Small but useful new Gmail labs feature: the ability to search both Gmail and Google Docs with one click.
Tag Archives | Gmail
A Sign of Gmail to Come?
Looks like a Gmail feature I’d love may be on its way: The ability to jump between multiple accounts with a click.
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Normalcy for Gmail?
As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of e-mail users in the world: Those for whom bundling up a thread of messages into a “conversation” makes perfect sense, and those who would much rather have an inbox sorted in strictly reverse-chronological order. The Business Insider’s Henry Blodget among the latter type: Yesterday, he posted a testy item (one of several he’s lobbed) begging Google to let Gmail users opt out of conversation view. Then he followed up with good news: Two Google executives, who he refused to name, had written him to say that Gmail will get a “normal” view in the next few months.
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Gmail Gets iPad-ized
Google’s version of Gmail for the iPhone, Android, and WebOS is one of the slickest Web-based mobile services out there–and its iPad edition looks pretty impressive, too.
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Thrilling News! reMail is Going Bye-Bye!
Remember reMail, the clever iPhone app that let you store massive amounts of e-mail on your phone and search it instantly? Google was apparently impressed–reMail founder Gabor Cselle, a former Gmail engineer, has announced news he says he’s “thrilled” by: Google has bought reMail and he’ll be rejoining the Gmail team.
And then he shares news that doesn’t sound all that thrilling to me: Google has discontinued reMail and yanked it off the iPhone App Store. Previously-downloaded copies will still work, and users of the free version can get all the features of the paid edition. But Google will stop supporting the app at the end of next month, and there will never be another update. Starting today, reMail is a Dead App Walking.
Oddly enough, Cselle says all this on a blog with a profile that says that (A) reMail exists to radically improve mobile e-mail; and (B) it hasn’t launched yet. That’s out of date on both fronts: It did launch–in beta form, at least, to an enthusiastic reception–and it won’t be improving e-mail from here on out.
Cselle doesn’t explain why Google is killing reMail. It’s possible that the company remained impressed by Cselle and wasn’t interested in reMail itself. But it’s also conceivable that it sees reMail as the foundation of an ambitious Gmail app, and that everything that was cool about reMail will reappear at some point in a new form. We just don’t know, and Google doesn’t seem to be dropping hints.
The search-engine behemoth has acquired an infinite number of interesting startups over the years. In certain cases, that’s been good news for fans of the products those companies made–Google Earth (nee Keyhole 3D Earth Viewer) and Picasa spring to mind. (Oh, and YouTube.) And Google says that the neat Q&A service Aardvark, which it bought last week, will live on as a Google Labs project.
Unfortunately, though, what’s good news for Google and startup founders is often a bummer–at least in the short term–for everyone else who cared about the startup in question.
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Gmail Controversies: 2010 Isn’t 2004 All Over Again
“On the surface, it sounds like a wow idea…Truth be told, however, this is the kind of technology advance that gives me the creeps…That’s why the big thinkers at Google should go back to the drawing board and correct a big mistake, before it’s too late.”–Charles Cooper, Cnet
“I think this whole thing could be an electronic noose…The more defined you are, the more definable you are, the more you’re exposed [to possible security problems].”–analyst Roger Kay as quoted in a Washington Post article
“The interplay between the creation of an inalienable right to privacy and the application of this right to the private sector is important. It requires Google to obtain the affirmative consent of individuals before violating their privacy.”–an open letter to the California Attorney General signed by privacy advocates
What do the above three comments have in common? Nope, it’s not that they’re expressing angst over Google Buzz’s privacy issues. They all date from almost six years ago, when Gmail was brand new and plenty of intelligent people were freaked out over the idea of an e-mail service scanning messages for keywords and displaying relevant advertising. As far as I can remember, it was the biggest privacy-related furor Google had encountered until this week.
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Is Cloud Computing Dangerous?
Cloud services like Facebook and Gmail might be “free,” but they carry an immense social cost, threatening the privacy and freedom of people who are too willing to trade it away for a perceived convenience, according to Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center.
On Friday, Moglen was the guest speaker at a seminar at New York University that was sponsored by local technology organizations. Moglen criticized the hierarchical nature of the Web today, and called for a return to peer-to-peer communications.
