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Filed under: Business, Security, E-mail, Productivity, Google

LawMail.org looks too much like Google for comfort

This is a software blog, not a clearinghouse for legal advice, but I have to say that I'd probably change my site design around a bit if I owned lawmail.org. Law Mail is a certified email service -- for lawyers! -- that provides secure, private, tracked messaging for the transmission of legal documents. Good idea. The legal profession is largely still mired in the dark ages of faxes and snail-mail because of the need to verify important documents.

Here's the bad idea: the Law Mail site might look a bit familiar to you at first glance. Specifically, it might look a heck of a lot like Google. From the primary-colored serif logo to the barely modified Gmail favicon, everything about this site added up to confuse me about whether it was actually a new service from Google. And that's not even mentioning that the phrase "powered by Google" shows up all over the Law Mail site. Sure, tech-savvy people know that "powered by" doesn't mean "owned by," but it throws you off for a second.

Law Mail is a pretty good idea for a service, but it's an idea that needs credibility to function. Whether or not you think they're trying to borrow some credibiity from Google, the fact that you have to think about it means they're dead in the water. It's not too late to rebrand and hire a savvy designer, and I hope that's what Law Mail will do. It would certainly keep them from getting a few Law Mails of their own from Google's attorneys.

Filed under: Google, Yahoo!

Google ripped off Yahoo!'s IE7 promo page?

Google/Yahoo! IE7 promo
Google's "Don't be evil" maxim has been called into question (again) after Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny pointed out that Google's new Internet Explorer 7 promo page looked suspiciously similar to the one Yahoo! put up a few months ago. And by "suspiciously similar" I mean practically identical. The layout was exactly the same, most of the wording was the same or very similar--basically everything except the colors and graphics. Google was quick to change the promo page, but Zawodny's blog has a screenshot of the original which is pretty damning. He says that he "checked with our PR group to make sure that this wasn't just a template that Microsoft gave to all partners," and they confirmed that that's not the case. So what's up with this, Google? Did some lazy intern put that page together? Please tell me heads are rolling.

[Via Matt Cutts]

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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