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Why I’m Having Second Thoughts About The Wisdom Of The Cloud

Something is up on the Facebook vs. Google data reciprocity front. It looks like Facebook is removing Gmail from the list of third party email providers on  “Find Friends”, whereas we were seeing direct link downloads to Gmail contacts still offered as an option just a couple of days ago.

It gets stranger. Some new users who sign up with their Gmail accounts can still see the option to add friends from Gmail, but when I tried to import contacts I got the below “Everyone on this contact list is already on Facebook or has already been invited” message. In other words it didn’t work.

Signing up with a non-Gmail account eliminates the option entirely even though you still have the capability to manually download and upload your contact files. This seems to be the latest development in the ongoing Facebook vs. Google slap fight, even though it’s not exactly clear who slapped whom.

I’ve contacted both Facebook and Google for more information and will update this post when they respond. For the record, Mark Zuckerberg called Gmail Priority Inbox “pretty cool” onstage at Web 2.0 Summit after Facebook announced their own email product last week.

Source: TechCrunch

Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox  that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.

The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time.

The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time.

I’ve been using the service since late last week and have found it to work very well. Occasionally messages that shouldn’t have been marked ‘Important’ are flagged, but I’ve yet to encounter an urgent message that slipped into the ‘everything else’ section. My colleague MG Siegler, who has also had the feature active, has had similar success.

It’s great. I love it. But it isn’t perfect.

My biggest gripe so far is the fact that there’s no way to tell why a given message has been deemed important. Oftentimes it’s obvious — emails from my coworkers are generally given the golden arrows, as are messages from PR contacts whom I frequently communicate with. But occasionally there are oddballs that have been marked important for no apparent reason.

Sure, it’s easy to tell Gmail that ‘this message is not important’ and strip its golden badge. But what if the message was marked important for a reason that is usually sound (perhaps it contains a reference to TechCrunch Disrupt, for example)? It would be nice if I could tell Gmail something to the effect of “this sender is never important”, but not to start frowning on whatever keywords the message contained. Still, it’s a great start.

Of course, this introduces a new dynamic to the way a lot of people are going to be reading email. Email intros will become ever more important, because you’ll want to ensure that your message gets marked with coveted ‘important’ tag.  It also has much broader implications. Increasingly, content will be displayed to you based on its importance rather than its time stamp — not just when it comes to browsing email, but for social networks and other content as well.

Priority Inbox will be rolling out to Gmail and Google Apps users alike over the course of the week.

Google plugs free PC-to-phone calling into e-mail

The service unveiled Wednesday enables US users of Google’s Gmail service to make calls from microphone-equipped computers to telephones virtually anywhere in the world.

All calls in the US and Canada will be free through at least the end of the year. That undercuts the most popular PC-to-phone service, Skype, which charges 1.2 cents to 2.1 cents per minute for US calls. It also threatens to overshadow another free PC-to-phone calling service called MagicTalk that was just introduced by VocalTec Communications Ltd.

Skype, Google and many other services have been offering free computer-to-computer calling for years.

Google hopes to make money on its PC-to-phone service by charging 2 cents or more per minute for international calls. The international rates will vary widely, sometimes even within the same country. Google posted a rate chart at https://www.google.com/voice/b/0/rates.

People also will be able to receive calls on their PC if they obtain a free phone number from Google or already have one.

The phone numbers and technology for the new PC-calling service are being provided by Google Voice, a telecommunications hub that the company has been trying to expand. It had been an invitation-only service until two months ago when Google Voice began accepting all number requests.

Google disclosed last year that it had assigned about 1.4 million phone numbers through its Voice service, which can field calls made to a person’s home, mobile or office number. Craig Walker, a Google product manager who helped develop Voice, said the service has expanded its reach since then, but he wouldn’t provide specifics.

Besides planting Voice’s technology into Gmail, Google also plans to promote the service by setting up red phone booths at universities and airports scattered across the United States. People will be able to make free calls from the booths to US and Canadian numbers and save on international calls.

Google also plans to enable people to transfer, or ”port,” their existing home or mobile phone to Voice to widen the service’s appeal. Walker said Wednesday that flexibility will be available soon.

The PC-to-phone calling option initially is being offered only to consumers who have accounts on Google’s Web-based e-mail, but the company left open the possibility that it will be expanded to the millions of businesses and government agencies that rely on Gmail as part of an applications suite that includes other programs such as word processing.

The added competition comes at an inopportune time for Skype SA, the Luxembourg-based company that recently filed plans for an initial public offering of stock. Skype has 560 million registered users, including 8.1 million paying customers (most people use the free PC-to-PC service). After four years under the ownership of eBay Inc., Skype was sold to a group of private investors last November for about $2 billion. The company has been doing well since the sale, earning $13 million on revenue of $406 million during the first half of this year. – AP

Source: dawn.com

Starting today, Google is rolling out its latest version of Gmail to users around the world. As you can see, it has been slightly redesigned to more prominently display both Contacts and Tasks. While you click on the link to go to the new Contacts area, you’ll notice that Gmail’s left sidebar transforms to show you labels for your various contacts. And the contacts themselves in the main view are now one big stream of names and email addresses — it looks a lot more like Gmail.

And it acts more like Gmail too. Clicking on a contact opens their card very quickly. From here you can easily edit information on the fly. There’s no longer a need to hit any “edit” and “save” buttons, all of this is done automatically. You’ll also notice a huge new area for Notes. Product Manager Benjamin Grol says this was one feature a lot of business users in particular were asking for.

