Google Buzz Challenges Facebook And Twitter
Google Buzz makes Gmail social by letting users view media and status updates shared online by their friends. This format is popular with Facebook and Twitter. Status update through Buzz is not limited to 140 characters.
From Google Blog: Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google’s experience in organizing information can help solve. We’ve recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.
GMail Send Attachments While Offline
GMail users can now attach files to messages when you’re online or offline.
From Google Blog: If you have Offline Gmail enabled, you’ll notice that all your mail now goes through the outbox, regardless of whether you’re online or offline. This allows Gmail to capture all attachments, even if you suddenly get disconnected from network. If you’re online, your mail will quickly be sent along to its destination.
Cloud Credibility Damaged By GMail Outages
Google’s GMail suffered a second outage where the online email service is unavailable for 2 hours thus blocking access to e-mail accounts, contact lists, and other functions. The outage was caused by on routine upgrade errors.
From Google GMail Blog: I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
The reason why businesses are not adopting cloud computing services is the fear of outages and also security concerns.
Google GMail Push Comes To iPhone
The Google Mobile team announced over-the-air syncing (Google Sync) and thus push e-mail for both iPhone, iPod Touch and Windows Mobile-based devices.
To get started, go to m.google.com/sync from your iPhone browser. Follow the steps to setup.
Gmail Experiencing Outage
Google GMail was down on yesterday, 1 September 2009, for a few hours leaving GMail users in the dark. Google sent out a statement saying, We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 1:53:00 PM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.
The last outage was in May 2009. The reason behind this comes from Google introducing new advertising campaign that persuade companies to ditch Outlook and Word for Google’s Apps and Gmail.
Google Removed Beta Label From GMail And Other Apps
After five years, Google has finally lifted the “beta” tag from GMail to attract large businesses to Google Apps. Other Apps out of beta are Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk, and Google Video for Business.
Users of Google Lab can reinstate the “beta” tag from the application preferences.
Google Adds Search To GMail
Google has added the ability to search Google directly within Gmail as a Google Labs experiment. The search box is located on the left of a composing message. Typing search terms in it brings up a window with the results, and the information can be copied into the e-mail message body.
From Google Blog: What’s in the menu depends on what you’re doing in Gmail:
- If you’re reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
- If you’re writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
- If you’re chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
- You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.
Google Revamped GMail For iPhone
Google has updated the user interface, made it faster to open messages, allowed for batch actions and add offline option to GMail for iPhone.
From Google Blog: Expect nothing less than a more robust cache that utilizes Gears to allow you to compose messages and access recently read messages without a network connection, an improved look and feel, and the all new “floaty bar” (their name, not ours) that keeps popular menu commands from scrolling off screen, as this bad boy rolls out progressively over the course of the day. And for those of you who are resistant to change, fear not — the previous version is still available. Check it out for yourself over at gmail.com
Google GMail Undo Sent Option
Google now let you undo sent just in case you realise you have email it to the wrong person or regret sending it out.
The new Google Unsend feature will run for 5 seconds. There is an option to extend this to 10 seconds. This feature can be turned on in Gmail Labs by going to Settings.
Google GMail Adds Location Aware Signature
Google has recently released Latitude, a new location sharing service. Now Google has added a GMail Lab add on which allow users to add location aware signature to their emails.
To switch this on, go to Labs and select Signature Settings, and click on “Append your location to the signature”. The location here is based on your current IP. More accuracy can be obtained by using Gears location module and Wi-Fi triangulation to locate your position.
