by Sujoy on July 17, 2008
I knew this would soon be fixed and it was quite sooner than I expected. If you have closely followed the trend, anyone whom you mailed twice appeared in your contact list on the left side chat window. This made your chat window filled with even all those names with whom you would never chat. The result- an unorganised, cluttered and populated chat contact list. And as expected, it is FIXED. GMail Blog reports today that the automatic addition to contact list has been modified. The automatic contacts addition/update still works but on two levels viz. My Contacts and Suggested Contacts.
What is the difference? My Contacts are the one added by you explicitly through invites,import,sync etc. This also includes frequently mailed email IDs (not as frequent as the previous one, this one now has a minimum of 5 emails. )
And well, Suggested Contacts is where GMail puts in all the auto-created contacts. The default settings are, that for frequent email-ed Suggested Contacts will be automatically shifted to My Contacts. But the settings can be altered. Through this, the usage based addition to My Contacts can be changed or even removed.
I’d say this one is a good change. Would definitely remove a lot of clutter on my contact list. At least I can tick one on the checklist now.
Right, so the google guys have been on a roll. As the curtains on the new iPhone 3G get lifted this Friday, we have more reasons to rejoice. There is a new version of GTalk being specifically made for the iPhone. All you need is to go to talk.google.com and sign in, right through the Safari Browser.
Yes, no other downloads required. Chat with your pals on the go, exchange texts etc etc. Read the post on GMail blog on this. The flipside though is, that this is NOT an Always ON Chat Application, and it gets signed out if you were to switch to another browser window, or an app. Hmm, that is bad. But yeah, if you were doing nothing and have a wi-fi in your neigbourhood, or even with the new 3G enabled, GTalk on the iPhone could be a real SMS killer. Probably, we could altogether do away with it in almost a year.
What do the tech-pundits have to say about it?
For people like me, you and almost anyone who use GMail from your personal machine, your workstation, your mobile phone, may be even a cybercafe, we often login and logout frequently, without really remembering whether any of these sessions are active/logged out and that whether my GMail is secure? Well, no matter how cool we are with our lives being open, the Inbox is a space which is as private as your personal diary. And not only that, you might even have some vital information in it. The new GMail to be rolled out would be featuring new features to keep your Inbox secure and you- free from stress of any Inbox breach.
The new post on GMail blog reports the new added feature and that is : Last account activity. It mentions the time at which the last activity occured in your account, and even the IP address from which it happened (if that helps you to trackback ). There is even a details link that is featured near it (all near the footer of the inbox) which when clicked, indicates whether the activity occured from a browser, a mobile phone etc. The detail link also shows a page with details of all the locations at which the Inbox is open/or was accessed with Date/Time information along with respective IP addresses.And for the extra-cautious, you can go ahead and sign-out all other sessions.
As the blog suggests, this feature will be rolled out soon and will be enabled only in Firefox and IE7. Sorry Safari!
