NetReport

Improved accessibility for Google Calendar - Official Gmail Blog

2011-09-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

Posted at GMAIL Blog

Today we announced some of the updates we’ve released recently to make Google’s applications more accessible to the blind community. Google Calendar now has new keyboard shortcuts and better screen reader support for our blind users. Members of the blind community can now use JAWS, VoiceOver and ChromeVox to manage your calendars, create and edit events or simply browse your events. Here are a few examples of how screen readers and keyboard shortcuts work with Google Calendar:

In your calendar lists, you can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate between your calendars. For each calendar in the list, you’ll hear its name and can use the spacebar to turn the calendar on or off. To remove a calendar from the list, use the delete key.

In the agenda view, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move between events and use the left and right arrow keys to move between dates. To expand an event and expose the event details, press enter. To go to the event details page, type ‘e’. To remove an event, press delete. Although agenda view provides the best screen reader experience today, we are also working on improved accessibility for other views.

In the guest list on the create/edit event page, you can navigate around using the up and down arrow keys. Use the spacebar to switch a guest's status between optional and required. To remove a guest from the list, use the delete key.

Additional keyboard shortcuts make it easier to use Google Calendar no matter which view or screen you’re on. Type ‘c’ to create an event, ‘/’ to start a search, and ‘+’ to add a calendar.

For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts and to learn more about using Google Calendar with screen readers, please visit the help center. With these new accessibility features, we hope to make it easier for everyone to use Google Calendar. Please use this form to share your feedback directly with the accessibility team so we can continue to improve our products.

Original Post

EarthQuake of 6.7 Felt in New Delhi

2011-09-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

EarthQuake measuring 6.7 felt in New Delhi at 11:30 PM Local Time, 7th Sep 2011. No casuality has been reported until now.

Offline Gmail, Calendar and Docs

2011-09-02T06:33:00.000-07:00

Posted at GMAIL Official Blog

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog)

The great thing about web apps is that you can access all of your information on the go, and we’ve introduced ways to use Google Apps on a variety of devices like mobile phones and tablets. But it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally find yourself in situations when you don’t have an Internet connection, like planes, trains and carpools. When we announced Chromebooks at Google I/O 2011, we talked about bringing offline access to our web apps, and now we’re taking our first steps in that direction. Gmail offline will be available today, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today.

Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app that’s intended for situations when you need to read, respond to, organize and archive email without an internet connection. This HTML5-powered app is based on the Gmail web app for tablets, which was built to function with or without web access. After you install the Gmail Offline app from the Chrome Web Store, you can continue using Gmail when you lose your connection by clicking the Gmail Offline icon on Chrome’s “new tab” page.

Google Calendar and Google Docs let you seamlessly transition between on- and offline modes. When you’re offline in Google Calendar, you can view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments. With Google Docs you can view documents and spreadsheets when you don’t have a connection. Offline editing isn’t ready yet, but we know it’s important to many of you, and we’re working hard to make it a reality. To get started using Google Calendar or Google Docs offline, just click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access.

IT administrators can deploy Chrome Web Store apps to users en masse by setting up organizational policies for Chrome.

Today’s world doesn’t slow down when you’re offline and it’s a great feeling to be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time. We’re pushing the boundaries of modern browsers to make this possible, and while we hope that many users will already find today’s offline functionality useful, this is only the beginning. Support for offline document editing and customizing the amount of email to be synchronized will be coming in the future. We also look forward to making offline access more widely available when other browsers support advanced functionality (like background pages).

Original Post

Faces Series 5: Brandon Long

2011-08-27T05:25:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL Blog

In this month’s Faces of Gmail we’ll introduce you to Brandon Long, a parent, ice-hockey player and science fiction fan who makes sure your emails get sent and received.

What do you do on the Gmail team?
I’m the Tech Lead Manager of the Gmail delivery team. Our team is responsible for sending and receiving email for Gmail and many other Google projects. We’re also responsible for the IMAP & POP support for Gmail, which is the most popular way to access Gmail on mobile devices.

What did you do before joining Google?
I founded Neotonic Software which wrote a web application for email customer support. Before that, I worked at eGroups, which was acquired by Yahoo! and is now Yahoo!Groups.

What’s your typical day like?
My typical day involves catching up on email from our teams in other timezones (Google Engineering never sleeps). I also stay on top of escalations from our support team, keep abreast of the running service with our SREs (Site Reliability Engineers), and make sure my team doesn’t have any blockages. Finally, I still manage to keep my hands in the codebase, working as part of the team. When I have some extra time, I take a peek in the Gmail help forum to see if there’s anything brewing or any help I can offer.

What do you like most about what you do?
Scale and ubiquity. Everyone knows about Gmail, many people I know use it. The volume of messages we deal with on a daily basis is pretty staggering, and it’s pretty complicated to keep the whole thing working and continuing to scale.

What are the three Gmail features you wouldn’t be able to live without?
SMTP, IMAP, and keyboard shortcuts. I get thousands of messages a day to my work account, and keyboard shortcuts make all of the difference in handling the volume.

What’s your favorite lab?
Green Robot. I’m an Android fan, and I like to see which of my friends are fans as well.

What do you do when you’re not working on Gmail?
I’m a father of two young children, and I play ice hockey in the local beer league.

Any favorite TV shows?
Burn Notice, The Daily Show, Top Chef, Top Gear

What’s on your reading list?
Switching to the Kindle for reading has allowed me to subscribe to magazines I gave up reading a long time ago. For example, after 15 years I’m back to reading Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. I find it very convenient to read the short stories during my commute.

What would your last meal be?
Does one go with comfort food or with amazing? For comfort, nothing beats Chicago-style Pizza. In SF, that means Patxi’s. In Chicago, that means Lou Malnati’s or Gino’s East. For amazing, I’m not a foodie myself, but I have enough foodie friends to have been introduced to some meals both amazing and ridiculous. And besides, if it’s going to be my last meal, why not a 25 course gastronomic event taking six hours or more? The last place we tried was e by José Andrés, and it was fabulous.

Photos by Cody Bratt, Google Talk team

Original Post

STARS - via GMAIL

2011-08-24T05:17:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL Blog

Stars are handy for marking important messages, but how do you mark really important messages? That’s where Gmail’s additional stars options can come in handy.

I like to use purple stars to mark important messages from my family, red exclamation points for messages that need my immediate attention, and a green check mark for messages that I’ve already taken care of but want to keep track of (ok, so we’re using the word “star” loosely here). This way your inbox can become like a to-do list.

Now that Superstars has graduated from Gmail Labs, it easy to incorporate these different stars into your workflow. Go to the General tab in Settings, then scroll down to the “Stars” section:

Here you can select which stars you want to use, and in which order you want to them to cycle through when you click the star icon in your inbox. Simply click and drag the stars to the appropriate spot in the lists.

If you want to have all your starred messages show up at the top of your inbox so you see them right away, try out the Starred first inbox style.

You can also find messages with specific stars by using the following queries in your search box:

has:yellow-star
has:red-star
has:orange-star
has:green-star
has:blue-star
has:purple-star
has:red-bang
has:orange-guillemet
has:yellow-bang
has:green-check
has:blue-info
has:purple-question

Want more tips? Make sure to follow Gmail on Twitter to see our weekly #tuesdaytip, or follow our community manager Sarah Price on Google+.

Original Post

GMAIL's New Look - via Google

2011-07-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL Blog

A few weeks ago, we released a preview of Gmail’s new look via two new themes. We asked you to try them out and send us your feedback. So far, less than 5% of Gmail usage is happening through these themes, but we’re getting some good feedback on what’s working and useful advice about what to improve from you early adopters.

What you like

The clean and minimalist look of the new design

Seeing a consistent “look” across Google products

“The new Preview theme is wonderful! It's clean and crisp, easy to read and really focused on the one thing that matters most in Gmail — the mail! Thanks!"

What you want to change

Too much whitespace and not enough information (though interestingly, many people reported that they appreciated to lower information density after a while)

Not enough contrast

Darker theme options

"Even with the 'dense' version, I still have listings of about 30% fewer messages. The lack of visual differentiation between content and UI chrome is also harder to process (e.g., where does the conversation list end and the toolbar begin)."

We’re working on improvements for the final release, but it is very encouraging that a visual update like this was generally greeted with such a positive response. If you haven’t tried out the new themes yet, give them a go and tell us what you think.

Original Post

What is GOOGLE PLUS - via Google

2011-07-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Google Blog

6/28/2011 10:45:00 AM

Update: For our international readers, this post is also available in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. - Ed.

Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day.

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project:

+Circles: share what matters, with the people who matter most
Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in “friend” paper—and sharing really suffers:

It’s sloppy. We only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time.

It’s scary. Every online conversation (with over 100 “friends”) is a public performance, so we often share less because of stage fright.

It’s insensitive. We all define “friend” and “family” differently—in our own way, on our own terms—but we lose this nuance online.

In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, “What do people actually do?” And we didn’t have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time—with their circles.

From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: we brought Circles to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new—just like any other day:

+Sparks: strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything
Healthy obsessions inspire sharing, and we’ve all got one (or two, or three...). Maybe it’s muscle cars, or comic books, or fashion, but the attraction is always the same: it comes up in conversation, we immediately jump in, and we share back and forth with other fans. Often for hours. The trick is getting things started, and getting over that initial hump. Fortunately, the web is the ultimate icebreaker.

The web, of course, is filled with great content—from timely articles to vibrant photos to funny videos. And great content can lead to great conversations. We noticed, however, that it’s still too hard to find and share the things we care about—not without lots of work, and lots of noise. So, we built an online sharing engine called Sparks.

Thanks to Google’s web expertise, Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share—with just the right circle of friends:

+Hangouts: stop by and say hello, face-to-face-to-face
Whether it's inside a pub or on a front porch, human beings have always enjoyed hanging out. And why not? It's how we unwind, recharge, and spend unscheduled time with old and new friends alike. Hanging out is deceptively simple though, and the nuance gets lost online.

Just think: when you walk into the pub or step onto your front porch, you're in fact signaling to everyone around, “Hey, I've got some time, so feel free to stop by." Further, it’s this unspoken understanding that puts people at ease, and encourages conversation. But today’s online communication tools (like instant messaging and video-calling) don’t understand this subtlety:

They’re annoying, for starters. You can ping everyone that’s “available,” but you’re bound to interrupt someone’s plans.

They’re also really awkward. When someone doesn't respond, you don't know if they’re just not there, or just not interested.

With Google+ we wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts. By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you're free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face:

+Mobile: share what’s around, right now, without any hassle
These days a phone is the perfect sharing accessory: it's always with you, it's always online, and it's how we stay close with our closest friends. We didn’t want “just” a mobile experience, however, so with Google+ we focused on things (like GPS, cameras, and messaging) to make your pocket computer even more personal.

+Location, location, location
In life, the places we visit shape conversations in lots of meaningful ways. If we call John from the airport, he’ll likely ask about our trip. Or if Jane texts from a nearby restaurant, we might join her for dessert. With Google+ you can add your location to every post. (Or not. It’s always up to you.)

+Instant Upload
Getting photos off your phone is a huge pain, so most of us don't even bother. Of course pictures are meant to be shared, not stranded, so we created Instant Upload to help you never leave a photo behind. While you're snapping pictures, and with your permission, Google+ adds your photos to a private album in the cloud. This way they're always available across your devices—ready to share as you see fit.

+Huddle
Coordinating with friends and family in real-time is really hard in real life. After all, everyone's on different schedules, in different places, and plans can change at any moment. Phone calls and text messages can work in a pinch, but they're not quite right for getting the gang together. So Google+ includes Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what's going on, right this second.

Starting today Google+ is available on Android Market and the mobile web, and it’s coming soon to the App Store.

+You: putting you first, all across Google
That’s the Google+ project so far: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and mobile. We’re beginning in Field Trial, so you may find some rough edges, and the project is by invitation only. But online sharing needs a serious re-think, so it’s time we got started. There’s just one more thing—really the only thing: You.

You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus—on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data; and more ways to let us know how we’re doing. All across Google.

When your invite arrives we hope you’ll join the project. But it’s entirely up to +You.

Original Post

via Google - Faces Series 4

2011-07-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

In this month’s Faces of Gmail we’re profiling Sarah Price, our history-loving, lindy-hopping community manager.

What do you do on the Gmail team?
I’m the Community Manager for Gmail. That means that I watch over Gmail’s user forum and talk with Gmail users in other places. For example, I’m one of the people behind @gmail on Twitter and Facebook. If you use Google+, you can follow me there, too!

What’s the most challenging part of your job?
Gmail users have high expectations for us. They think of Gmail as their own and have great ideas about how to make it better. I love this about our users. Sometimes, though, we make a change that some people love and some people don’t like as much. For the people who don’t like the change, it can be hard to help them understand why we made it, and that we are still listening to their feedback.

What’s your favorite part of your job?
I love that I get to work with such an amazing product, and I love meeting Gmail users from all over the world, including the “Top Contributors” in our Help Forum. I also love helping people get to know each other. It’s very powerful when people come together over a common interest in Gmail.

What did you do before coming to Google?
I studied Latin Literature at Yale and Ancient History at Oxford. You are probably wondering how I ended up at Google! While I was a student, I also worked as a computer repair technician. I enjoy solving problems and teaching people about technology.

