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The email marketing world is about to be shaken up a bit by a new player with some disruptive pricing plans that may finally force the big players to start lowering their prices. PHPList has been the defacto open source standard for managing mailing lists for as long as I can remember, but as a self-hosted solution, it is often difficult to maintain deliverability. Commercial hosted solutions tend to have much better deliverability than self-hosted solutions because commercial providers maintain strict anti-spam compliance and have relationships with the major email providers and ISPs to ensure that their messages get through spam filters so long as senders comply with anti-spam regulations. Email marketers almost ALWAYs want to break the rules, so if you run a self-hosted solution, it's often impossible to comply with anti spam regulations because the people calling the shots tell the people controlling the software to break the rules. Virtually every person I've ever worked for has wanted to break the email marketing rules/laws at some point. So going with a commercially hosted solution has the secondary benefit of taking that decision of anti-spam compliance out of the hands of your potentially irresponsible clients. Unfortunately, most of the major players in the commercial email marketing space have priced themselves right out of many people's range. They charge ridiculous rates for anything over a few thousand users. Enter PHPList's new hosted solution .

The pricing is less than half of what the nearest commercial players are charging. They claim to have relationships with the major email providers and ISPs and maintain a very strict anti-spam compliance, in fact you have to go through a trial period where they monitor your sending behavior and then slowly grant you increased sending priviliges. Their most expensive pricing tier is just  $180 for 100,000 messages per month. Still not cheap, but it's way cheaper than the alternatives. I have yet to find any commercial service that even advertises a pricing tier with a monthly sending limit over 100,000, which seems odd because it's easy to build a list with over 100,000 users these days. One site I work on just got 40,000 new signups from a 1-week promotional campaign. If we send out two messages per month we'll go over the limit for most commercially hosted programs. So I'm looking forward to seeing how well the hosted PHPList service works and whether the prices stay at their current levels over time.

If you're looking for some alternatives to PHPList, you might want to check out this article, which lists "The Top 8 PHPList Alternatives ", though I'm not sure if they are really THE top 8 alternatives, it might give you some good ideas.  

From the dept of "Why Didn't I Think of That?" comes yet another useful site:

http://scriptsrc.net/

It's just a page of links to the latest versions of the most common open-source script libraries hosted on Google. The developers added convenient "copy" buttons for all the major script libs that you can just click to copy the relevant javascript library includes to your clipboard for easy pasting into your web pages. Not a game changer, but a handy site to bookmark anyway. Contains script src info for jQuery, jQueryUI, Chrome Frame, SWFObject, MooTools, YUI, Ext JS, Prototype, Dojo, and script.aculo.us and show the number of times each has been copied, giving you an idea of the relative popularity of each library. No surprise, JQuery is vastly more popular than any other JS framework. After several years of somewhat serious javascript work, I can confirm that JQuery makes me wish I'd never heard of Prototype and Script.aculo.us when I first started working with JS libraries. Anyway, check out scriptsrc.net the next time you're wondering what the Google CDN locations are for any major JS lib. 

I stumbled across a couple of neat apps for my Android OS phone (HTC Incredible) that offer two new approaches to speed typing on a touchscreen.

The first is called Swype (UPDATE: It's not actually available yet for the HTC Incredible or most other phones). It allows you to slide your finger from one letter to the next, tracing out a geometric shape with your finger as you do so. This allows words to be recognized by the shape you trace out on the phone's screen as you slide from letter to letter, so you theoretically don't need to be as accurate, so long as you're consistently innacurate. I've read some reviews of Swype and people generally either seem to love it or hate it. The demos I saw made the software look somewhat sluggish at recognizing words, and if it's not sure about the word you still have to choose from a list just like the word recognition built into the standard AndroidOS keyboard. Here's a video that shows how it works:

The other app that aims to make typing easier is called ThickButtons . ThickButtons watches what you're typing and tries to increase the size of the letters you are most likely to need next. For English and the romantic languages, it actually doesn't require much processing power to do something like this since most western language words have common prefixes and word stems. Anyway, it seems like another decent idea and most reviews I've read seem fairly positive. Check it out the video:

Of course, I haven't tried either app myself. I try to avoid typing on my phone at all costs, but I plan to try them both eventually and report back. Maybe I'll even start typing more on my phone.

UPDATE: I have finally gotten around to trying ThickButtons on my HTC Incredible and I definitely like it. Anxiously awaiting the arrival of Swype. 

CNET pits the HTC DROID Incredible against the iPhone 3GS and determines that the Incredible is "The best phone we've seen". The kicker, just like I've been saying since the release of the iPhone, was call quality. Going into the final round, the phones were essentially tied in terms of overall features, construction, performance, etc. It was that crappy AT&T network that lost the iPhone the top spot. That's the #1 reason why I don't own an iPhone. Of course there's about 10 other reason that are just as important to me, but the #1 reason is still that it runs only on the horrible AT&T network. 

Check out the full prizefight on YouTube.