I invite you to check out the different faces of the newly improved Yahoo mail (biggest new difference? 100mb of storage. *yawn*).

First, the default American "Welcome Woman". Standard professional photography. She could be anyone; a mom, a businesswoman on a weekend, a pilot. It works, but it's a little boring. If you click Learn More, you get a picture of a quasi-asian person, probably chosen for her racial ambiguity. Hawaiian? Vietnamese? Filipino? She probably sounds like a valley girl though, so don't worry, you're still on the American site.

Now for Hong Kong. If you mouseover or check the alt-text on the image, you'll see she's labelled "Welcome Woman." That's fine with me. Women have every right to steal the jobs of Welcome Men. Again we have professional photography, and this time the model is younger and looks like she's having fun. There's a cute and fresh personality being projected with the color yellow and the expression on her face. Our cultures seem to place a premium on this brand of female attractiveness, and that's fine with me too. I'd take a flighty and immature woman in her 20s over a serious one, any day. [More related reading here] The photo on the Learn More page, however, is a different story. One that I will not get into.

Most localized sites still use the old Yahoo format, so India/China/Denmark and others are out. Germany/Spain/France/Italy/UK/Brazil/Argentina/Mexico's sites look exactly like the US site. Australia has a picture of a Welcome Woman too, except she's fitted into a different template, and is working on a laptop. Once again she's got a playful, silly grin on her face that no male model would be told to pose in. Korea has the same image as HK, but somehow the colors have been tweaked! Ah, those Koreans and their penchant for cosmetic modifications.

But Singapore, oh Singapore. I have saved you the last place. What the hell is going on here. The photos look like they were taken with some cheap-ass $40 keychain digital camera from Sim Lim Square. The models look like they were responsible for selling the camera to the photographer. And even that's a low blow, for I quite like the people who work at SLS, in their own honest and cheating ways. Oh dear, oh dear. This is not who we are; why are we projecting this image to all the other global Yahoo users?

--

In other news: I have been very busy and will be very very busy for the next 14 days as things at work shift into high gear. We're trying to secure a major deal, and it looks like I will be called on to work overtime and over weekends. More on this over at the other blog (o_O). Take care, dear readers. That is all.