The Battle for the Browser Sidekicks

Imagine this: You're a half-hour away from a winning bid at Yahoo Auctions that will land you an autographed Mickey Mantle baseball for $61.

Unfortunately, it's time to head to the office. So you grab your wireless Yahoo handheld for the car ride. And good thing you did, because some wiseacre outbid you. Your Yahoo handheld belts out a yodel calling this urgent matter to your attention.

You pull over and counter-bid just in time to land the slugger's John Hancock for a cool $75.

Welcome to the age of portable Internet assistants.

Actually, the Yahoo handheld isn't ready yet, but you can park a browser-free version of Yahoo on your desktop that can alert you to shifts in your stock portfolio, when other friends are online, and pre-configured calendar events.

Nearly all the major portals have cooked up some software app to run on your desktop so they can keep feeding you ads and drive you back to their home base.

Take A Test Drive

I checked out three of the best so-called desktop portals: Yahoo Messenger, once known as Yahoo Pager; Excite Assistant, a snazzy month-old offering from Excite@Home; and America Online's ICQ, which has slowly become a multi-tentacled mishmash of features and functions.

These gadgets are not yet ready to join the elite class of must-have applications for your desktop. Most are still tethered tightly to a browser and dependent on persistent Net connections. But these portal offspring are worth test driving around the block.

Exciting Potential

Excite@Home's Excite Assistant automatically downloads customized content from your My Excite customized portal start page to a stylish desktop client. You can browse through stock quotes, sports scores, horoscopes, and other content without having a browser open or even being online at that very moment.

But while Excite@Home's client is by far the most swank in its class, it is limited in function. The 1.3MB program offers a lot of sizzle, like dozen channels of audio content using RealNetworks' RealAudio technology. What it's missing is instant messaging and integration of other cool Excite@Home technology like its voice mail and audio chat.

Excite Assistant does provide notification when you receive Excite@Home e-mail, but overall it falls short compared to AOL's ICQ and Yahoo Messenger in terms of instant communication and awareness of friends and colleagues online.

If you aren't looking for an instant messaging client or aren't in the market for event alerts, though, Excite Assistant is for you. It wins kudos from me for its style, thoughtful design and usability.

ICQ: The Emperor of Chat Gets New Clothes

With a whopping 38 million chatters, AOL's ICQ reigns supreme when it comes to chat. But the biggest is not always best.

Over the years ICQ has slowly morphed into a portal hybrid serving up functions like search, community building tools, a calendar, and e-mail hooks. Last week ICQ upped the ante announcing it would provide "voice chat"-something Excite and Yahoo already offer.

But ICQ isn't really a portal, it's simply a client-side software application tied to a number of different Web sites (although not AOL.com or Netcenter.com). This is both a plus and a minus.

ICQ tries hard not to be an AOL clone, but it could learn from its parent when it comes to clean design and neatly integrated features. ICQ can be hard to navigate and confusing for the uninitiated, and it's not always the best-behaved application.

As for features that compete with Yahoo and Excite? ICQ offers text-based chat and notification when buddies log online. Alerts can be configure to go off whenever you want, but they are not tied to dynamic content on the Web like stock market conditions or pre-configured calendar events.

ICQ does win when it comes to community, since the bigger the phone book the better the service. (Curiously, though, it still doesn't connect to AOL Instant Messenger.)

And it wins hands down in advertising, since it has none-unlike Yahoo and Excite, which display non-stop banner-like ads inside their clients.

Yahoo Sends Out a Messenger

Yahoo had hoped to give you access to AOL's exclusive "buddies list" so you could swap text-based instant messages with an extra 25 million people online using its week-old beta Yahoo Messenger. But no, last week AOL pulled the plug on interoperability with its AOL Instant Messaging service leaving beta downloaders like me high and dry.

Still, the beta Yahoo Messenger has a lot more going for it besides the ability to yack it up with the AOL clan.

What makes Yahoo's Messenger stand out is its tight integration with My Yahoo. Along with folding news, stock, weather, and sports headlines from your My Yahoo start page, it integrates Yahoo Auctions, Travel, and Calendar.

Yahoo Travel was easily configured to give me the latest and cheapest fares to my favorite destinations. By selecting the "Travel" tab on Yahoo Messenger I easily located the "Edit" option. Once I clicked on "Edit" it launched a browser window that brought me to My Yahoo where I could set departure and destination cities.

Yahoo Messenger also offers very slick alerts, which can notify you when friends are online or when stock quotes reach user-defined price limits. Yahoo can also alert you when you have a winning bid on Yahoo Auctions, or an upcoming appointment in Yahoo Calendar, or if someone answers your personal ad.

The program itself is a 1.2MB download, and in typical Yahoo fashion the interface is modest but rich in features.

Which Sidekick Are You On?

Excite Assistant is great for people who like sexy-looking technology with limited functionality. It's guaranteed to jazz up your desktop and temp you to kill an hour just playing around with it. But if you want an assistant that does more than push e-mail, headlines, and music streams, look elsewhere.

ICQ is a very powerful tool that's getting better and bigger all the time. But it is a strange beast and hard to quantify because its always a moving target. Every time I click on it I unearth another four features I will never want. For someone like me who doesn't want to wage World War III on the Web, it's overkill.

Yahoo offers a barebones interface with loads of great functionality. Unlike competing portal products it does a great job of packaging a truckload of applications into one tiny client. Some features are hard to find like setting up alerts for Yahoo Calendar, but Yahoo Messenger is my favorite.

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