What’s your favorite lab?
How can I pick just one? I couldn’t live without Multiple Inboxes, which I combine with Superstars. I also use some little tweaks like the Tab in Editor lab. Inbox Preview is really cool, too.

Which theme do you use?
I recently switched to the Preview (Dense) theme. It took a day or two to get used to it, but I like how clean it feels.

What’s something you think every Gmail user should know about Gmail?
Everyone should take a tour through settings. Just click through the pages and see what you find. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, and some really important things, too, like options for recovering your account if you ever lose access.

What do you do when you’re not working on Gmail?
I rehearse and perform with my fusion social dance group, Decadance. We do everything from hip hop to waltz -- sometimes in the same piece! I joined Decadance because I love the lead/follow dynamic in partner dance. When I’m not dancing, I love to read, travel and play games, both board games and video games. I’m also starting to plan my wedding.

What’s your biggest pet peeve?
I hate waste when it’s easily avoidable. For example, when someone leaves the door ajar on the refrigerator in the office kitchen, or throws away a plastic bottle when there is a recycling bin nearby.

If you want to meet Sarah, she will be “hanging out” on Google+ today from 1-2:30pm PDT (8-9:30pm GMT).

Photos by Cody Bratt, Google Talk team

Original Post

Improved iGoogle GADGET- via GMAIL

2011-07-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL Blog

With iGoogle, you can personalize your homepage with the information on the web that’s most useful and relevant to you. You can check email, watch videos, catch up on the latest news, check the weather, and more. One of the most common iGoogle requests we’ve been hearing is to update the iGoogle Gmail gadget. Because the Gmail gadget has to share space with other gadgets on the screen, the Gmail experience can be limited to an area not much larger than the size of a business card. Since we’ve already built an experience optimized for small screens with Gmail for mobile, we decided to adapt the mobile web version for iGoogle and are now rolling out an updated gadget.

The new Gmail gadget is pretty similar to the mobile experience — it's fast, looks good in small spaces, and includes popular features like search and labeling. By default, it appears in a minimized window (shown above); if you expand it into canvas mode by clicking on the maximize button in the upper right hand corner, you get the two pane view until now provided only on tablet devices (shown below). Going forward, the Gmail gadget will be updated with new features in tandem with the mobile edition.

Click the image above to see a larger version.

We’ll be rolling out the new Gmail gadget over the next couple weeks. If you’re already using the gadget, it will update automatically. If you’re not, you can add it to your iGoogle page here. Keep in mind that the new gadget currently requires a WebKit compatible browser, such as Chrome or Safari.

Original Post

Now Multiple PHONE calls via GMAIL

2011-07-21T05:45:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

Over the years, we've expanded Gmail's communication abilities by allowing you to make voice and video calls to other computers and more recently call phones. Until now, though, you were limited to making one call at a time. Today we're excited to relax that restriction and allow you to make or receive multiple calls in Gmail.

If you’re in a call and make a second one, your first call will be put on hold while you talk on your new call. You can switch between calls by pressing the “Resume” button on the call you want to talk on, which will automatically put the previous call on hold.

Receiving incoming calls while you're in another call is just as easy: you'll receive a notification of the incoming call and can choose to accept it or not. If you take the new call, the previous call will be put on hold.

Whether you make a second call or not, you can now put any call on hold — useful in case you need to talk to someone in the room or grab something off the stove. Just press the “Hold” button and then “Resume” to start talking again.

This feature works across all call types (voice, video, and phone); the only restriction is that a maximum of two outgoing calls to physical phones can be placed at once.

Original Post

New FEATURE ! - ZIP and RAR Supported via GMAIL

2011-07-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL Blog

(Cross posted from the Google Docs Blog)

Downloading files that you only need to preview can create unnecessary clutter on your computer. While you can already use the Google Docs Viewer to view over 15 different file types in Gmail without downloading them, today we’ve added support for archive file types ZIP and RAR. Now, if someone sends you a ZIP or RAR file in Gmail, you’ll be able to view its contents from within your browser by clicking on View.

This will bring up a view that includes all of the files in the archive, the file types, and the size of those files.

When you hover over the list you can activate a menu by clicking the “Actions” button. You’ll be able to View items supported by Google Docs Viewer and Print (PDF) those that we offer PDF support. Save to Google Docs and Download appear for all files.

ZIP and RAR archives that are embedded inside other archives also work. For example, if you have a RAR file inside a ZIP file (like in our example above) you can just click on that file to access the embedded archive.

Go ahead and try the feature by viewing a ZIP file

This feature extends to Google Docs for mobile, too. For each viewable file (including embedded ZIP or RAR archives) there is a link to view.

We hope this removes the need to download full archives when you only need to work on select items. We’re always adding more file types to the Google Docs Viewer -- let us know what file types you’d like to see support for next in the forums.

Original Post

PICK your INBOX - via GMAIL

2011-07-18T06:55:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

Ever felt like there should be a better way to manage your inbox? There are already lots of different ways: some people read everything, some mark messages they need to take action on with stars, and others like to have their important email separated from the rest automatically — something Gmail started offering last year with Priority Inbox.

Over the coming weeks, we're rolling out several new inbox styles to help you manage your mail in the way that works best for you. Once it’s turned on for your account, you can easily choose a style from the tabs at the top of your inbox:

Classic - This is the default inbox style most people are used to. In the Classic inbox, messages are ordered chronologically, with your most recent email at the top.

Priority Inbox - Important and unread messages appear at the top of your inbox, then starred messages, then everything else. Each section can be customized further, so you can create your own inbox style.

Important first - This style puts important mail at the top of the page (both read and unread messages). Everything else is in its own section at the bottom of your inbox. You may have noticed that we turned on importance arrows for everyone a few weeks ago; this inbox style separates messages with these arrows from those without.

Unread first - Simple: unread mail at the top; everything else at the bottom.

Starred first - Starred messages at the top; everything else at the bottom.

After you've settled on a style you like and used it for about a week, these tabs will go away, You can always change your inbox style from the drop down menu next to the Inbox label or from the Settings page.

So try on a new inbox style and see what fits you best!

Original Post

AMAZING New Look - via Gmail

2011-07-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

We get a lot of great feedback about how Gmail helps you be more efficient, keep in touch with family and friends, and get work done. We’ve saved you from forgetting attachments and made sure that you got the right Bob. Over the years, adding countless features to Gmail has made it an increasingly powerful communication hub, but along the way the interface has also become more cluttered and complex.

That’s one of the reasons we’re embarking on a series of interface updates to help strip out unnecessary clutter and make Gmail as beautiful as it is powerful. This is part of a Google-wide effort to bring you an experience that’s more focused, elastic, and effortless across all of our products. The changes are not going to happen all at once. We know that you love and care about Gmail as much as we do, and we’ll be working on these upgrades gradually over the next few months to allow plenty of time to understand and incorporate your feedback into the evolving design.

We’re kicking things off with two new themes for you to try out as a sort of sneak peek at what we’re up to. Starting today, you’ll see the “Preview” and “Preview (Dense)” themes in the Themes tab in Gmail Settings. Why two themes? Our new interface will eventually expand dynamically to accommodate different screen sizes and user preferences, but until then you can pick the information density that you prefer.

Here’s what one of the new themes currently looks like:

And in conversation view:

Click the images above to see larger versions.

If you poke around you’ll hopefully find a lot to like and a much cleaner, modern look but also few rough edges. In particular, some Labs features may look a little strange in the new themes. We plan to fix these issues as we roll out changes in the coming months. You can also expect some updated themes that embody the same design principles but are better suited to working in a dark environment, use a different color palette, or include the illustrations that we know many of you love to see around your inbox.

Look out for these and other new features over the next few months. In the meantime, try out the new themes as a preview of the future of Gmail and let us know what you think.

P.S. Like Gmail, Google Calendar is also getting a new look. You’ll see it automatically within the next few days so there’s no need to turn it on, and we’ll also continue to make improvements there in the coming months. Details about the current changes to Calendar can be found in the Calendar help center.
Original Post

FIGHT SCAM !! - via Gmail

2011-07-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL Blog

I recently received an email from what looked like my bank saying I should update my account, but it looked a little weird. I clicked on the “show details” link and quickly learned it wasn’t from my bank after all; instead of being sent from First National Bank’s real email address, this message originated from a random South African domain. If I hadn’t viewed these details, I could have been tricked — it wasn’t entirely obvious that this email was a fake.

Phishing messages are a form of spam that attempt to deceive recipients in order to gain access to their personal information. Starting today, Gmail will automatically display more information about the origin of certain messages you receive so you can be better informed and protect yourself from getting tricked. If someone fakes a message from a sender that you trust, like your bank, you can more easily see that the message is not really from where it says it’s from.

Whenever you receive a message from someone who isn’t already in your Gmail contacts, the header will now show the sender’s email address like this:

Websites sometimes send emails on behalf of someone, like when your friend Mike sends you an article from abc.com using one of the site’s “Share this story” links. Gmail will now show this information more prominently:

Gmail will also automatically detect suspicious messages and display a warning when it looks like someone may have spoofed a Gmail address (we do this by evaluating the message’s authentication data).

If you determine that an email is a phishing attempt, please let us know by reporting it (you can always do this by clicking the down arrow next to “Reply” at the top-right of the message and selecting “Report phishing”).

To learn more about how to avoid phishing scams, check out these previous posts:

How to steer clear of money scams

How to avoid getting hooked

Ensuring your information is safe online

Fighting phishing with eBay and PayPal

New in Labs: The super-trustworthy, anti-phishing key

Original Post

via Google - WoHOOO!! 10 Gmail gadgets to try

2011-06-27T02:45:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

There is a powerful but little known Gmail feature that lives in Labs called “Add any gadget by URL.” Once you turn it on, you can add iGoogle gadgets (or any gadget specified by an .xml file) to the side of your Gmail account. While most of these gadgets are built by third-parties and not owned or maintained by Google, they can be super handy.

To install any of these gadgets, follow those steps:
1) From your Gmail account, go to the Labs tab of Gmail Settings.
2) Look for the Lab “Add any gadget by URL.” Enable it, then click “Save changes.”
3) Go to the new “Gadgets” tab under “Settings” and add the relevant .xml address.

Here’s a list of a ten I’ve found worth trying out:

Wikipedia
Look for a specific query right from Gmail.
http://www.google.com/ig/modules/wikipedia.xml

Google Calculator
Make some quick calculations while typing an email.
http://calebegg.com/calc.xml

Note
Add a sticky note to the corner of your Gmail account.
http://www.google.com/ig/modules/sticky.xml

Remember the Milk
If you’re a fan of this task management system, accessing all your “Remember the milk” notes from right within Gmail can be super handy.
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/gmail/rtm.xml

PolyClock
Gives you the time of day for any place in the world.
http://gad.getpla.net/poly/clock.xml

Currency Converter
A real time currency converter.
http://helloworld123---.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/currency-converter.xml

bit.ly URL shortener
Lets you shorten URLs in a single click.
http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107368512201818821991/bitly-shortener.xml

Chuck Norris fact generator
Displays a different “Chuck Norris fact” every day of the year. http://marsupialmusic.net/stu/scripts/chucknorris.xml

Finally, you might be familiar with the last two gadgets, since they are also available as individual Gmail Labs:

Google Calendar
Displays your Google Calendar agenda right from Gmail.
http://www.google.com/ig/modules/calendar.xml

Google Docs
Gives you quick access to your most recent documents.
www.google.com/ig/modules/docs.xml

You can find lots of other gadgets optimized for iGoogle on this page, and many of them work well in Gmail, too.

Original Post

via Google PASTE image into GMAIL Messages

2011-06-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Daniel Cheng, Software Engineer

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and people certainly like to spice up their emails with images. A while back, Gmail started making this easier by letting you drop images from your desktop right into the compose window.

Now, when you’re running the latest version of Google Chrome, you can paste images right from your clipboard too. So if you copy an image from the web or another email, you can paste it right into your message. This is especially handy for passing around screenshots — you don’t have to save the files any more (I’ve been using Command-Control-Shift-4 on my Mac to save screenshots directly to the clipboard). While this currently only works in Chrome, we hope to enable it on other browsers soon.

Original Post

via Gmail Happy Fathers Day

2011-06-21T06:55:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

Today is Father’s Day in many countries around the world, so whether your dad lives across the street, across the country or across the ocean, it’s a good day to let him know you’re thinking about him. Of course, email is a simple, quick way to check in with your old man, but it’s just as easy — and maybe even more meaningful — to call him right from Gmail.

If you’re in the U.S., you can use Gmail to make free domestic calls and calls to Canada. If your dad lives abroad, we have some of the best rates around, like two cents per minute to Australia, Argentina, France and many other parts of the world. (Unfortunately, those of you outside the U.S. will still have to phone Dad the old-fashioned way.)

And in case you don’t read this post in time, we've added a small note in the Gmail chat roster, right under the “Call phone” link, to remind you to give him a ring.

Happy Father’s Day from Gmail!

Original Post

via Google Watch Unique Wonders !

2011-06-18T19:10:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Blog

We’re always fascinated by the unique wonders of space and the world—what can we say, it’s the geek in us! Naturally, when we learned that part of the world will be treated to a rare 100-minute long total lunar eclipse starting at 11:20am PDT today, we were both excited and disappointed that this rare occasion wouldn’t be visible from our Mountain View campus like last year’s eclipse. We suspect we aren’t alone, so you’ll be glad to know that we’ve worked with Slooh Space Camera to let you experience the spectacle wherever you are in the world, in real time.

