So GMail has rolled out a brand new feature known as Google Buzz and it intends to integrate a whole bunch of features right into your inbox. Surprisingly enough, when I logged into GMail, I was greeted with the following page.
If you haven’t been invited yet, you can directly opt to try out Buzz by going to Google Buzz.
GMail has always been awesome with rolling out better and newer features and integrating them right into the inbox. First it was just email, and then came chat, video chat, and with Labs features enabled, we could do much more with our plain old GMail inbox.
GMail Buzz intends to take it to the next level with the integration of other Google services such as Reader, Picasa etc. as well as other social networking services such as Twitter, Flickr all in one place – your inbox. And it is indeed very simple to get started, as seen below I integrated my twitter account.
All this means just one thing; Google is trying to bank on its GMail services to get back into the social networking arena [after Orkut having lost the match to twitter/ facebook etc]. Sharing links, content etc is all going to be integrated in your inbox.
It is also available on your mobile phone. For more details visit this link [ Google Mobile Blog post: Introducing Buzz for Mobile ]
Yes, 5 years after all the magic and spells and labs and offering us 7 gigs of inbox space, GMail has finally shed its beta skin and entered the non-beta zone. GMail’s blog post [Read: Gmail leaves beta, launches "Back to Beta" Labs feature] announces the arrival of the new GMail, although its been hightime since the last 3 years for GMail to come out of the beta-image. The little GMail icon on the left of your Inbox page showed the beta text, but its no longer there.
So, does that really mean anything for you? Not exactly! Since, GMail has been quite frankly, the most stable email service provider for me, and the most functional as well. In terms of sheer inbox size, they are at the top. In terms of different innovations, Labs has taken care of it. The blog post [ linked above] enlists the different changes that GMail has brought into itself since its introduction to us 5 years ago. From being an invite-only service to opening up for sign-ups, to chat, group-chat, and video-chat, the list is endless.
So, have a look at the list.
And well, if you are still fussy about the damn beta-image and can’t still get enough of it, a new labs called “Back to Beta” will restore the Beta-image back to your inbox. Although you know, its no more Beta at heart. Its only the shell !! This Labs feature is available in the Labs list, and follows similar procedure for activation.
Happy GMailin’ folks!
Sometimes things can become worse from being good, just in the name of innovation. A current example of such a thing is the newly introduced change of features in the Labels of GMail inbox.[Read: Labels, drag and drop, hiding and more] Innovation is supposed to bring with it, ease of use and user-friendliness. But with this new feature, what we have is completely the opposite.
GMail has pioneered user-freindliness, and I was overjoyed when I was given the facility to use the GMail Lab – Right side Chat. It allowed to manage my inbox space in a much more organised fashion. I did not bother if my hundreds of labels would mean my Chat Window would get buried down in deep underground. Everything was jolly good.
With the new features though, Label is back to a space above its original position – which is just below the default Inbox Tabs, and above chat. Sure, there is a summarizer which wraps up the Labels, which again questions its utility now. For one, I am not used to the Left-sidedness of it. Secondly, if the Labels tab is wrapped up, it only means, that when I drag and drop my messages to the left, it is going to unwrap then. The wrapping up of the Labs to show only the most used Labels is also quite questionable. This is because I have lots of Labels which I use frequently, but GMail Inbox now shows only 4 of them. For sure, I can use the “Move to:” feature still, which completely negates the drag and drop feature introduction.
I know GMail introduced the ‘drag and drop’ feature to replicate the Folder scenario as seen in Yahoo and Hotmail. But to do so here, users have to strategically place the mouse between a space so small that it can only fit a hair. This space is at the extreme beginning of the email, and before the checkbox. Yes, can you SEE it even? Talk about user-friendliness.Pffft!
And yes, Right-Side Label Labs is dead. WHYYYY????? I cannot send my Chat to the Right, because the popped up Chat Windows block the Contact list. So it did mean more sense for Right-Side Label to be enabled. I can only request, along with all the other users to bring Sexyback – Imean Right-Side Labels. Puhhhleeeeeeeezz!!!