“The underlying architecture of the Net is meant to be about peerage,” Moglen said. “…There was nothing on the technical side to prevent it, but there was a software problem.”
The client/server architecture has been locked in over the past two decades by Microsoft Windows, Moglen claimed. “Servers were given a lot of power, and clients had very little.”
Control has been moved even further away from the client (people) by cloud services, which can be physically located anywhere in the world where the provider chooses to operate, Moglen said. Privacy laws vary widely from country to country.
There was no discussion of social consequences on the part of computer sciences as they created technologies that comprise the Web, Moglen said. “The architecture is begging to be misused.” Cloud providers are the biggest offenders, in Moglen’s view.
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Snow Leopard and Gears: The Possible Dream!
I keep blogging about Google Gears and Snow Leopard, and I’m doing so once again, but this time with good news: A Google representative just pinged me to say that it turns out that the incompatibility between Gears and Snow Leopard isn’t due to any fundamental incompatibility. It stems from a good old-fashioned bug. Which Google is in the process of fixing.
Gears still doesn’t work in Safari under Snow Leopard, and Chrome for OS X lacks the built-in Gears that’s one of the benefit of Chrome for Windows. And the future of Gears is still murky at best. But if you use Snow Leopard and Firefox, you should be able to get access to Gmail’s offline features and other Gears-enabled offline tools in Google Docs, Zoho, Remember the Milk, and other services. Soon, I hope.
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Offline Gmail Leaves Labs…But Doesn’t Arrive in Snow Leopard
(UPDATE: Google says it’s figured out how to make Gears work in Firefox within Snow Leopard.)
Gmail’s extremely useful offline access feature has graduated from Labs and is now “a regular part of Gmail.” Users of Google’s mail service can now read, compose, and manage mail even when they don’t have a working Internet connection. Well, many folks can–but not Mac users who are running the current version of Apple’s operating system, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Offline Gmail depends on Google’s Gears framework, and Gears doesn’t work in Snow Leopard.
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Google’s New Online Storage Deal: Much Cheaper, But Not a Game Changer
Google is so synonymous with free stuff that it’s easy to forget that it does indeed offer some for-pay services–such as additional online storage space for Gmail messages and Picasa photos. Yesterday, it announced that it’s slashing the fees it charges for extra elbow room.
The new pricing starts at $5 a year for 20GB of space, and go up to $4,096 (!) for 16TB (!!). These fees only matter after you’ve used up all the service’s free space–7GB+ for Gmail, and 1GB for Picasa–and there’s no discount as you buy more capacity. No matter which plan you get, you’re paying a quarter a gigabyte. Until yesterday, the company was charging $20 a year for 10GB, or $2 a gigabyte, or eight times as much.
Google had maintained the old price for two years, during which the cost of hard disks has nosedived, so to some extent the new pricing is just catching up with economic reality. The company says that the new cost is similar to what you’d pay per gigabyte for an external drive. But while it’s true that you’ll pay around a quarter a gig for something like a Seagate FreeAgent drive, you’re buying the drive and renting your Google space. Over three years, the FreeAgent’s total cost per gig remains a quarter, while you’ll have paid 75 cents a gig to Google.
(Not that I’m complaining: I remember paying $250 for a 500MB hard drive–or $500 a gigabyte–in the mid 1990s.)
How do the new prices compare with competitive Web services? It’s kind of hard to do the math. Yahoo, for instance, says that Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage for free; unlimited free storage for Flickr is $25 a year. Online storage services such as Box.net and SugarSync charge way more than Google does, but let you use their space for files of all sorts, and offer lots more features.
Ultimately, the target audience for Google online storage in its current form isn’t gigantic. You gotta think that the percentage of Gmail users who need more than 7GB of space is tiny, and that most Picasa users can make do with 1GB. (Picasa continues to feel like it’s aimed at newbies–the most hardcore photo shares I know tend to use Flickr or SmugMug.) What would really change everything would be Google rolling out the mythical Gdrive–a true hard drive in the sky–at the prices it’s charging for Gmail and Picasa. I’m guessing we will see Gdrive someday, but I don’t have a clue when it’ll show up or how much storage you’ll get, at what price.
(And sorry, but I’m still sitting here slackjawed at Google’s 16TB-for-$4,096 pricing plan. Wonder how big the market is for that?)