box down and spreading the username and logout options out, Live Mail could save a lot of space.

Conversations?

One disappointment with Live Mail is that there is currently no option to sort mail by conversations (even Outlook 2003 has that feature). For me, this has become by far the most efficient way to organise my email — not only is there the obvious and logical grouping of the same messages, but Gmail also combines all messages into one parent ‘message’, which saves an awful lot of screen space.

But I think the biggest disappointment with Live Mail is that it’s ‘enhanced’ mode is built exclusively for Internet Explorer 6.

It’s 2006, and I can’t believe Microsoft have built this purely for IE6. It’s just sheer laziness. As a developer I spent more time developing for IE6 than any other current browser. But, again, this is only a beta product — hopefully Microsoft will clean up their lax browser support in the future. However, I’m really not tempted in the slightest to switch back to Microsoft for my webmail, as Gmail is still streets ahead.

The WYSIWYG-style interface is of the usual high standard you’d expect from Google — AJAX rich and very easy to use. There are warnings about putting your email online (“Be careful. Remember that any time you include an email address on a web page, nasty spammers can find it too”) are nice — as are the encouragements to check links before you put them in.

I’m looking at these features from the point of view of what Google perceives its target customers to be: basic users who are making their first steps into web publishing. This may include those who may not know what a blog is, yet or how to share photos online, or those who just want to set up a good old fashioned ‘homepage’. However, with the boom in community-centric online services (Blogger, Myspace, Flickr) I’m really not seeing how this service is going to really impact in any serious way — unless Google has something else up its sleeves for this one.

I find it interesting that this site appears to have video and photo sharing — is this the first we may see of a Google photo sharing service? Such a product seems to be strangely missing from Google’s product line up, especially considering its very offline photo organising service Picasa.

Maybe Google aren’t quite ready to challenge Flickr (and Yahoo!) just yet.

We spent 20 minutes writing this entry, and then the browser crashed. Good thing there’s auto-save. It saves. Automatically.

Now that’s a smashing idea. Hooray for Gmail!