Xtra, my ISP, broke loads of it’s subscribers email this weekend while implementing a “new enhanced service”. Stuff like that can happen with upgrades, especially when it’s a complex system with several hundred thousand users. It shouldn’t, but we’re getting a wonderful new service so it’s worth the pain, right?
“Yahoo!Xtra Bubble” claims to be to be “Your window to the Web” so I had a look. It just seems to be re-packaged MyYahoo! with all the usual Yahoo! crud. Do I really need Yahoo! Horoscope?
Then, looking closer, it all seemed very odd. I wonder why a service from a New Zealand ISP for a Kiwi customer had defaulted to showing:
- Results from a lottery in Arizona?
- The weather from Sunnyvale, California?
- Sports news from “The Roanoke Times” (Roanoke, Virginia?)
- Local news from the Denver Post. (I’m in Auckland and Xtra know it, their bill gets here OK)
- The “Lubbock News”. (Fascinating for the good folks of Lubbock but not much interest to me)
- Shopping from US merchants. (Again, not much use as our dollar plunges)
“Yahoo!Xtra Bubble” sure isn’t my window on the web, whose is it?
Yes, I could spend time customising all this for local content but you still get the Yahoo! crud. Forget the Bubble, a blank home-page looks like a good option right now. Thank goodness this rubbish is provided at “no extra cost”!
Xtra emailers' weekend of misery - NZ Herald
The company says it is enhancing the overall service to more than 500,000 Xtra customers and had tried to notify people of a 24-hour webmail outage.“The result of a partnership between Yahoo! and Telecom, Bubble is touted as providing "an exciting range of new services that will change the way you use the internet" for no extra cost”
Bubble bursts for Telecom service - Stuff.co.nz
Telecom's website announced the arrival of a new internet service with the words "The wait is over!" but for many customers that's all they did over the weekend - wait.
