Which service is best? You judge
By Oo Gin Lee
March 03, 2006
A FEW years ago, you basically had two choices of free web-mail and instant messaging, Microsoft's MSN or Yahoo!.
MSN Messenger 8 Beta version, Gmail with Google Talk integrated, Yahoo! Messenger and Skype.
Now things have become more complicated, with other features like voice calls, video conferencing, e-mail alerts, sexy emoticons and so much more.
Which is best - Google, MSN, Skype or Yahoo? The best way is to compare their different services.
FREE E-MAIL
For web-mail, Gmail is my top choice because it has the cleanest user interface, loads quickly, offers the largest mailbox at a free 2GB, allows e-mail to be sorted into multiple folders which it calls 'labels' and arranges e-mail by threads instead of individual e-mails.
You can view your Gmail using Microsoft Outlook or other e-mail software.
The only setback is that you need an existing Gmail user to send you an invitation to get an account.
Yahoo! Mail is in second place for its 1GB free e-mail space, decent loading speeds and clean interface.
The premium version sends your e-mail to other e-mail software too.
Hotmail lags too far behind, especially since you only get a measly 250MB of space in your mailbox.
It takes a while to load and the interface is messy with irritating ads.
And Skype doesn't have e-mail.
VOICE CALLS
While the four services let you make PC-to-PC calls to fellow users, only Skype and Yahoo offer the convenience of PC-to-phone calls at very low prices.
For PC-to-PC calls, I was surprised that Google Talk offered the best quality, beating even the better-known Skype, which was recently acquired by eBay.
MSN and Yahoo! unfortunately do not have as good PC-to-PC voice quality.
Both Skype and Yahoo's PC-to-phone calls have reasonably good voice quality.
Skype costs 3.5 cents per minute for calls to many popular destinations like Australia, China, US and 4 cents per minute to Malaysia.
Yahoo!Messenger with Voice has better rates - 2.9 cents per minute to China, Australia and Malaysia and just 1.9 cents per minute to the US.
INSTANT MESSAGING
All four services offer instant messaging (IM) or chat services.
I have to say that MSN Messenger is still my favourite, especially its current 7.5 version.
Most people that I come into contact with seem to be on MSN, probably because it's been around the longest.
MSN's user personalisation is very good and you can even tell the world what music is playing on your PC.
You can also add your own picture, or your toddler's, or dog's, or a slideshow of them all, if you prefer.
You can also have a multi-party chat session and save all your IM conversations on your hard drive, so you can refer to them later on.
Now, you can even copy emoticons sent by your contacts and add them to your own list!
We are currently testing the MSN Messenger's Beta 8 version, and it is more customisable with different coloured chat windows and enhanced file-sharing capabilities.
Yahoo!Messenger has most of the features that MSN offers but somehow, MSN just does it better.
I consider Google Talk as second best, mainly because of its clean interface and good integration with Gmail.
All your chat sessions are automatically saved in a chat folder in Gmail and you can initiate chat sessions from the same Gmail interface.
The only thing you can't do is to have a voice chat on Gmail.
You need to open up a separate Google Talk interface for that.
Google Talk, however, lacks the cutesy stuff like emoticons and sexy user personalisations.
Worse, you can't have a chat conference with multiple users.
Skype is too basic although it can do multi-party conferencing.
If you can't decide which is best, just do what I do.
Use them all.
