Beta Watch

This month: three new online services that are unfinished, but available to the public to try out.

Windows Live Mail: Buggy, but Promising

The eventual successor to Outlook Express in Windows XP and Windows Mail in Vista, Windows Live Mail is a free download, but be warned: It's a true beta, with bugs and incomplete features. By default, the program shows a pane of Web search results based on terms contained in your e-mail. We quickly turned that useless feature off. More promising is the photo-message feature that lets you compose captions and even do light editing within your message. But the messages didn't display properly in other e-mail apps.

Mahalo: People-Guided Search

Mahalo's search results are put together by human guides.If you want to know more about Jessica Alba or the iPhone, Mahalo, a search engine that uses human beings to create pages of results, will be great for you. If your interests are less mainstream, you may be out of luck. Search for a topic that Mahalo is prepared for, and the results are nicely presented. You get quick facts about the subject in a box on the right and categorized sets of links in the main part of the page. Ask about a topic for which Mahalo's human Guides haven't put together a page, and you get mostly Google results, along with suggestions of Mahalo pages on supposedly similar topics. We'll have to see whether the real people driving Mahalo, which is currently in a public alpha, will be able to keep up with the many topics Web users search for.

Yoomba: IM Anybody

The idea of Yoomba is appealing: To send someone an instant message or make a VoIP call, all you need to know is their e-mail address--no more remembering handles from the myriad other chat programs out there. You enter the person's e-mail address, and if they aren't using Yoomba, they'll get an e-mail invitation to download the program. Whether Yoomba will succeed in dislodging people from AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or Trillian is questionable, though. Installation went fine on one of our PCs, but froze on another. And chatting on Yoomba is still relatively primitive: You can't share files or obtain a log of your conversation.