Gmail, I love you!

Everyone uses Gmail. I've been a loyal user since I got an account in 2004. Back then I probably got it just to show people that I've got one and feel important. To be honest, there was nothing new except perhaps the simple looking ajax interface and the conversations view. And yes, there was this big space available which they later started incrementing indefinitely. That was quite a change in email service that followed. It was only later that other competitors began expanding their users' inboxes. A few other things I liked about gmail was starred conversations, labels as opposed to folders, archiving and chat from within the browser. Remember meebo? Gmail labs came out mid-2008. Again, there was lot of excitement around the launch but I chose to ignore the new "cool" features. However, later I started using some of them.

Recently, I've started using gmail as my mail-client-in-the-cloud (Yay, cloud computing FTW!). That is, I use gmail at work (so I can take some time off and check emails from home). After the initial mapping of outlook folders to labels, I thought a lot more needs to be done to get the 'corporate' effect. Labs came to the rescue. Am going to list the ones I liked best and some more you might want.

Default 'Reply to all'; Google Calendar gadget - portable preview of your calendar; Google Docs gadget - access often used Docs; Multiple Inboxes - this one's amazing. I prefer this over their 'priority inbox', do try it; Navbar drag and drop - move around some of the gadgets above plus chat window; Nested Labels; Quote selected text - very useful when you're replying only parts of a long email; Send & Archive - reply to an email and hide the whole convo from your inbox; Sender Time Zone - doesn't seem to work sometimes. Supposed to show the time of sending in the sender's timezone (against the current time there too!); Title Tweaks - Gets the "Inbox (2)" before "Gmail" in the title so you can know from other windows; Undo Send;

I use most of them given above. Additionally, I use Inbox preview which is great while you wait for gmail to load. Especially if you clear out your inbox and organize them elsewhere.  There are a few more like Superstars, Quick links which I might try but I haven't got around to try it.  This is how my inbox looks like (you can't see all of what I've used, though):

I think Labs is a great idea. It makes sense to not confuse users with too many options and yet make them available optionally. I think users to should take time to try everything Labs has to offer and if possible contribute.

Outside of Labs, users with multiple emails, calendar and/or docs should try and integrate everything inside their gmail inbox. Personally, am excited by what Google has done so far and what they're to create in the coming days.

Bye,
LVS

PS: I do wish they remove the "96 invites left" box from my gmail. Really, who needs it anymore? Read more…

A twitter clone?

Sure, there are lots of twitter like websites and services available on the net. But you surely wouldn't have expected this. I came across an email where someone typo-ed gmail.com as gmail.net - I was laughing at it for sometime. But after a while, inspiration stuck and I thought lets try out http://gmail.net and see what happens. I wouldn't have been surprised if I had got some cheap search engine or 'this domain is for sale'. However, I was expecting a redirection to gmail.com (unlike airtel.in used to redirect to vodafone UK). Surprise. What I got was "What are 'you' doing?" in the header. They've even got versions it seems for says in the page 'Live Comments 3.0.4'
You have a field for name, email (both optional) and a comment field where you can type upto 255 characters. Twitter without accounts? Only am not sure how I can follow someone....Try it! Wonder why Gmail didn't buy it though.

~LVS

PS: A bit more exploring reveals that it is some geeks attempt at trying some AJAX...scroll to the end of the page
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Undo sending an email

No. This can't be true. Its too good to be true. But it is now possible! Thanks to gmail I can now not resend an email for forgetting an attachment - not slap my forehead for missing an important line in the mail - not regret sending the mail to the wrong person - and so on and so forth. How many time was it that you've felt any of the above? (yes yes. nod nod. many a times) Trust Google to come up with useful features. They've done it again. Now you can actually 'Undo' sending an email that wasn't supposed to be sent the way it was. Don't believe me? Read Gmail offical blog : Undo Send.

How does google accomplish this? Once an email is sent, you can't do much to it. There's no post(wo)man to bribe. Well its simple. Actually that's the limitation to this feature, but its a very fair trade off. When you hit Send, Gmail actually doesn't send it for 5 seconds. Meanwhile, it shows you the following message:


You don't click it in five seconds or you aren't able to because your net connection suddenly went poof, Gmail will send the mail. Neat. But then here's the catch. You have to be bright enough to realize you've goofed up something - within 5 seconds! :P

This can be a problem actually. Say when you have to send a really really ultra urgent email to someone, you're effectively losing 5 seconds! :D So if you need to do that often, you might as well turn it off. Or you can spend 30* seconds going to Settings and turning off the feature! You get to pick it! Perhaps The Gmail Team can add a 'Send now' button. Easy.


Cool,
LVS

PS: Am going to try sending some hate mail and then hit Undo. Gives some temporary satisfaction doesn't it?


*Dependent on your Internet connection speed and your agility with the mouse.

Update: I tried sending a mail to myself and hit undo. However, just before that the new mail actually reflected in my inbox!! :-o
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Where are my readers?

Long long ago, I had enabled a beautiful tool, called Google Analytics for my blog. And I had forgotten about it. Today, I thought I'd use GA to track visitors, page clicks etc etc and realised what I already quoted in the first line. This being my second attempt (first here) at statistics for my blog, wasn't as cheerful to look at.
Here are a few things GA measured for me (and I pick the ones which were relatively the best)

• Visitor loyalty - how many times an individual user returned to read my blog
• Visitor recency - how soon did the returning user come back
• Bounce rate - how many just came to the home page and then went away without looking at other pages
• Length of each visit
• Number of unique users
• Page views
  
• and more...

And I scored abysmally on all of the above! 70% of the people visiting my blog, turn away after reading(?) the stuff on the first page, and playing with the fish too perhaps. Unique visitors is about 200. Average time on site is 2 mins. Average number of visits per day is around 4 :-( :-( :-(

So I thought it was time for some action. I guess you now realise that I have enabled summaries (which is not an _available_ feature in blogger). Number of posts per page have been increased. GA also tells me, 64% of the visitors are new and more than 50% come from referring sites. I've decided to make the biggest draw even bigger. Backlinks everywhere! My IM status will almost always say "Blog update" henceforth and things like that...More ideas for blog promotion are welcome. Yes, am on directories like IndiBlogger and Technorati.

Also, I need to make sure the visits spike on the day of a post is not too much higher than on other days. Any ideas for that?

OK, I made this post just to tell you people that some changes on this blog (visible/otherwise). A change of template didn't work. Someone suggest one?

Thanks and keep coming back for more! :D

Update: 'ravukalam' and 'i am an idiot latin translation' are keywords that show my blog as the first result on google search! :P yay!
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How to...Why is...

Google can be as enthusiastic as girl in class who knows all the answers to the teacher's questions.
Recently, Vishal discovered that in a Gmail Atom feed. I for one, found something similar. At first I thought, "Why is Google being so silly?". Take a look at the suggestions (automatically generated) given by the Google search bar in Fx3 for "How to ".

Then I tried with some other keywords, I've got a grab of that too.

This is when I realized (and with some shame, remembered), that Google gives these suggestions based on frequently searched keywords! Woah, are there really so many people who have second thoughts about their marriage?! Ask google indeed!!


Update. Seems the suggestions change with time and is also affected by what you searched. Sample, a N(a)RI-in-US's results:

~LVS
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