GMail has just realeased a list of smart shortcuts to easily manage your day-to-day activities with the GMail Inbox. Most of it is widely known to most users, such as using stars to favorite mails, or labels and even archiving. In the latest blog post from GMail Blog , they have talked about the different levels with which they have distinguished the tips and tricks to use GMail more efficiently. Of course, it is the same inbox, but it is upto the user how well he/she manages it.
For e.g. simple keyboard shortcuts like C for compose, Y for archiving or O for opening a mail can make life a lot easier. [Of course, keyboard shortcuts has to be enabled in the Settings, and for that matter, people who are not very familiar with using Keyboard shortcuts will get so much irritated by unexpected opening of mails or the compose mode.]
For all GMail users, we often tend to face one big problem which keeps compounding with the ever increasing inbox that GMail offers. Yes, the problem is to retrieve an old email which I might have indexed somehow with a star, a label or something that I can’t remember properly. We know how to get to the labels, but even the labels could be a bit tricky and not so helpful in giving the specific output that we need. And this is when the necessity of the G-Hackman [such a cool name] rises. I am talking of some search keywords to drive away all your Inbox Mail Search worries.
Yet another addition to the GMail Labs. Google today introduced Inbox Preview feature in GMail Labs. The point to be noted here is though, in a world of high-speed internet, and GMail anyway offering high speed mail service-is this feature going to be useful at all? If you can’t long enough to let your Inbox load, or you are still stuck in the days of not-so-fast Internet connection, this feature might be of some help.
Similar to other features from GMail Labs, you will need to enable this feature from Settings, search for this particular Lab feature, and Enable. Once enabled, this feature will let users preview the 10 most recent messages. This is just a simple, static preview, and hence, saves time for people who might not have time to sit down to check whether they have got any new mails or not.
I certainly don’t understand the argument quite completely. But reading GMail’s verdict on it, here is what Peter Balsiger had to say:
… imagine that you access Gmail on a super slow connection from a remote place in Ethopia where it might take minutes to completely load your inbox. The disappointment is larger when you find out that there is nothing new to read and you could have saved all that time.
GMail never stops innovating, does it? The latest addition to the never-ending list of innovations in GMail Labs is Translation. And what is it? Once enabled in the Labs Settings, this will enable users to translate mails in the inbox to the language of usage. Say e.g. you got a mail from a friend who wrote it in French. Enabling this Lab Setting, will show a link titled: Translate message to: English. This will happen if the users setting is English. The default translation language settings can be changed in the Setting Tab. Google has already rolled out this feature and it works like a charm.
Although, I would like to see features available in the Translate page of Google; i.e. features like translate the message in multiple languages. Just for fun. I know that has not much of a business sense, or does it not?
Further innovations on GMail could very much work on the lines of how Google handles translated web pages.Based upon your default language settings, if a mail is sent to you in a different language, the inbox could automatically translate your message in your default language with a Disclaimer stating: This is an automated translation of your Mail which was written in Language A. For the original message, please click this link.
Shifting mail base is what we call a pain in the bum. With my GMail inbox now touching over the 5 gigs mark, I cannot even think of moving to any other mail provider. And that’s why I can exactly understand why my best friends wouldn’t get shifted from Yahoo or Hotmail or even Indian providers like Rediff and Indiatimes. But as I had mentioned in an earlier post – innovation is thy name, GMail. A new feature has been rolled out which allows users to import not only contacts, but even older mails as well.
So, GMail can now migrate email and contacts from a lot of email service providers and the list is pretty damn exhaustive. The big names are definitely featured -Yahoo, Hotmail/Live, AOL and also some familiar names in the US and UK such as Comcast and Sprint. (See the full list here).
In the official GMail blog post, it has been mentioned that businesses and schools using Google Apps however, will not be able to use this feature. Another functionality added is to try and test GMail for a period of 30 days, by importing just your new email to GMail (after which I believe you never would want to go back). Depending on the size of the inbox, importing would take 24-48 hours.
Yes, 5 years after all the magic and spells and labs and offering us 7 gigs of inbox space, GMail has finally shed its beta skin and entered the non-beta zone. GMail’s blog post [Read: 