Slooh will host a live mission interface using Google App Engine that lets anyone not lucky enough to live in certain areas (South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia) take part in this rare astronomical event. It’s equipped with audio narrations from real-life astronomers so you can hear a firsthand, expert account of the event. You can also watch the live stream on the Google YouTube Channel or from the Sky layer in Google Earth (download this kml), while exploring the fascinating world that exists in our galaxy. Finally, those of you on the go can download the Slooh Space Camera Android app to view the images right on your phone.

If you're fortunate enough to be able to view this event in the sky, we hope you'll get the chance to step outside and indulge in the spectacle. For everyone else, we hope our moon madness helps brighten your day.

Update 11:23 PDT: Starting now, if you visit the Google homepage you’ll see a special interactive doodle, which will update throughout the day to show the latest state of the moon. Lunar imagery provided by Slooh.

Original Post

via Google - Faces Series 3

2011-06-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

In this edition of “Faces of Gmail,” we’ll introduce you to Hareesh Nagarajan who balances managing datacenters with improving his golf game.

What’s your role on the Gmail team?
I am the tech lead for part of Gmail’s backend infrastructure. Gmail has lots of datacenters to support hundreds of millions of users. We try to balance out these users in a way that will ensure that a good experience and run our datacenters at maximum efficiency. You could say that we like having our cake and eating it too: the software we’ve written tries to come up with a fine balance between keeping both our users and our datacenters happy.

What did you do before joining Google?
Google is my first full-time gig. Before Google, I went to graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago where I lived above a piano bar. Before Chicago, I went to college in Bangalore. I wrote a bunch of software that no one uses (including me!). I did give my creations memorable names though: I built a text editor called “Save Trees,” an instant chat messenger called ionicChat (after the ionic bond in chemistry), and an assembler called “miASMa.” I was also active in the local quizzing circuit. I think I raked up about 40,000 INR in prize money in those four years.

What do you do when you’re not working on Gmail?
I’ve been playing golf for nearly two years now. I’m not very good, but I’ve been seeing improvements in my game. Since I like data and statistics, I try and collect everything that I can when I’m playing. The data I’ve collected so far says that I’ve pared or bogey one in three holes in 2010, but so far in 2011 I’ve improved to one in two holes. Hopefully there are more big improvements to come. Golf is a hard game: errors propagate. I’ve tried to analyze why tennis has fewer unique winners than golf on my blog. Apart from golf and occasional blogging, I also like writing software (in a few hours) that empowers people. For example, I built pravaas.org to provide high quality mentorship and advice to any student for free, and I built tweetandbeat.com to track real time updates for the keyword cancer. You can follow my updates and my photos from my phone on twitter.com/hnag.

How do you get your workday started?
I come in at about 10:00 in the morning. I check system dashboards to make sure that Gmail users are happy, that our datacenters are running cool, and that I haven’t broken anything from the previous day. I usually do all this while eating cereal. I buy cereal boxes (Kashi Autumn Wheat) by the dozen from Amazon. Folks who enter my cubicle at the start of my cereal cycle are shocked to find 12 boxes of cereal right next to my desk and ask, “Are you going to eat all that cereal?” to which I say, “Well yes, would you like some?”.

Photos by Cody Bratt, Google Talk team

Original Post

via Google Amazing GUITAR Doodle !!

2011-06-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog
The electric guitar brings back memories for me of exchanging riffs with friends and wearing out cassette tapes as I meticulously learned songs. Today, we’re attempting to recreate that experience with a doodle celebrating the birthday of musician and inventor Les Paul.

For the next 24 hours on the Google homepage, you’ll find an interactive, playable logo inspired by the guitar developed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee that made the sound of rock and roll possible.

As well as his guitar work, Les Paul experimented in his garage with innovative recording techniques like multitracking and tape delay. In keeping with this spirit of tinkering, those of you in the U.S. can click the black “compose” button to record your own 30-second track. Just strum the strings or trigger notes with the letters or numbers on your keyboards. Clicking the button again will display a link to share the songs you’ve made. (For example, here’s a little tune I put together.)

If you’re curious, the doodle was made with a combination of JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas (used in modern browsers to draw the guitar strings), CSS, Flash (for sound) and tools like the Google Font API, goo.gl and App Engine.

I hope you have as much fun playing with and sharing the doodle as we did making it (special thanks to engineers Kristopher Hom and Joey Hurst and doodle team lead Ryan Germick for their work). Crank up your computer volume and make some music!

Update June 9, 8:29pm: Due to popular demand, we're leaving the Les Paul doodle up in the U.S. through Friday for an encore. Thanks for jamming with us! ♫

Original Post

via Goolge Plan to Move off Old Browsers

2011-06-06T07:27:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog and the Google Docs Blog.)

For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

So if it’s been a a while since your last update, we encourage you to get the latest version of your favorite browser. There are many to choose from:

As the world moves more to the web, these new browsers are more than just a modern convenience, they are a necessity for what the future holds.

Original Post

via Google People WIDGET !!

2011-05-31T05:36:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog)

Email is just as much about the people you communicate with as it is what you communicate about. We think it can be helpful to view relevant information in context, which is why over the next two weeks we’re rolling out a new people widget located on the right hand side of your messages. The people widget surfaces content from friends, family and colleagues that is already available to you but may be hard to find and makes it easier to connect with them.

Next to every email message you can now see contextual information about the people in that conversation including recent emails you received from them, relevant Buzz posts, shared documents and calendar events. You also have quick access to a variety of ways to communicate with individuals, start a group chat or schedule a meeting with groups of people.

We hope the people widget will improve your Gmail experience and we’re eager for you to try it out.

Original Post

AOL's AIM blends more in Google's Services

2011-05-27T05:20:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

From the beginning, we designed Google Talk using open standards so that you could connect to your friends and family using any chat product, making communication as easy as possible. A few years ago, we announced our partnership with AOL which made it possible for people to chat with AIM users right from inside Gmail. Today, we’re happy to report that AOL has now made it possible to chat with AOL contacts across a variety of Google services: not just Gmail, but also iGoogle, Orkut, and Google Talk on Android phones.

If you chat with AIM buddies in Gmail, you’ll notice a few changes. First, you’ll no longer need an AIM account to connect to your friends using AIM. Instead you’ll be able to add your AIM buddies just like you add Gmail contacts to your chat list: using their AOL screennames (for example, username@aol.com). AIM users will now also be able to add Google contacts to their AIM chat clients.

Second, you’ll no longer be able to sign into your AIM account from within Gmail chat since you can now add AIM contacts directly. And lastly, if you previously had a lot of AIM contacts and don’t want to re-add them to your chat list one by one, AOL has created a tool to import your AIM buddies into your Gmail account. See their blog post for more info.

Original Post

via Google - Color your DATE

2011-05-19T01:38:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

If your calendar ends up full of many different types of events (film nights, lunch dates, and doctor appointments, for example), there’s now an easy way to categorize them using colors.

Just click on an event, then click the colored square in the top left of the pop-up bubble and pick a new color. If you don’t see this option quite yet, hang tight — it'll be there for everyone within the next day or so.

Only you and anyone else you’ve given edit access to your calendar will be able to see the colors you choose. This has been a feature request from many of you for some time, and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we do.

Original Post

150 years of MIT

2011-05-14T14:05:00.001-07:00

Posted at Official Google Blog

5/13/2011 03:26:00 PM

2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded to speed along America’s industrial progress through scientific innovation. MIT has been at the forefront of computer science with key advancements in the field, like the invention of core memory, the first file sharing system and RSA, the algorithm for public key encryption. MIT and Google share many of the same goals and philosophies, and as part of MIT's 150th anniversary celebration, we wanted to take stock of the many ways we've been working together.

More than 500 MIT graduates work at Google, in Boston and beyond—on Android, Chrome, crisis relief efforts and more. At our Cambridge, Mass., office—just down the road from MIT’s campus—and at the newly acquired ITA office, you can spot many MIT alumni Googlers proudly sporting red and gray in celebration of the milestone anniversary.

We love our Googler MIT grads, but our partnership with the university goes beyond an alumni relationship: we also support the university’s mission of discovery and innovation in the sciences. Recently, we gave a focused research award to CSAIL to further research in computer science and artificial intelligence. We also partnered with researchers at the MIT Media Lab on Konbit, a service that helps communities rebuild themselves after a crisis. In the same lines, we’re sponsoring MIT Next Lab, a group that researches and develops ways in which people can use mobile platforms to solve global and economic issues. And finally, as part of their 150th anniversary celebration, MIT announced a major Intelligence Initiative (I²) that we’re helping to support. Beyond the pure scientific goals, it’s hoped that this research will lead to practical applications in the form of more intelligent systems and software that will benefit society broadly

In addition, we have close relationships with some of MIT's faculty, like Hal Abelson, Professor of Computer Science and a member of Google's Visiting Faculty program, who has used our technology to conduct education outreach. He started the Young Android Project in 2007 and helped design App Inventor, which launched in 2010. Hal also teaches classes to non-engineers about building Android apps.

This summer we’re looking forward to welcoming high school students into our Boston office through the MIT MITES program to introduce a whole new crop of future scientists to the joys of science and engineering. Plus, 50 MIT students will join Google as interns this summer alone.

Although MIT was established more than 100 years before the Internet was invented, the institution has continued to remain a world leader in technological research, development and advancement. We’re excited to celebrate the university on its anniversary, and look forward to a continued and strong relationship for the next century to come.

Posted by Steve Vinter, Engineering Director, Google Boston

Original Post

FACES Series 2: Petra Cross

2011-05-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

Last month we kicked off “Faces of Gmail,” a series where we’ll introduce you to some of the members of the Gmail team. For our first post, we spoke with Manu Cornet, an engineer in Paris who made some of our favorite themes. This month we’re back in Mountain View with Petra Cross, a globe-trotting gal who builds tools to help make the Gmail engineering team more efficient.

What do you do on the Gmail team and how long have you been at Google?
I have been a software engineer at Google for over six years. I spent my first three and a half years with the search team developing a framework for evaluating the relevance of search results. Since then, I’ve been focusing on internal Gmail infrastructure and building tools that help make other Gmail engineers more productive.

What did you do before joining Google?
After I got my computer science degree from Santa Clara University, I worked for a year at a small Silicon Valley semiconductor start-up. Before I came to California, I studied CS in Slovakia. I’m always doing many things at the same time. While I was in school, I created and sold little black and white drawings, taught English classes at a local elementary school, worked as a talk-show host at a local TV station, modeled, and also sang competitively in a choir. I miss singing the most. Today, besides working on Gmail, I’m focusing on photography and my husband Bradford.

What are the three Gmail features you wouldn’t be able to live without?
Ah, there are so many features I would miss if they went away:

Priority Inbox helps me point my attention to emails I might want to respond to first.

I use chat a lot to communicate with my co-workers and friends. I also love Gmail’s ability to call phones.

I like how Gmail organizes emails into conversation view, instead of putting each email into a separate line in the inbox. It makes it a lot easier to see the entire context of the discussion.

What do you do when you’re not working on Gmail?
I visit my parents in Europe few times a year. To trick my husband into joining me on every trip to visit his in-laws, I try to wrap the trip into a fun package that includes more countries. And so, in the last three years, we’ve visited Belgium, Netherlands, U.K., Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Austria, Jordan (we visited Petra!), Lebanon, Egypt, and we also got married in a 13th century castle in Slovakia.

Besides traveling, I’m quite domesticated and I’m constantly decorating our San Francisco home. To my mom’s disappointment, I almost stopped cooking since I joined Google (blame the free Google food!) and started spending most of my days on a computer. I’ve been blogging a lot lately and also spending a lot of time photographing people. I can’t imagine what my life would look like without technology. I can’t even sit still on a beach for five minutes. Seriously.

How do you procrastinate?
I don’t procrastinate. I make conscious decisions to not do certain things at this very moment. Like right now, I am responding to your questions instead of coding. :)

What would your last meal be?
Crepes with Nutella and chestnut puree, and a lot of whipped cream. The whipped cream has to be hand-whipped, not from a can. Crepes need to be perfectly browned on both sides. I’m up for a crepe-off any time!

Photos by Cody Bratt, Google Talk team

Original Post

UNLIMITED Contacts - upto 25k limit

2011-05-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

Gmail used to have a limit of 10,000 contacts. For most of us, this was way more than enough, but we heard from some of you who use Gmail to communicate with more than 10,000 people. We want you to be able to store all of your contacts in a single place, so starting today, we’ve increased the limit for all Gmail users, including all those of you who use Google Apps, to 25,000 contacts.

Also, previously an individual contact could be no larger than 32KB — big enough for most people, but not always sufficient for those who like to keep a lot of notes on individual contacts. Now, each contact may be up to 128KB in size, allowing you to store more information in the notes field.

Original Post

CUSTOMIZE Gmail

2011-05-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL Blog

Gmail offers a ton of customization, and when you get hundreds of emails every day it’s crucial that you have it set up to process mail quickly and efficiently. Working on Gmail, I get asked all the time what settings and features I use to help me power through my mail. Rather than answer my friends and co-workers one by one, I thought I’d put it all into a blog post. So here goes.

Turn on Priority Inbox. I couldn’t live without Priority Inbox. I keep the default set-up with important and unread mail at the top of my inbox and the section for everything else at the bottom.

