Just awful
Written: Mar 04 '05
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I signed on with Excite back in the early days of the internet...when anything and everything was fresh and new, and content trumped ease of use and functionality. Now in 2005 it has become exceeding apparent that Excite.com is the Ford Pinto of email services: no matter how many new features are added to it, it's still dangerous to operate.
Sign on with Excite, and you get pretty much the same services offered by the likes of Yahoo! and MSN. Personalized home-pages with more content choices than you could ever take advantage of, an internet based email account, and a search engine. The overall design is laid out well and easy on the eyes. I would rate it better than Yahoo!, which in the looks-department is really kind of basic. The email service is nothing to write home about. Pretty basic and somewhat "functional", although it does come equipped with a 'Power Editor' which is a kind-of basic MS Word within Excite that will allow you to change fonts, insert characters and sounds, and spell check. This feature is perhaps its one redeeming quality.
My frustration with Excite is that while all of its features look great on paper, in practice it exceedingly slow, plagued with pop-ups, spam filtration that's useless, and a service that's basically out-of-step with what Yahoo and Google are offering its users today.
Exceedingly slow: even with a T3 line at work, and high-speed cable access at home, Excite.com takes an abnormally long time to load, especially when using email. This is one area that is most frustrating, because this is the feature that most of us will use more regularly than anything else. Sign-in alone can make you want to switch all of your addresses to another service. Sometimes it can be almost comical. I've heard Hotmail users complain about the sluggishness of their service, but I swear - Excite is worse.
Plagued with pop-ups: A trip to Excite.com gives my Google toolbar a real workout. I'd bet that of the 3,000+ pop-ups logged by my Google toolbar, at least 50-60% of them are from Excite alone. I understand that they need to make a profit, but angering users shouldn't be a way to do it.
Useless Spam Filter: Set to "Medium" and my in-box is plagued with SPAM. Even more frustrating are the spam emails tagged with past dates, which Excite wont recognize as "new" and puts them among my other old emails, forcing me to scroll through my inbox to properly delete them. Yahoo's email service puts all new emails, regardless of dates, in the front of the pack. Why can't Excite? Set to "High", and Excite's SPAM filter will place just about all of your messages into the Bulk folder. In short, it's pretty much useless.
Out of Step: Yahoo and Google, as well as most others, have corrected these types of issues to make their service more functional and easy to use. Excite, just well, hasn't!
Bottom line: If email is what you want, go with Yahoo or G-mail. Content? Yahoo. Slow, frustrating service? Excite.
Recommended:
No
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About the Author
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