Front-page princess

Congratulate Andrea, everyone, for having two front-page infographics in as many days in the Mercury news.

     
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Worth checking out

A beta version of Yahoo Messenger 6.0 is out. It offers a couple of neat additions, including better integration with mobile devices. It automatically forwards IMs to your phone when you're offline, and text messaging to phones is much easier. It also integrates with Launchcast, which is nice if you use the service. And you can make yourself invisible to specific contacts.

In other beta news, I've been testing the new Google Mail service, which should be more widely available soon. This one could be a category killer. It gives you a gigabyte of storage on the theory that you should never have to delete your messages. Searching is a breeze, and it automatically groups related messages while viewing. It's fast, too. Common tasks that take two or three clicks on other Web mail sites take on Google single-click or less -- choosing from a pull-down menu takes no clicks at all.

Some have raised privacy concerns because the service displays ads targeted according to the e-mail's contents (they show up only on e-mail you receive). It does feel a little weird, but the fact is, most e-mail is "read" by a series of computers on its way from the sender to the recipient. Triggering ads based on certain keywords in the e-mail doesn't mean the computer is actually comprehending it, or judging you. And for those who worry that certain keywords might attract government scrutiny, well, guess what -- that's already a reality with nearly all e-mail systems.

One minor caveat: Google says a gigabyte of storage means you never have to delete anything. Well, based on my mail over the last two days, my inbox will be full in about 4-5 years.