Show more than 25 conversations in your inbox. I like to see as many emails as possible per page so I can quickly scan through my mail, so I have this set to 100 (the max possible). Go to Gmail Settings and look for “Maximum page size” which you can change to 25, 50, or 100.

Enable keyboard shortcuts. Press the “?” key when looking at your inbox to see the list of keyword shortcuts. Make sure they are turned on, then pick one or two to start with and try to learn more as you become comfortable. I probably use ‘e’ to archive my messages and ‘j’ and ‘k’ to move through messages the most.

Many of the features I love can be found in Gmail Labs (click on the “Labs” tab from Gmail Settings). I have a ton of them on, but the combo of these four work really well for me:

Inbox preview: Shows a simple, static preview of your inbox while Gmail is loading. While you can’t take action on the messages until your inbox fully loads, it’s great to get a sneak peek and form a plan of attack.

Send and archive: Adds a button that lets you send a reply to a message and archive the conversation in a single click (keyboard shortcuts work well with this one, too).

Background send: Lets Gmail send your mail in the background while you move on to more important things.

Auto advance: Automatically shows the next conversation instead of going back to your inbox after you delete, archive, or mute a conversation. When combined with the “Send and archive” button and background send, this feature makes reading and replying to messages lightning fast.

Try out this set up and let us know what your favorite features are.

Original Post

Get back LOST Time

2011-04-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

Posted at GMAIL Official Blog

We’re always looking for ways to make Gmail faster. One of the most common delays happens after you hit that “Send” button, when you’re waiting patiently for a couple seconds for Gmail to send your message. If you send a lot of email, that can add up to a lot of lost time.

To help give you that time back, there’s a new feature in Gmail Labs called Background Send. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, you can get on with what you’re doing while Gmail quietly sends off your mail in the background. You can keep reading your inbox, compose new messages, chat with people — all the things you’d usually do. You can even send more than one message in the background at the same time.

If anything goes wrong (maybe you got that email address wrong, or maybe your connection had a hiccup), you’ll see a warning message that prompts you to go back and fix the issue or try again later.

The “Send errror” message will stay around until you decide to fix things, so you don’t have to stop whatever you’re doing right away. The only catch is that you should wait for your mail to finish sending before you close Gmail or shut down your computer. If messages are still being sent in the background when you shut down, your messages are probably going to be lost. You’ll know you’re good to go when you see a message like this:

We’ve been trying out Background Send for a while here at Google, and we like it a lot. We hope you like it too, and we hope it gives you back a little bit of your day!

Original Blog

TIME Machine from Gigapan.org

2011-04-25T18:05:00.000-07:00

Posted at Google Official Blog

From the presidential inauguration to the World Series to gorgeous cityscapes, for the past few years the GigaPan team at Carnegie Mellon University has been making it possible to explore breathtaking panoramic photos from around the world. GigaPan pioneered the hardware design that captures these photos and used innovative rendering techniques—similar to those of Google Maps—to create seamless transitions between photos, so people can pan and zoom through the image for an interactive and incredibly detailed photo experience.

Yesterday, the GigaPan team took their creative and technical skills to the next level with the GigaPan Time Machine, which brings this same kind of visual interactivity to video using the power of HTML5 and modern browser technology. Time Machine works particularly well on Google Chrome, thanks to its support for the latest HTML5 features and its stability architecture, which ensures it can smoothly run complex web applications without crashing. Time Machine is featured on the gallery of Chrome Experiments, a showcase of creative web applications submitted by developers around the world, and built using the latest web technologies.

The sophisticated cameras the GigaPan team uses for their photographs capture hundreds or even thousands of digital pictures and stitch them together to form an interactive panorama. With Time Machine, the cameras capture these image mosaics at regular intervals to create a video with hundreds of millions or even billions of pixels in each frame. The result is a video that viewers have the ability to zoom in on while it’s playing and see incredible detail.

With Time Machine, watching paint dry or grass grow is actually pretty cool. Take a look at a table full of potted plants grow and bloom into flowers. Zoom in to examine a specific plant or even a single leaf, or watch a caterpillar bite off a leafy green for lunch.

One of the critical elements of making Time Machine work was developing algorithms that allow the site to shift seamlessly from one portion of a video to another, to give people the experience of zooming and panning across a video of almost limitless resolution. This is particularly challenging because a seamless transition between videos requires starting a new video before the old one is finished, and then queueing it to align perfectly in time before the swap. The GigaPan researchers were able to accomplish this successfully using HTML5’s video tag feature, as well as by taking advantage of Chrome’s speed and stability to render the content smoothly as videos start and stop dynamically.

While you can’t fast-forward to the weekend (yet), head over to GigaPan’s Time Machine to zoom around in space and time with some of the samples, or create your own Time Warp by building your own animated tour through any of the sample videos.

Posted by Rachel Durfee, Google Blog team

Original Post

ANNOUNCEMENT: Long Label Support in GMAIL

2011-04-25T06:07:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

Today we’re making a small change that makes it easier to handle long label names: you can now add and edit label names up to 225 characters. The old limit was 40 characters, which wasn’t enough for some people who had switched from Outlook or accessed Gmail through IMAP.

Label names can get really long, especially when you use Nested Labels. When that happens, Gmail will shorten them if necessary to avoid cluttering your view.

You can always mouse over to see the full label name and use colors to better distinguish your labels from each other.

Original Post

ATTENTION - New GMAIL Features for IPhone, Blackberry, Android

2011-04-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

Posted by Bryan Logan, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Google Mobile blog)

Sometimes when I’m using Gmail on my phone, I delete a message by mistake or label it incorrectly. Sure I can fish the message out of my Trash or remove the label and apply the correct one, but that takes several steps. Even just a few seconds is usually enough time to catch those annoying mistakes.

Now when you use the Gmail mobile web app, you’ll have a small window of opportunity to undo four key actions: archive, delete, add or remove a label, or move a message/conversation.

When you take one of these actions, Gmail displays a yellow bar that recaps what you just did and allows you to undo it:

This bar stays in position even if you move to another screen (e.g. moving to ‘Menu’ from ‘Inbox’). If you don’t happen to catch your mistake in time, not to worry: all four actions can still be undone through other means (e.g. you can move a message from Trash back into your Inbox).

Try it out at gmail.com in the browser of your Android or iOS device.

Update (10:00 am, 4/19/11): This update is available for phones running Android or iOS, but not tablet devices with the two-pane Gmail interfact. It is also now available for BlackBerry OS 6.0 phones.

Original Post

GMAIL Actions

2011-04-20T10:35:00.000-07:00

Original Post

Happy Birthday to Google Calendar

2011-04-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

On April 13th, 2006 we released Google Calendar to the world. What started as an experimental project by several Googlers has grown to become a service that millions of people rely on every day. From photography studios to schools to airlines to supermarkets, we discover new ways people are using Calendar all the time.

A birthday wouldn’t be a birthday without a little present, so today we’re happy to announce our latest tiny addition: the up-to-date favicon. When you look at the Google Calendar icon at the top of your browser window, it will no longer always display “31” but will instead change to reflect the current day of the month. Today’s date is now always a short glance away.

If you don’t see the new up-to-date favicon already, you should within the next couple of days. To keep up-to-date on all things Google Calendar, check out our Twitter account (and feel free to tell us how you’re using Calendar too).

Original Post

Imagination into GMAIL Themes

2011-04-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

Themes in Gmail are great — there are tons to choose from and they give your inbox a personalized look. But we’ve heard from many of you who thought it would be even better if you could give Gmail an even more personalized look and create themes completely on your own.

For a while, you’ve been able to set your own colors, and starting today you can customize your inbox with your own background image too.

Just go to the Themes tab in Settings and choose “Create your own theme.” There, you can select background images for the main area and the footer.

You can pick from any of your Picasa images or upload a new one. Enjoy!

Original Post

Sent Email to BOSS instead GirlFriend !

2011-04-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

“Don’t forget Bob” and “Got the wrong Bob?” are two Gmail Labs features that help prevent you from making two common mistakes: forgetting to include someone on an email, and sending a message to the wrong person with a similar name to the person you meant to email — like emailing Bob (your boss) instead of Bob (your friend).

We’ve received quite a bit of positive feedback from people who avoided some embarrassing situations thanks to these features. And today, we’re excited to graduate them from Gmail Labs and start turning them on for everyone (they should start working in all Gmail accounts over the next day or so). Once that happens, as you type in your recipients, Gmail will automatically make suggestions based on the groups of people you email most often. When you see a suggestion to add a person you’ve forgotten, all you have to do is click on their name to add them.

Similarly, if you click on a suggestion to replace a mistakenly added recipient, the proverbial “wrong Bob” will be replaced by the right one.

We hope these suggestions help you avoid some sticky situations — before you hit send. As you compose messages and see these features in actions, let us know what you think by tweeting @gmail with your ideas and impressions or leaving a message in the Gmail Help forum.

Original Post

BETTER Improved GMAIL !

2011-04-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

Ever since I joined the Gmail team, my friends have been eager to tell me, "I love Gmail! Except for this one thing..." And every day, Gmail users share their "one thing" that would make Gmail better for them through our suggestions page. While we enjoy creating new solutions to old problems with features like Priority Inbox, those little annoyances and missing pieces are important, too. Recently, we've rolled out several small tweaks to Gmail to show it a little extra love.

Here’s a rundown:

Auto-save contacts setting: Most people like that Gmail automatically saves every email address you send messages to; it can help recover forgotten addresses of former teachers, bosses, and people you contacted once but never thought you'd need to contact again. For some people, though, this feature can cause too much contacts clutter. Today, we're rolling out a new setting to let you turn off the auto-save option. You’ll see it on the General tab of Gmail Settings.

Better warnings for typos in email addresses: We all make typos, even when addressing email. In the old days, when you accidentally left out the "." in your ".com", Gmail would tell you there was an error but not point it out. Now, it’ll let you know which address has the problem -- much easier when sorting through a long “To:” list.

Fewer annoying error pop-ups: Gmail's filters are really useful for organizing your messages automatically, but sometimes those filters can have unintended consequences, like sending mail you'd like to keep to the trash. When you replied to a message in the Trash, Gmail would show an error message you'd have to click through to continue working. Now, you’ll still see the error, but it's no longer a pop up and it gives you an easy way to move the conversation out of Trash right from there.

Easier transitions between certain actions: You can create filters quickly from the "Filter messages like this" option that shows up on some messages. Now, after you've saved your filter, Gmail will send you right back to the message you were reading so you can go right back to what you were doing before.

Keyboard shortcut guide for everyone: Keyboard shortcuts can be a huge productivity boosters. If you've never tried them, try hitting Shift+? -- that's one keyboard shortcut that's now automatically turned on and gives you a peek into the rest of them and a quick link to enable from there.

Refresh button: For a long time, people have pointed out the inconsistency of having "Refresh" as a link in the menu bar, next to all of the buttons. We changed it to a button to match.

If any of these small fixes were your "one thing," we hope you've noticed the changes as they rolled out. When you find the next little tweak that would make you love Gmail even more, let us know.

Original Post

via Google Better GMAIL

2011-04-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

Auto-save contacts setting: Most people like that Gmail automatically saves every email address you send messages to; it can help recover forgotten addresses of former teachers, bosses, and people you contacted once but never thought you'd need to contact again. For some people, though, this feature can cause too much contacts clutter. Today, we're rolling out a new setting to let you turn off the auto-save option. You’ll see it on the General tab of Gmail Settings.

Better warnings for typos in email addresses: We all make typos, even when addressing email. In the old days, when you accidentally left out the "." in your ".com", Gmail would tell you there was an error but not point it out. Now, it’ll let you know which address has the problem -- much easier when sorting through a long “To:” list.

Fewer annoying error pop-ups: Gmail's filters are really useful for organizing your messages automatically, but sometimes those filters can have unintended consequences, like sending mail you'd like to keep to the trash. When you replied to a message in the Trash, Gmail would show an error message you'd have to click through to continue working. Now, you’ll still see the error, but it's no longer a pop up and it gives you an easy way to move the conversation out of Trash right from there.

Easier transitions between certain actions: You can create filters quickly from the "Filter messages like this" option that shows up on some messages. Now, after you've saved your filter, Gmail will send you right back to the message you were reading so you can go right back to what you were doing before.

Keyboard shortcut guide for everyone: Keyboard shortcuts can be a huge productivity boosters. If you've never tried them, try hitting Shift+? -- that's one keyboard shortcut that's now automatically turned on and gives you a peek into the rest of them and a quick link to enable from there.

Refresh button: For a long time, people have pointed out the inconsistency of having "Refresh" as a link in the menu bar, next to all of the buttons. We changed it to a button to match.

If any of these small fixes were your "one thing," we hope you've noticed the changes as they rolled out. When you find the next little tweak that would make you love Gmail even more, let us know.

Original Post

Google Plays April Fools

2011-04-06T03:06:00.000-07:00

Gmail Team seems to enjoy April Fools Day

Gmail Motion Blog Post

via GMAIL - MOTION !

2011-04-06T03:05:00.000-07:00

Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager

In 1874 the QWERTY keyboard was invented. In 1963, the world was introduced to the mouse. Some 50 years later, we’ve seen the advent of microprocessors, high resolution webcams, and spatial tracking technology. But all the while we’ve continued to use outdated technology to interact with devices. Why?