Along the top of the new contacts cards, you’ll notice a drop-down menu for Groups. This is a key element to the redesign. By default, new Gmail users now have four groups that contacts can be placed into: My Contacts, Friends, Family, and Coworkers. The My Contacts group is the main one — these are the ones that are essentially your actual contacts. Google still keeps track of the people you email the most, but those are automatically added to the Other Contacts area below. If you wish to added someone to your actual contacts, simple label their card with My Contacts.

And, like Gmail itself, you can add you own custom labels to contacts. These labels are now shown on the right side of the main contacts area when in list view. And the labels are then added to the left sidebar for easy sorting.

Speaking of sorting, you can finally do that by first or last name. This is a must-have feature in many European and Asian countries, Grol says. But up until now you couldn’t do it.

Also new is the ability to use the same keyboard shortcuts that Gmail users are used to. This is a great addition for power users.

The two main themes of this redesign were simplicity and consistency (with the rest of Gmail), Grol says. From the looks of it, they’ve done a nice job. While it’s still not the prettiest thing in the world, it does look a lot like Gmail now, and the area is much easier to use. I’ve been playing around with it for the past day or so, and I’ve already done more contact organizing in that short time span then I have in the past several years.

Grol says that Contacts was easily the feature that users complained about the most within Gmail. People may have to find something else to complain about now.

Google notes that Google Apps users won’t see these new Gmail changes just yet, but they’re working on it.

Source: TechCrunch

Gmail

Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.

The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).

If Google wants Gmail to pass Hotmail quickly and gain the No. 2 spot, my suggestion is to keep pumping in new enhancements through Gmail Labs and to speed up the pace at which mail storage increases. Not that I am a typical user, but I am already at 97 percent of my allotted 7,358 megabytes. One of the primary lures of Gmail has always been its seemingly endless and ever-expanding storage limits. Please don’t make me pay for more storage.

Source: TechCrunch

Gmail has four new items in its labs section, all of which enhance the links people have included in their messages. You’re now able to flip on support for Yelp, Flickr, Picasa Web albums, and YouTube. Doing so will turn a link from one of those sites into a full-quality preview of the content you’d find on that site.

For instance, if someone has included a YouTube link, it simply shows up at the bottom of a message, just as if they had included it as an attachment. (You are less likely to get Rickrolled, that way.) The same goes for Yelp reviews, and individual photos and albums from Picasa and Flickr.

Gmail had previously done this for information embedded within messages, including package-tracking numbers, dates, and addresses, all of which led to a related Google service. However with the addition of Yelp and Flickr, Google is opening this up to third parties.

In fact, the official Gmail blog is encouraging interested parties to submit their own site to be added as a preview, which could lead to a whole new subcategory within Gmail labs.

With this addition, it also brings the tally of Gmail labs add-ons past 40. It may be time for a better way to sift through all that information, especially if the company intends to add more of these site preview options. In a meeting I had with Google back in December, Gmail product manager Todd Jackson had said this was something that was being considered.

Thousands of Twitter messages carrying the words “gmail” or “gfail” will teach you that Google’s free web-based e-mail platform is currently down around the world. A Google spokesperson told Pocket Lint that their engineers are working on it but have no clue why the errors are turning up.

Meanwhile, a Google representative posted this on a its help pages:

We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

I’m not buying the small subset part, and considering the fact that Pocket Lint says the problem started occuring around 10:20am GMT, 3 hours before even telling everyone what’s going on is an incredibly long timeframe in my opinion.

Update: Gmail is supposed to be coming back now, at least for some.

Update 2: there’s a status box on the Gmail Help homepage that says the outage started at 1:30 AM PST, which means the problems have been occurring for nearly 2 hours and a half at the time of this update.

Update 3: the problem appears to be solved for most users now, 3 hours after Google indicated that it was aware of the errors.

This comes a couple of weeks after the chaos when a reportedly human error caused Google’s search engine to erroneously flag the entire internet as malware. Curious to see what their response to this outage will be, as this is not the first time this has happened.

Good thing Gmail went offline with Google Gears some time ago.

Update 4: Google’s official statement was just blogged.

If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.

We’re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.

Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We’ll report back as we make progress.

Source: TechCrunch

A new feature in Gmail Labs just launched, giving users the ability to simultaneously view multiple panes in Gmail without having to open another browser window. For users that frequently label their messages and have saved searches, this is a huge upgrade that will make Gmail even more efficient.

Since launching, Gmail users looking to view search results or a subset of their labeled messages saw their results take up their entire browser window. Now, you’ll be able to do multiple things at once.

To enable the feature, first activate Gmail Labs for your account, then enable “Multiple Inboxes” from the list of Labs options (you’ll have to scroll down a bit to find it). The term Multiple Inboxes is a bit of a misnomer – you can’t actually show messages from other accounts, but that could still come in a future Labs release.

To set up your panes, go to the Gmail Settings menu and select “Multiple Inboxes” (once you’ve enabled them). From there, you can create up to five different panes. Creating a pane seems to be a little counter-intuitive – you’ll need to manually enter the Gmail ‘code’ of your label (for example, “label:friends” would display a list of messages tagged with the friends label). But the system is also flexible, as it allows you to combine multiple attributes into a single pane (for example, “is:drafts OR is:starred” would show messages that are either drafts or starred).

Google first launched Gmail Labs last June, giving Googlers a way to showcase the results of their 20% time. Labs apps have included everything from a version of the classic game Snake to features like SMS chat, Gadgets, and even Mail Goggles, meant to keep intoxicated users from sending drunken Emails that they’ll regret in the morning.

For more, check out Google’s blog post on the new feature here.

Source: Tech Crunch – by Jason Kincaid