Google Realtime Search: Useful?

Official Google Blog: Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools

This appears to be one of those projects that involve a lot of work and resources, but result in very little gain. I don't see the usefulness of Google Realtime for anything beyond checking for possible news information that hasn't been reported in the major media yet. For example, I may want to read about the incident that caused train delays today. At the moment, I am using Twitter search for this purpose and it seems to do what I want.

4 Hours to Create Email Account

One of my clients asked me to create a new email account for them. Their site is hosted on Network Solutions. In the past, this was not a problem at all. I just log into the account management system and the whole process is finished in under a minute. It is no longer so simple. I don't know when they changed it. They now have a notice stating that changes can take up to 4 hours. The email account that I created is still inaccessible a half hour later. This is unacceptable and I have not seen this problem with any other host.