This is a question that we’ve been thinking about a lot at Google, and we’re excited to introduce our first attempts at next generation human computer interaction: Gmail Motion. Gmail Motion allows you to control Gmail — composing and replying to messages — using your body.

To use Gmail Motion, you’ll need a computer with a built-in webcam. Once you enable Gmail Motion from the Settings page, Gmail will enable your webcam when you sign in and automatically recognize any one of the detected movements via a spatial tracking algorithm. We designed the movements to be easy and intuitive to perform and consulted with top experts in kinestetics and body movement in devising them.

We’ve been testing Gmail Motion with Googlers over the last few months and have been really excited about the feedback we’ve been hearing. We’ve also done some internal tests to measure productivity improvements and found an average 14% increase in email composition speed and 12% reduction in average time in inbox. With Gmail Motion, Googlers were able to get more done and get in and out of their inboxes more quickly.

To use Gmail Motion, you’ll need the latest version of Google Chrome or Firefox 3.5+ and a built-in webcam. If it’s not already enabled on your account, sit tight — we’ll be making it available to everyone over the next day or so.

For more information, visit gmail.com/motion.

Introducing Gmail Motion - Official Gmail Blog

via GMAIL - FACES Series 1

2011-03-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL blog

I’m a big theater buff, and I always wonder about all the unseen people hard at work backstage, grabbing props, making sure the microphones work, and moving set pieces. Whether you’re into theater or not, we figured you might be interested in hearing about what goes on “behind the scenes” of Gmail. With this in mind, we’re excited to bring you a new series over the coming months called “Faces of Gmail,” which will spotlight the engineers, designers, and other folks who help make Gmail what it is. So here’s our first interviewee: Manu Cornet, the Parisian engineer behind many of your favorite Gmail themes.

What do you do on the Gmail team and what did you do before joining Google?
I’ve worked on the Gmail frontend team for most of my four years at Google. I mostly work on things I can’t really talk about just yet :-). But on the side I do many small user interface-related things such as labs (e.g. I worked on Nested Labels, Message Sneak Peek, and the Unread Message Icon), themes, and various interface improvements. Before Google, I got a master’s in physics (plus some biology) and one in computer science. Then I started a Ph.D. in bioinformatics, but after a year I felt I needed to work on things that would be useful to more people in a shorter time range.

How did themes get started and how did you help develop them?
The idea of making Gmail theme-able had been around for nearly as long as Gmail existed. When I joined the Gmail team, they asked me if I wanted to be part of the first themes team. I said “yes” immediately! Working at Google is already a thrill, but talk about a dream job within a dream job! Making themes may sound easy, but it proved pretty challenging: Gmail has a huge amount of code, this was long before recent evolutions like CSS3, and we obviously had to support all major browsers. Especially for the crazy themes that involved custom borders, drop shadows, and customizations everywhere, like Ninjas, Desk, Shiny, etc. To this day I don’t believe any email client (web-based or not) provides that level of styling and customization. Anyway, people obviously like themes, so I’ve continued to work on more like Marker, High Score, and the ability to choose your own colors. On my personal Gmail account I use Zoozimps — it’s my baby, I drew all these big-nosed characters (they’re kind of self-caricatures).

What are the three Gmail features you wouldn’t be able to live without?
I’m an “inbox zero” kind of guy, so I would say archive (to move things out of my inbox), filters (everything that isn’t addressed to me directly or cc’d to me doesn’t make it to my inbox, but I do take a glance at all unread emails once every day), and conversation view (gathering all messages in a conversation in one place). With so many emails a day I’d go crazy without those.

What do you do when you’re not working on Gmail?
I like to write (I published a few books in France), draw (illustrations and comic strips), and play music (mostly jazz — I published an album back in 2004 but I don’t have as much time as I’d like for that these days).

What would your last meal be?
I think it would be a meal with only desserts: crème brûlée, molten chocolate cake, red fruit tiramisu, floating island, ice cream, etc. Alright I’m hungry now...

Photos by Cody Bratt, Google Talk team

Original Article

via GMAIL - BIG SWITCH !

2011-03-30T03:25:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official GMAIL Blog

Switching email accounts can be painful. The idea of losing years of accumulated contacts and messages can sound daunting, to say the least. Luckily, switching to Gmail doesn’t mean you have to start totally fresh.

Back in 2009 we announced tools that let you import mail and contacts from other providers, such as AOL or Hotmail. Today we’re announcing the addition of fourteen more international domains to our list of supported email providers:

aol.com.br

hotmail.es

hotmail.it

hotmail.co.jp

Kimo.com

live.jp

yahoo.es

yahoo.cn

yahoo.com.cn

yahoo.com.hk

yahoo.com.sg

yahoo.com.tw

yahoo.co.jp

yahoo.it

We’ve also created a site, gmail.com/switch, with basic information and how and why you might want to switch to Gmail. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re already a Gmail user, but perhaps this link will be handy for friends and family.

We’re always looking for ways to make Gmail more useful -- both for existing users and new ones -- so, as always, we’d love to hear what you think!

Original Post

via GMAIL - for iPhone new CONNECTION BAR

2011-03-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

Using Gmail in Safari on your iPhone gives you access to fast search, conversation view, stars, labels, and more. But it’s sometimes frustrating not knowing whether your email has been sent or whether your phone has a functioning internet connection at all. To address this, we recently introduced the “connection bar.” The connection bar appears at the bottom of the screen when needed to give you the info you want— and then gets out of the way.

The connection bar appears when the app launches and is checking for new mail:

It also appears when your phone is offline, back online and sending, and then again when it finishes sending all messages:

You can see this improvement by visiting gmail.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch’s browser (iOS4 only). Don’t see the new changes yet? Try clearing your cache and refreshing the page. And if you like using Gmail in mobile Safari, get to it faster by tapping the “+” at the bottom of the screen and then “Add to Home Screen.”

Original Post

via GMAIL call phone numbers in-MAIL

2011-03-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

With the ability to call phones built right into Gmail, you no longer have to get out your phone and retype a number anytime someone sends you one in an email or chat message. Starting today, you’ll see that phone numbers appear as links, like this:

Just click the number, and Gmail’s dialpad will pop up, already populated with the number you’re trying to call.

Click “Call” and voilà! Of course, if you don’t already have the voice and video plugin installed, you’ll be prompted to do that first.

You’ll also see a little green phone icon next to numbers in your contacts which you can use to do the same thing.

Original Post

8.9 Earthquake struck Japan triggering a Tsunami Alert

2011-03-11T09:54:00.000-08:00

Aftermath of the Tsunami in Japan caused by 8.9 earthquakeOil Refinery Ablaze

via GMAIL Smart LABELS

2011-03-10T17:51:00.000-08:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

People get a lot of email these days. On top of personal messages, there are group mailing lists, social network notifications, credit card statements, newsletters you might have signed up for, and promotional email from a shopping site you used once months ago. Gmail’s filters and labels were invented to help manage the deluge, but while I have about 100 filters that triage and label my incoming mail, most of my friends and family have all their messages in a giant unfiltered inbox.

Last year, we launched Priority Inbox to automatically sort incoming email and help you focus on the messages that matter most. Today, we're launching a complementary feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels, which helps you classify and organize your email. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such. “Bulk” mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later), “Notifications” are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as “Forums.”

If you already use filters and labels to organize your mail, you may find that you can replace your existing filters with Smart Labels. If you're picky like me and still want to hold on to your current organization system, Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too. On the Filters tab under Settings, you'll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your existing filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox (which you can also do by just clicking on the label, then selecting or unselecting the checkbox in the top right corner).

Labs in Gmail are a great testing ground for experimental features, and we hope Smart Labels help you more effortlessly get through your inbox. If you notice a message that was automatically labeled incorrectly and want to help us troubleshoot, you can report miscategorizations from the drop down menu on each message (in doing so, you’ll donate the full message to our engineers so that we can improve the feature). Give it a try and send us feedback on how we can make it work better for you!

Original Article

via GMAIL - Its DOWNTIME !!

2011-03-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.

I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centers? Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That’s what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we’ve been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue.

To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.

So what caused this problem? We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email. When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version.

As always, we’ll post a detailed incident report outlining what happened to the Apps Status Dashboard, as well as the corrective actions we’re taking to help prevent it from occurring again. If you were affected by this issue, it’s important to note that email sent to you between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 was likely not delivered to your mailbox, and the senders would have received a notification that their messages weren’t delivered.

Thanks for bearing with us as we fix this, and sorry again for the scare.

Update (3/1/11, 12:20 PM PST): Data for the remaining 0.012% of affected users has been successfully restored from tapes and is now being processed. We plan to begin moving data into mailboxes in 2 hours, and in the hours that follow users will regain access to their data. Accounts with more mail will take more time. Thanks for bearing with us.

Update (3/2/11, 10:55 PM PST): Gmail should be back to normal for the vast majority of people affected by this issue. If you are still experiencing issues, please contact us at the temporary alias we've set up for this particular issue, gmail-maintenance@google.com. Thanks again for bearing with us.

Original Article

via GMAIL - MORE ! formats support in Google Docs Viewer

2011-02-18T15:43:00.000-08:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

Cross posted from the Google Docs blog

The Google Docs Viewer is used by millions of people every day to quickly view PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations online. Not only is viewing files in your browser far more secure than downloading and opening them locally, but it also saves time and doesn’t clutter up your hard-drive with unwanted files.

Today we’re excited to launch support for 12 new file types:

Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
Apple Pages (.PAGES)
Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
TrueType (.TTF)
XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

Not only does this round out support for the major Microsoft Office file types (we now support DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS and XLSX), but it also adds quick viewing capabilities for many of the most popular and highly-requested document and image types.

In Gmail, these types of attachments will now show a “View” link, and clicking on this link will bring up the Google Docs Viewer.

You can also upload and share these files in Google Docs, so that anyone can view the content using their browser.

And as always, the Google Docs Viewer is available for use on any website, with both a full Chrome and embedded option. More information can be found here.

Original Article

via GMAIL Improved sign-in security using 2 step Verification

2011-02-17T17:05:00.000-08:00

Posted Official Gmail Blog

(Cross-posted from the Google Blog)

Has anyone you know ever lost control of an email account and inadvertently sent spam—or worse—to their friends and family? There are plenty of examples (like the classic "Mugged in London" scam) that demonstrate why it's important to take steps to help secure your activities online. Your Gmail account, your photos, your private documents—if you reuse the same password on multiple sites and one of those sites gets hacked, or your password is conned out of you directly through a phishing scam, it can be used to access some of your most closely-held information.

Most of us are used to entrusting our information to a password, but we know that some of you are looking for something stronger. As we announced to our Google Apps customers a few months ago, we've developed an advanced opt-in security feature called 2-step verification that makes your Google Account significantly more secure by helping to verify that you're the real owner of your account. Now it's time to offer the same advanced protection to all of our users.

2-step verification requires two independent factors for authentication, much like you might see on your banking website: your password, plus a code obtained using your phone. Over the next few days, you'll see a new link on your Account Settings page that looks like this:

Take your time to carefully set up 2-step verification—we expect it may take up to 15 minutes to enroll. A user-friendly set-up wizard will guide you through the process, including setting up a backup phone and creating backup codes in case you lose access to your primary phone. Once you enable 2-step verification, you'll see an extra page that prompts you for a code when you sign in to your account. After entering your password, Google will call you with the code, send you an SMS message or give you the choice to generate the code for yourself using a mobile application on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device. The choice is up to you. When you enter this code after correctly submitting your password we'll have a pretty good idea that the person signing in is actually you.

It's an extra step, but it's one that significantly improves the security of your Google Account because it requires the powerful combination of both something you know—your username and password—and something that only you should have—your phone. A hacker would need access to both of these factors to gain access to your account. If you like, you can always choose a "Remember verification for this computer for 30 days" option, and you won't need to re-enter a code for another 30 days. You can also set up one-time application-specific passwords to sign in to your account from non-browser based applications that are designed to only ask for a password, and cannot prompt for the code.

To learn more about 2-step verification and get started, visit our Help Center. And for more about staying safe online, see our ongoing security blog series or visit http://www.staysafeonline.org/. Be safe!

Advanced sign-in security for your Google account - Official Gmail Blog

via Google.org: Information resources for Egypt

2011-02-16T17:00:00.001-08:00

Posted at Google.org Blog

We continue to follow the fast-changing events in Egypt, hopeful that compiling vital information in one place helps people on the ground and their anxious relatives and friends. We just posted the first version of a resource page in response to the need for information such as emergency hotlines, embassy phone numbers, and recent updates about the unrest in Egypt. We plan to translate the page into Arabic and will continue adding useful information.

As has been widely reported, Internet access is limited inside Egypt. We hope that the resources on this page will be valuable for those in touch with friends and family on the ground and others simply eager to find information. We believe that access to information is a fundamental global right. YouTube is helping people access and share footage from the demonstrations. We also teamed up with Twitter to turn on a speak-to-tweet service that helps people in Egypt stay connected at this challenging time.

Our thoughts remain with those in Egypt.

Original Article

via GMAIL for Mobile Priority INBOX

2011-02-09T16:30:00.000-08:00

Posted at Gmail's Official Blog

(Cross-posted from the Mobile blog)

If you’ve ever cursed a phone’s tiny screen as utterly inadequate for sifting through an overflowing inbox you’ll be pleased to hear that the Gmail mobile web app now supports Priority Inbox. Priority Inbox helps combat information overload by automatically identifying your important messages so you can focus on those first. Until today it was only available on the desktop and Android devices.

Now, once you set up Priority Inbox in the desktop version of Gmail, you’ll see Priority Inbox sections when you visit gmail.com from your phone’s browser and click on the ‘Menu’ screen. You’ll also see importance markers in your inbox, so you can quickly identify which messages are important.

This feature is available for most mobile browsers that support HTML5, such as devices running Android 1.5+ and iOS 3+. If you have suggestions or want to learn more, visit our Help Center and forum.

Original Post

via GOOGLE - Bing uses Google search results

2011-02-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice

Posted at Official Google Blog

By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google's results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.

I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.

This example opened our eyes, and over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries. Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing.

We couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google’s top search result appeared at the top of Bing’s ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google’s search results in Bing’s ranking.

We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:

To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above).

We saw this happen for multiple queries. For the query [delhipublicschool40 chdjob] we inserted a search result for a credit union:

The same credit union soon showed up on Bing for that query:

For the query [juegosdeben1ogrande] we inserted a page of hip hop bling jewelry:

And the same hip hop bling page showed up in Bing:

As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:

Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program

or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop.

Original Post

via GMAIL - Improvements to contact groups

2011-02-03T19:33:00.000-08:00

Posted at Gmail's Official Blog

Organizing your Gmail contacts into groups can save you time when you’re writing messages to multiple people at once. For example, if you create a “Family” group, instead of addressing an email to your mom, dad, sister and brother, you can just start typing “Family” and Gmail will complete the rest. Today we’re making two improvements to contact groups which should make them easier to create and control.

First, let’s say you have a list of coworkers you think you’ll want to contact again in the future. Now, you can paste that list into the Add to group menu when viewing your “Coworkers” group to populate or extend it.

Second, we’ve added the ability to specify which one of your contact’s email addresses you want to use in a given group. So, for example, you can now use your friend’s personal address in your “Poker Buddies” group and that same friend’s work address in your “Coworkers” group.

We're always listening for feedback about what we can do to make Contacts, and all of Gmail, better, so let us know what you think.

Original Post

via GMAIL: Taskbar Notification for EMAIL and CHAT

2011-01-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

Many of us are guilty of constantly switching back to Gmail to check for new messages. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably missed an important chat message because you weren’t looking at your Gmail window when it came in. If you use Google Chrome, these days can be over since we just launched HTML5 desktop notifications which display pop-ups whenever a chat message or new email arrives.

To turn them on, click on the Settings link in the top right corner of Gmail and scroll down to the “Desktop Notifications” section. If you just want to get notified about chat messages, or if you use Priority Inbox and only want to get notifications for important messages, you can customize your settings from there too.

This functionality is currently only available for people using Google Chrome, but we’re working to make notifications part of the standard Web platform.
Original Article

via GMAIL Unread EMAIL count in Favicon

2011-01-27T06:36:00.000-08:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

When you’re visiting sites other than Gmail, it’s easy to find out how many unread messages are in your inbox by glancing at the title of your Gmail tab or window. However, if you have a ton of tabs open, or if you use Chrome’s “Pin Tab” feature that hides everything except the tab’s icon, it can be tricky to figure out without switching tabs.

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, you may like the new Unread message icon we just added to Gmail Labs. It embeds the number of unread messages you have right into the Gmail icon itself, like this:

To turn it on, go to the Labs tab in Settings, enable this lab, and click the “Save Changes” button at the very bottom of the page. Note that it’ll only works in Chrome (version 6 and above) and Firefox (version 2 and above).

Original Article

via GMAIL Print DIRECTLY! from mobile using Google Cloud Print

2011-01-25T15:36:00.000-08:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

Let’s say you need to print an important email attachment on your way to work so that it’s waiting for you when you walk in the door. With Gmail for mobile and Google Cloud Print — a service that allows printing from any app on any device, OS or browser without the need to install drivers — you can.

To get started, you’ll first need to connect your printer to Google Cloud Print. For now, this step requires a Windows PC but Linux and Mac support are coming soon. Once you’re set up, just go to gmail.com from your iPhone or Android browser and choose “Print” from the dropdown menu in the top right corner. You can also print eligible email attachments (such as .pdf or .doc) by clicking the “Print” link that appears next to them.

We’re rolling this feature out in U.S. English over the next few days, so if you don’t see it right away please check back. In the meantime, you can learn more in the Google Cloud Print help center.

Original Article

What You are Looking For, search-as-you-type - via GMAIL

2011-01-24T12:37:00.000-08:00

Posted at Gmail's Official Blog

Have you ever found it just a little bit tricky to find what you were looking for on the Gmail Labs Settings page? Scrolling was ok when there were a handful of Labs, but now that there are over 50 it’s another story. A lunchtime discussion made us realize that having to rely on the browser’s search function or endless scrolling makes it hard to find the Labs features you want. So another Gmail engineer named Manu and I decided take an afternoon and address this. The result is an addition to the Settings page which filters the visible Labs as you type.

You can also link directly to the search results (e.g. http://mail.google.com/mail#settings/labs/video) if you’d like.

Original Article

Improved Picasa Web Albums Uploader for MAC

2011-01-15T00:09:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 06, 2010 at 7:28 AM

Posted at Google MAC blog

Our new release of Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac OS X adds some valuable improvements suggested by users. If you share photos and videos on Picasa Web Albums with friends and family, you’ll find this update works even more smoothly with iPhoto and other photo management applications on your Mac.

The uploader application and iPhoto export plug-in now try to identify when files are duplicates of photos or videos already in the destination album, and will offer to skip uploading the copies. This is especially helpful when exporting directly from iPhoto, since now you can upload a growing iPhoto album or event repeatedly without having to carefully exclude the files you previously shared.

When photos are resized or are converted to JPEG, the new uploader also offers better image quality, and more consistent preservation of photo metadata like photo orientation and camera details.

This release is also a better foot soldier on the Data Liberation Front. When you use the Picasa Web Albums Uploader application to quickly download one or all of your albums, it will retrieve not just photos but now also a video file for each of your movies when MPEG-4 versions are available from the server. This makes Picasa Web Albums an even better choice for sharing your high-definition videos.

The latest release of the uploader, version 1.4, is available from the download page. If you have an older version of the uploader on your Mac, it may have already updated itself. To share your questions or suggestions, join the conversation in the Mac Uploader area of the Picasa Help forum.

Original Article

Free !! Call to US and Canada Via GMAIL

2011-01-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

When we launched calling in Gmail back in August, we wanted it to be easy and affordable, so we made calls to the U.S. and Canada free for the rest of 2010. In the spirit of holiday giving and to help people keep in touch in the new year, we’re extending free calling for all of 2011.

In case you haven’t tried it yet, dialing a phone number works just like a regular phone. Look for “Call phone” at the top of your Gmail chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.

To learn more, visit gmail.com/call. Calling in Gmail is currently only available to U.S. based Gmail users.

Happy New Year and happy calling!

Original Article

Top 5 Feature Requests for TASKS Via GMAIL

2011-01-14T00:23:00.000-08:00

Posted at GMAIL official Blog

A few months ago, we asked for your help to make Tasks better by voting on your top feature requests. We were blown away by the number of responses we received, with over 17,000 people participating and an overwhelming 185,000 votes.

Now, we’re preparing to tackle some of your top requests. In no specific order, here are the top five feature requests that emerged from the Tasks product ideas page:

Ability to create repeating tasks

Reminders and notifications

Sharable task lists

Tasks API and synchronization

Visual distinction for overdue tasks

So thanks for all the feedback and stay tuned for changes to Tasks throughout the year. In the meantime, we wish you a productive (and Tasks-filled) 2011!

Original Article

Must Check Emoticon in Gmail Cool Feature !

2010-11-30T18:30:00.000-08:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

When we added emoticons in Gmail, you responded with a nice big smile , but then you asked for more. So we added hundreds more emoticons through Gmail Labs. “But alas!” you cried. “How can I ever keep up with so many different choices? I am overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of emotion , amusement , and cute animals that Gmail has to offer." Well, don’t despair, fine purveyor of emoticons. There is now a solution: “Recently Used Emoji” in Gmail Labs, which keeps track of the ten most recent emoticons you’ve used, and saves them for easy access. To turn it on, just visit the Labs tab of Gmail Settings.

No more searching through dozens of cat faces for the one that says, “I miss you, but I’m still ambivalent about our weekend plans.” You can now triumph over the plethora of emoticons, and easily add a pile of emotion to any email that you choose — let us know how it goes.
New in Labs: Recently used emoji - Official Gmail Blog

Gmail Updates: 5 New themes added

2010-11-06T01:52:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

Manu: Hey, how would you fancy some new Gmail themes?
Jake: Sure, I would love that! How usable are they?
Manu: Huh, usable? Well, there’s a flishy-flashy theme that blinks every...
Jake: What? I don’t want things to flash, I want to read my email.
Manu: No? Well then, what about this fluorescent pink theme that will make your screen look very special when your friends are looking at...
Jake: No pink please!
Manu: Oh. Then maybe this hyper dynamic and playful theme that makes all links on the page jump away each time you try to click on...
Jake: Are you insane? Please, just give me something usable. If I want flashy game-like graphics, I can use High Score. If I want something dapper for my friends to look at, I can use Shiny. If I want cartoon characters hanging out here and there in my Gmail, I can use Zoozimps. I just want something dead simple.
Manu: What about stripping the Gmail interface to the bare bones, like these two new themes, Basic Black and Basic White?

Jake: That’s better. The dark one may be good for my eyes.
Manu: Great! Do you have an Android phone?
Jake: Yes.
Manu: Then you may like this Android theme too. How about that?

Jake: Nice! Some graphics but still subtle. Give me more.
Manu: Relaxing tree tops? This one ain’t blinking.

Jake: Not bad! What about something that would feel more handmade?
Manu: You’re in luck, sir. I have this cool Marker theme in store for you. Very unprofessional.

Jake: Nice — I’m gonna stick with this one for now.
Manu: Good choice! See you next time for some more.

Link to Gmail Blog

Gmail in IPHONE - Update

2010-11-05T06:16:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

Go to gmail.com from your iPhone and you’ll notice two improvements we’ve rolled out over the past few weeks. First, scrolling is snappier: the speed of scrolling reflects the speed of your swipe gesture. This is helpful for long conversations where a few quick flicks will get you to the information you need much faster than before. Second, the toolbars stay on screen while you’re scrolling rather than moving down into view after each scroll. Being able to access your toolbars from any point on the page should make it easier to triage your email and move around the app.

If you use Gmail in your mobile browser a lot, you may have noticed that we recently tried several different variations of these buttons. We‘ve iterated on the design and made improvements based on your feedback. If you have more suggestions, please post them in our forum or, if you use Twitter, mention #gmailmobile and we'll take a look. If you’re a developer and are interested in learning about the Javascript and HTML techniques we used to do this, we’ll post an article to code.google.com/mobile in the coming weeks.

You can see these improvements by visiting gmail.com from the browser of iPhone and iPod touch devices running iOS4 (English-only for now). And if you like Gmail in mobile Safari, make getting to it easier by tapping the “+” at the bottom of the screen and then “Add to Home Screen.” (Don’t see the new changes yet? Try clearing your cache and refreshing the page.)

Original Blog Entry

Gmail security checklist

2010-10-15T21:45:00.000-07:00

Posted @ Gmail Official Blog

October is National Cyber Security Awareness month and a good time for a reminder about why hijackers do what they do and how you can protect your account. Check out the Online Security blog to learn about common hijacking techniques and security practices that will help you stay one step ahead of the bad guys. To help ensure your Gmail account is safe, take a minute to visit the Gmail help center and complete our new security checklist.

Help keep your account safe with the Gmail security checklist - Official Gmail Blog

Gmail security checklist

2010-10-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

Help keep your account safe with the Gmail security checklist - Official Gmail Blog

Nice!! Google Calendar Sync now supports Outlook 2010

2010-08-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

Posted @ Gmail Official Blog..

Making sure that your calendar is available to you whenever and wherever you need it is important. That's why Google Calendar works with a number of desktop applications and mobile devices including iCal, iPhone and iPad, Blackberry, Android, Nokia/Symbian, and Windows Mobile phones. Google Calendar Sync for Outlook is also available, but one thing was missing — until now.

Google Calendar Sync now supports Outlook 2010 — our top feature request. Outlook 2010 comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and currently only 32-bit is supported. To start syncing your calendar with Outlook 2010, download Google Calendar Sync version 0.9.3.6. Once you install it, a Settings window will appear. Enter your account’s email address and password, choose your sync option and sync frequency, and you’re done! (Note: If you’re already using Google Calendar Sync, you’ll still need to download and install this new version in order to be able to sync with Outlook 2010. If you need help, take a look at our getting started guide.)

Google Calendar Sync now supports Outlook 2010

Dual Gmail Accounts Access in Same Browser

2010-08-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

Posted @Gmail Official Blog...

I have a couple different Gmail addresses that I use for different purposes. Historically, Google Accounts – including Gmail accounts — have only let people access one account at a time per browser, so using both accounts has been a bit inconvenient. I’ve either had to sign out and sign back in, use a second browser for my second account, or use a Chrome incognito window. And I'm not alone; lots of people have asked us for a better way to use multiple accounts at once in the same browser.

Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to "Multiple sign-in." After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts.

Please keep in mind that this is a feature for advanced users, and there are a couple things to watch out for:

1) Not all Google services support multiple account sign-in yet. For the services that don't support it (like Blogger and Picasa Web Albums), you'll be defaulted to the first account you signed in with during that browser session. So if you click a link from Gmail to Blogger, for example, you'll be logged into Blogger with the first account you signed in with, even if you clicked the link to Blogger from your second Gmail account.

2) We’re still working on making Gmail and Calendar work offline with multiple sign-in. If you rely on offline access, you probably don't want to enable this feature quite yet.

3) Multiple account sign-in only works on desktop browsers for now, so if you use Gmail on your phone's browser you won't see this option yet.

Since Google Apps customers can already sign in to their accounts at the same time as their personal Google Accounts, we won’t be adding this new feature to Google Apps until the new infrastructure is in place.

If you use more than one Google Account, we hope this makes you more efficient. If you have any questions, check out our help center.
Access two Gmail accounts at once in the same browser - Official Gmail Blog

Gmail now HTML5 Ready for Apple's Safari Browser

2010-07-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail Official Blog

We've been posting a bunch recently about new Gmail features built on top of HTML5 and other advancements in browser platforms, but so far you've only be able to drag in attachments and drag images into messages in Chrome and Firefox, and the ability to have new windows outlive your original Gmail window was limited to Chrome. Now, all three of these features work in the newest version of Safari (Safari 5) too.
HTML5 features now in Safari too - Official Gmail Blog

Gmail Adds Richtext Signatures

2010-07-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail's Official Blog

Rich text signatures have long been one of our most widely requested features. Some of you have tried your own solutions, including Greasemonkey scripts, browser plugins, and even using canned responses from Gmail Labs. Others have simply lived with frustration of not being able to change the colors or font size of your signature, or insert images and links. Either way, you'll be happy to know that today we're launching the ability to write your own rich text signatures right in Gmail.

The next time you log in and visit the Settings page, you'll see a rich text editor in the signature section. Here, you can customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.

Gmail also now supports a unique signature for each email address associated with your account. So, if you send mail using a custom "From:" address, you can use a different signature for that address. From the Settings page, you can edit the signature for each account by changing the email address that appears in the dropdown menu.

Currently, only the latest desktop version of Gmail supports rich text signatures and multiple signatures. The older version and HTML version of Gmail, along with the mobile versions, use a plain text version of your primary account’s signature.

Rich text signatures - Official Gmail Blog

Gmail Video Chat Tour for Dummies

2010-07-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jason Toff, Grandson of Evelyn & Ida

Often when I tell people that I work on Google video chat, I hear stories about how they’ve used it to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones... the list goes on. This got me thinking about how convenient— and sometimes even magical — the experience of video chatting is.

So when I saw that my grandma, who loves keeping in touch with family more than anyone, wasn’t set up to use video chat, I decided to help her get started. While doing so, it occurred to me how many people there must be out there in similar situations. If only there were a simple way that any grandmother could use to get started on her own...

Introducing the Grandmother’s Guide to Video Chat:

This video, along with a printable guide, can be accessed at google.com/chat/grandma. Feel free to share this link with your grandma—or grandpa—or, well, anyone who wants to video chat to help get them up and running.

And after your grandma is all set up, take a screenshot of you video chatting with her and email it to grammy324@gmail.com to share it with us. The first 100 people to do so will get a t-shirt, printable guide and VHS of the video (because if your grandma’s like mine, she’s still a cassette kind of girl).

In a few weeks, we’ll feature the best photos submitted on this blog.

Grandmother's guide to video chat - Official Gmail Blog

Hurray !! - Now its easy to video chat, voice chat, and group chat in Gmail

2010-06-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail blog

Video chat, voice chat, and group chat have all been available for some time within Gmail, but they've been curiously tucked away. Getting them up and running required fidgeting with a little menu at the bottom of each chat window. Starting today, all of these features will be just a single click away.

One of the more subtle benefits to surfacing these chat options is that it's easier for people to get started who don't yet have the voice and video chat plugin.
If your chat buddy doesn't have the plugin, clicking on this icon in the chat window will invite them to install it. As soon as they're done, you can carry on with a face-to-face video chat. Since we launched a similar feature on iGoogle and orkut a little while ago, we've seen a dramatic uptick in people using video chat.

Finally, you'll find oldie but goodie features such as "Go off the record," "Block", and "Send SMS" in a more aptly named "Actions" menu of each chat window.

Making it easier to video chat, voice chat, and group chat in Gmail - Official Gmail Blog

Drag & Drop Images into Gmail

2010-05-13T18:47:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail official Blog

Recently, we launched a feature that allows you to drag an attachment from your computer right onto Gmail.

I've always been a fan of the inserting image lab, so I naturally wondered if it would be possible to combine the two.

Today we're launching a feature that allows you to drag images from your computer into a message. You don't have to have the insert image lab enabled for it to work. Just drag the image in, resize it if you want, and send.

Currently, this feature only works in Google Chrome, but will be coming soon to other browsers.

Drag images into messages - Official Gmail Blog

GBuzz Features - Comment via email and view entire photo albums

2010-05-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

Posted @ Gmail Official Blog

One of the things people like best about Google Buzz is the ability to have conversations in the comments. But until now, if you were reading a post in an email client (like the native mail app on your phone or Outlook), you couldn't easily join in on the conversation -- you could only email the original poster. Today, we rolled out a new Google Buzz feature for you to try out: comment via email. Now, you can comment on the post simply by replying to the email message.

Plus, last week we made it possible to view entire photo albums in Buzz (rather than the handful of photos from a given Flickr or Picasa album you could see before). So if you share an album with tons of photos, people can now click through all of the photos in the Buzz photo viewer.

We're chipping away at the feature requests we've been receiving, so keep them coming. And if you want to keep up with everything Google Buzz related, follow our team at buzz.google.com/googlebuzz.

Comment via email and view entire photo albums in Google Buzz - Official Gmail Blog

Finally !! UK Google Mail is becoming Gmail

2010-05-04T05:09:00.000-07:00

Posted at Official Gmail Blog

As a Brit, my friends and family often tell me they're miffed that they get an @googlemail.com address instead of @gmail.com. Today I have good news for them: Google Mail is soon becoming Gmail again in the UK.

If you already have a Google email account in the UK, you'll soon have the option to switch your existing @googlemail.com address to the matching @gmail.com one, but you're also free to stick with @googlemail.com. And starting later this week, anybody who signs up for a new account in the UK will get an @gmail.com address. Since "gmail" is 50% fewer characters than "googlemail," we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!

We'll be making this transition over the next week, and will update this post as the changes roll out. So to Aunty Pamela, Uncle Maurice, and everyone else in the UK, welcome to Gmail!
Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK - Official Gmail Blog

Hooray !! Buzz Secret Keys

2010-05-03T19:22:00.000-07:00

Posted at Gmail's Official blog

We've been constantly updating Google Buzz, adding features that you've requested and making small tweaks that improve the experience for power users. Here are three things that have rolled out over the last couple weeks, one as recently as today:

1. Deliver interesting posts to your inbox. Sometimes you're really interested in a certain conversation and would like to get it delivered to your inbox. You used to have to comment on a post in order to get updates sent to your inbox. Now, you can set the post to be delivered to your inbox regardless of whether or not you've participated. Click the down-arrow in the upper right-hand corner of a post, and select "Deliver to my Inbox."

2. Disable comments. If a conversation you've started has run its course, you can opt to prevent further comments. For example, we just closed comments on this post soliciting questions for our SXSW panel since the talk happened over a month ago.

3. Favicons for shared links. When you share a link in Google Buzz, we now grab the favicon associated with that page so it's easier than ever to see the source (in this case, Blogger).

If you want to keep up with the latest on Buzz developments large and small, follow the team at buzz.google.com/googlebuzz.
3 Buzz tips: Deliver posts to your inbox, disable comments, and favicons for links - Official Gmail Blog

Holy Cow !! - Drag and drop attachments onto messages

2010-04-20T08:49:00.001-07:00

Posted at Gmails's Official Blog

I'm always looking for ways to save time. Suppose I want to attach some files to an email, and I already have a folder open containing those files.

I used to have to click "Attach a file," find the photos, click them, etc. Starting today, if I'm using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6, I can just drag and drop the files to attach them — easy as pie.

We'll enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature. For now, you can drag and drop attachments in Chrome and Firefox only.

Drag and drop attachments onto messages - Official Gmail Blog

Google Buzz buttons

2010-04-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

Posted at Google official Blog.

We've seen lots of people using Google Buzz to share interesting links from around the web. To do so, you had to copy and paste the link from one browser window to another — there weren't buttons that made it easy to post to Google Buzz without leaving the site you're on. Savvy sites like Mashable and TechCrunch quickly got creative and implemented their own Buzz buttons, using Google Reader as the backend. But not every site owner should have to hack together their own version of these buttons (and not everyone who uses Buzz also uses Reader), so this morning we're making copy-and-paste Buzz buttons available for anyone to use.

Starting today, you'll see these buttons around the web on participating sites including: The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Glamour, YouTube, Blogger, MySpace, GigaOM, PBS Parents, PBS NewsHour, The Next Web, TweetDeck, SocialWok, Disqus, Vinehub, and Buzzzy. Mashable and TechCrunch have updated their sites to use these new buttons too.

A number of sharing platforms, including ShareThis (pictured below), Meebo, Shareholic, AddThis and AddtoAny have also incorporated the Google Buzz button into their sharing functionality, so you'll see Buzz listed as a choice when you go to share something on many other sites around the web as well.

If you want to add Google Buzz buttons to your site, just go to buzz.google.com/stuff , configure your buttons with a couple clicks and copy a few lines of JavaScript. Paste this code where you'd like the Buzz buttons to appear and you're all set.

And if you'd like to promote your own Google Buzz account, we have a button for you, which allows people to follow you on Buzz right from your blog or website. Here's an example using the Google Buzz team's own Buzz account (clicking it will take you to the Buzz team's profile page and from there you can easily follow our team's posts):

Follow on Buzz

You can grab that button code from buzz.google.com/stuff as well.

Google Buzz buttons - Official Gmail Blog

heh..5 Buzz Tips

2010-02-22T06:43:00.000-08:00

Thursday, February 18, 2010 8:04 AM

Posted @ Google's Offical Blog

Now that people have been playing with Google Buzz in Gmail for a week and we've rolled out the improvements we announced here over the weekend, we wanted to let you know about some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buzz. Here are five tips to get you started:

1. Format your posts. When posting in Buzz, you can format text just as you can in Gmail chat: *bold*, _italics_, or -strikethrough- all work.

2. View a summary of your own Buzz activity at www.google.com/dashboard. The Google Dashboard provides a private, consolidated summary of the data associated with your Google account, as well as direct links to control your personal settings. As of today, Buzz has its own section on the Dashboard, so you can see how many people you're following, how many people are following you, and information about your recent posts, comments, and likes. You can also access your Buzz settings right there on the page.

3. Use an @reply to send a post directly to someone's inbox. If you want to make sure one of your friends sees a certain Buzz post, you can direct it to their inbox with an @reply. Type the "@" symbol followed by the first few letters of their name, and select their email address from the list. Only you'll see their Gmail address — other people will just see their name.

4. Try keyboard shortcuts to fly through buzz. Turn on keyboard shortcuts from Settings, and use "j" or "n" to scroll down the buzz tab, "k" or "p" to go back up, "r" to comment (same shortcut as reply in Gmail), and "shift + l" to like.

5. Mute posts so they don't get sent to your inbox. Comments on your posts and comments after your comments send buzz directly to your inbox. If you don't want a lively conversation to keep appearing in your inbox as people reply to it, you can mute it. Click the arrow in the corner of a buzz post and select "Mute this post."

If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, you can also mute buzz that appears in your inbox by hitting the "m" key while you're reading it.

Check out our Help Center for more tips and answers to your common questions, and stay tuned for more here as well.

Official Gmail Blog: 5 Buzz tips

A new Buzz start-up experience for Google

2010-02-13T18:23:00.000-08:00

Saturday, February 13, 2010 3:53 PM

Following is posted at Google's Official Blog

We've heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we've been working around the clock to address the concerns you've raised. Today, we wanted to let you know about a number of changes we'll be making over the next few days based on all the feedback we've received.

First, auto-following. With Google Buzz, we wanted to make the getting started experience as quick and easy as possible, so that you wouldn't have to manually peck out your social network from scratch. However, many people just wanted to check out Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not happy that they were already set up to follow people. This created a great deal of concern and led people to think that Buzz had automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before they created a profile.

On Thursday, after hearing that people thought the checkbox for choosing not to display this information publicly was too hard to find, we made this option more prominent. But that was clearly not enough. So starting this week, instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we're moving to an auto-suggest model. You won't be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked "Follow selected people and start using Buzz."

For the tens of millions of you who have already started using Buzz, over the next couple weeks we'll be showing you a similar version of this new start-up experience to give you a second chance to review and confirm the people you're following. If you want to review this list now, just go to the Buzz tab, click "Following XX people" and unfollow anyone you wish. If you don't want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can opt out at any time from the edit profile page.

Second, Buzz will no longer connect your public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items automatically. Just to be clear: Buzz only automatically connected content that was already public, so if you had previously shared photos in an "Unlisted" album or set your Google Reader shared items as "Protected," no one except the people you'd explicitly allowed to see your stuff has been able to see it. But due to your feedback Buzz will no longer connect these sites automatically.

Third, we're adding a Buzz tab to Gmail Settings. From there, you'll be able to hide Buzz from Gmail or disable it completely. In addition, there will be a link to these settings from the initial start-up page so you can easily decide from the get go that you don't want to use Buzz at all.

It's been an exciting and challenging week for the Buzz team. We've been getting feedback via the Gmail help forums and emails from friends and family, and we've also been able to do something new: read the buzz about Buzz itself. We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so.

Official Gmail Blog: A new Buzz start-up experience based on your feedback

Google's Buzz Creating Buzz

2010-02-12T06:02:00.000-08:00

Thursday, February 11, 2010 4:49 PM

Posted at Gmail's Official Blog, Gmail and Google Buzz

It's been just two days since we first launched Google Buzz. Since then, tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out, creating over 9 million posts and comments. Plus, we're seeing over 200 posts per minute from mobile phones around the world.

We've had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback. In particular there's been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn't yet have public profiles from following them.

Like Gmail's chat service, Buzz helps you create a social network by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with most. You can change, delete or add any contacts you want to follow.

So here is some more information about how Buzz works, and some immediate improvements we are making today based on your feedback.

The first time you create a post or comment in Buzz, we ask you to create a limited public profile (at a minimum it's just your first and last names). We do this so we'll know what name to display next to your posts — and so the people you follow know who you are. As you do this, we notify you that the lists of people you follow and the people following you will be displayed on your public profile. You can view, edit, and even hide these lists. The lists of your followers/people you follow are not made public on your profile until after you go through this profile creation step.

That said, we heard from people that the checkbox for choosing not to display this information was too hard to find, and based on this feedback, we've changed the notice to make it very clear. We will roll these changes out to all Gmail users later today.

1. More visible option to not show followers/people you follow on your public profile
If you don't want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can always opt out during the profile set-up when you first use Buzz or at any time from the edit profile page. We are making this option more prominent in the set up process, to ensure everyone who wanted to hide these lists can do so easily.

2. Ability to block anyone who starts following you
We are making it easier to block anyone, by adding "Block" links to the list of people following you. Previously, you were only able to block people from following you after they had created a public profile. Now, you can block anyone, regardless of whether or not they've already created profiles for themselves.

3. More clarity on which of your followers/people you follow can appear on your public profile
Initially, we showed you a list of all the people who would be following you once they created a public profile. However, only those contacts who had already created a public profile would show up on your public follower list. We're making this clearer by explicitly distinguishing which of your followers have public profiles and will show in your public list of followers. With this change you'll be able to see who is on the public list of followers that everyone else sees.

We designed Buzz to make it easy to connect with others and have conversations about things that interest you, and it's great to see millions of you doing this already. It's still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way. We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind. For more information about the choices you have when using Google Buzz, please visit our Help Center.

Official Gmail Blog: Millions of Buzz users, and improvements based on your feedback

In Gmail, Improved Google Search Features

2010-02-09T06:18:00.001-08:00

There is a change posted on Gmail's official blog wrt to Google's most popular search features, in Gmail including:

Dictionary definitions: use a keyword like "define" in English and you'll see the first definition of the word, with a link to the dictionary from which it came.

Spelling corrections: if you mistype something in your search, Google’s spell checking software will automatically ask if you meant a more common spelling of that word (especially helpful when looking up a new word).

Calculations: type in an arithmetic expression and you'll get the result. In this case the "Paste result" option from the result's pop-up menu will actually paste the result of the computation.

Local results: you can search for a particular place or for things near a particular place (map results will show up in a few weeks — they're a little broken by our recent switch to use https). The "More info" link will take you to the place page.

Weather: just type "weather" followed by the city and state, zip code, or city and country.

News: if your query matches something in the news, we'll show you one hit and an indication of how many related articles there are, with a link to go see them.

In addition, you can now use this Labs feature in any available Gmail language and you'll get search results that match your preferred language.

Finally, as some folks have already noticed, I added a search button to the toolbar when you're composing a message:

If you've got text selected when you click it, Gmail will search for that text. If you don't have text selected, you'll just get a search box where you can start typing.

Recommended Reads:

Official Gmail Blog: Improved Google Search in Labs

New Change in Gmail

2010-02-03T11:39:00.001-08:00

Google was serving internet with their Ads on the Search Engine until they rolled out the email service, Gmail. Now that Gmail's Beta tag is off, today google has made a favourable change in the Gmail's Ad system, where you will see more relevant and better ads.
When user clicks open a message in the Gmail, system automatically finds relevant ads according to the contents of the email and show them. For instance, if there is a conversation about the Resume then you will see ads related to Jobs.
Now with today's rolled out change, if system is not able to find relevant ads then other email messages are used as a input to the ad system and Gmail show relevant ad according to the contents in the other email messages. For example, let's say you're looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren't any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email, about your Chicago's visit, instead.
This is what Google says about the user privacy:

"To show these ads, our systems don't need to store any extra information -- Gmail just picks a different recent email to match. The process is entirely automated: no humans are involved in selecting ads, and no email or personal information is shared with advertisers."

Some recommeneded reads if you want to master Gmail:

Do you want Update for Gmail Inbox while Browsing?

2010-02-03T11:31:00.001-08:00

Google has released a Gmail extension for Chrome Browser. The Google Mail extension adds a nifty little button next to Google Chrome's address bar that provides an updated indicator of the unread messages in your inbox. It also lets you access your inbox with just one click.

There's also a Send from Gmail extension which makes Gmail your default email application and opens a compose window whenever you click an email address on a webpage. It also adds a new button next to the address bar that makes it easy to send an email directly from Gmail, pre-filling the subject of the message with the title of the web page you're currently on and the body with selected page text and the link address.

There are several other Gmail extensions that the Google Chrome developer community has written; you can check out these and more than 2,000 other extensions in the Google Chrome Extensions gallery.

Google Chrome Extensions are now available for all Windows users. For those of you on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. Mac users, hang tight — extensions are coming to the beta soon.

Read more on Official Blog...

Recommended Books:

Norman Rockwell : Google Celebrating Birthday of Great Painter

2010-02-02T22:37:00.000-08:00

In celebration of Norman Rockwell's Birthday, Google has a new Doodle on its Home page...

Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was a great painter and illustrator.

Collection of Norman's work:

China Vs Rest of the World: This Time Google

2010-01-21T07:37:00.000-08:00

Again Google has proved that Security is top Priority for Gmail Users. Now Gmail users will have HTTPS (Secured) login as a default option. Google is taking this step after hackers tried to attack its Gmail Service.

This is what Google has to Say about this change:

In 2008, we rolled out the option to always use https — encrypting your mail as it travels between your web browser and our servers. Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots. We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do.
We are currently rolling out default https for everyone. If you've previously set your own https preference from Gmail Settings, nothing will change for your account. If you trust the security of your network and don't want default https turned on for performance reasons, you can turn it off at any time by choosing "Don't always use https" from the Settings menu. Gmail will still always encrypt the login page to protect your password. Google Apps users whose admins have not already defaulted their entire domains to https will have the same option.
To read about other steps you can take to protect your accounts and your computers, visit google.com/help/security.
Note: If you use offline Gmail over http currently, the switch to https is likely to cause some problems. Learn more about this known issue and how to work around it.

Official Gmail Blog Link: Default https access for Gmail

Person Finder post-earthquake Haiti

2010-01-18T05:50:00.000-08:00

Click here to Launch Person Finder

Official Google Blog: Staying connected in post-earthquake Haiti

Google on China for Free Speech

2010-01-15T21:00:00.000-08:00

In mid-December a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on Google’s corporate infrastructure originating from China was noticed by Google. It resulted not only loss in the intellectual property of Google but also led Google to take a huge step to review the feasibility of business operations in China. Google has decided to not to censor results on Google.cn. Google might have to shut down Google.cn, and potentially all offices in China.

Google has revealed that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. They have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, which they could not achieve. Moreover, they have been successfully accessing dozens more Gmail accounts of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based users who are advocates of human rights via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

Google has already taken steps to make sure that no such attacks take place in future by making architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for its users. This effort of Google is visible with the policy change in the login process of Gmail. Now HTTPS (Secured) protocol is made default setting when Gmail user logs into his account.

I feel it’s not only a attack on Google but also attack on free speech nature of the internet and also think that it’s the people of the China who will be most affected with the decision of the Search Engine giant to pull out everything from China as a result of the shameful attack.

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China

Google Translate Widget for Your Website

2010-01-15T18:20:00.000-08:00

Add translation capabilities to your website/blog by simply adding a Widget provided by Google at Google's Translate Tool . You just need to copy the Script and paste it onto your website and Boom.Your website is available in all the languages. Script taken from here... For blogs at Blogger.com you need to do some extra tweak to add Widgets. For you guys I have done that bit. You just need to click on the "Add Google Translate Widget" button and you will get an option to add Translate tool to your blog hosted at Blogger.com . Your Blog is ready with the Translation Capabilities

<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
    pageLanguage: 'en'
  }, 'google_translate_element');
}
</script>
<script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit">
</script>

Default https access for Gmail after Security Concerns

2010-01-15T05:07:00.000-08:00

Gmail and Nexus One

2010-01-15T04:42:00.000-08:00

Nexus One also features the Gmail updates of Android 2.0, including:

Multiple Gmail accounts: Sync multiple accounts to the same device and switch between them without leaving the app.
Undo: A handy 'undo' link makes it easier to retrieve messages when you hit archive or delete by mistake. (Note: you can't yet undo send as you can with the desktop version of Gmail).

For more information on Nexus One visit google.com/phone. To learn more about Gmail on this and other Android devices, check out the Gmail page on mobile.google.com/android, or watch this video:

Official Gmail Blog: Gmail on Nexus One

Self Description - xkcd.com

2010-01-14T19:13:00.000-08:00

SELF-DESCRIPTION

Be bold! with Google Wave

2010-01-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

Be bold! with Google Wave: There's a simple, powerful, and fun technique which leads to a better Google Wave experience for you and your friends: edit other people's content! You can edit any message in a wave, not just those you started.

Export data from AdWords

2010-01-14T13:16:00.000-08:00

Check out the video that shows you how to export data from AdWords over on the Google Public Policy Blog.

Yes, you can export data from AdWords, too - Data Liberation

User's Security Top Priority for Google

2010-01-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

Buy Nexus @ Google Official Store

2010-01-14T08:37:00.000-08:00

Official Google Blog: Our new approach to buying a mobile phone

The Google web store allows you to purchase the Nexus One (Android based) without operator service or with service from T-Mobile USA. Its is expected that Google will add more operators, more devices and more countries in the future, including Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and Vodafone in Europe. To learn more about the Nexus One, I recommend you to check it out yourself by visiting http://www.google.com/phone

Few already available Android based handsets in the market

Nexus One जीमेल पर

2010-01-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

आफिशीअल ब्लॉग पर देखें Nexus One और जीमेल :

Nexus One, में जीमेल की सारी खूबीयां हैं जो की अन्द्रोइड (Android) २.० ver के द्वारा रिलीज़ की गई हैं. जो के निम्न लिखित हैं
- आप अपने कई जीमेल अकाउनटस को इकठा देख सकते हैं, बिना जीमेल अपेलिकेशंन को बंद किये हुए
- अगर आप गलती से अपने मेसेज को आर्कईव् या डिलीट कर दें तो आप उसे वापिस इन्बोक्स में ला सकते हैं एक "Undo" बटन को दबा कर
अगर आप Nexus One के बारे में और जानकारी चाहते हैं तो आप http://google.com/phone पर विजित करिए और अगर आप जीमेल को नेक्सुस (Nexus) या अन्य अन्द्रोइड (Android) मोबाइल फ़ोन के लिए जानना चाहते हैं तो आप जीमेल पेज देख सकते हैं http://mobile.google.com/android या आप इस विडियो को देखें:

Go Mobile!- Series on Mobile based Advertisements

2010-01-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

Go Mobile!- Series on Mobile based Advertisements

Get ready for the next big thing from Google, Mobile Ads. Over the past year, consumers have increasingly turned to their mobile devices to access the internet. They're performing searches, browsing content, watching videos, and interacting with mobile applications. Looking ahead, analysts expect internet usage on mobile devices to continue to ramp up even faster than it did on desktop computers.

So, Google is dedicating a complete series of monthly articles called "Go Mobile" related to mobile advertising. The series will highlight insights, new features, best practices, and tips for how to optimize your mobile ad campaigns.

Bye Bye Beta: Gmail

2010-01-07T16:40:00.000-08:00

Official Gmail Blog: It's been real, 2009:

Happy B'Day Gmail. Finally Google decided to take off the beta label after 5 years of long beta period, and adding more than 40 new features.

Few of them are:

Tasks, onto your phone and out of Labs
An improved mobile experience, including push Gmail and a complete redesign
Four new themes to make Gmail sparkle
Offline Gmail and its graduation from Labs
Drag and drop labels
More fast previews, including PowerPoint and TIFF
Multi-select attachments for faster, smoother file sharing
A way to eliminate duplicate contacts with a single button
More storage
Lots of new labs experiments, including undo send, automatic message translation, and 'Got the wrong bob?'

We wish lots more to come from Gmail yet...