Gmail Experimental Features Make Gmail More Interesting

If you haven't noticed yet, Gmail opened up a "labs" page a while back that allows you to turn on experimental features within your gmail interface.  It had gotten little attention until the new beer goggles protection feature that was added two weeks ago.  Well I hadn't really felt the need to turn on any features until this morning, when Google added the ability to integrate Google Calendar and Google Docs directly into Gmail, as well as any additional Google Gadgets (though others are done through a hack and are not yet entirely meant for integration) you like.  At that point I turned on 6 features - Google Calendar, Google Docs, Chat to the right, Labels to the right, drag and drop modules, and pictures in chat.  Now all of the sudden Gmail looks like a much more powerful dashboard, and the only thing I really feel missing right now is a to-do list (which I could really take care of by pumping a remember-the-milk module into the left bar via the gadget hack).  I've grabbed a screenshot of my Gmail as it stands right now - if you want to turn on these features, sign into gmail and go to the settings link, then over to the labs tab.

Or you can click here to go directly to the labs feature page.

Labels vs. Folders in Gmail

Google Blogoscoped has a great interview with Kevin Fox, the former lead designer of Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calendar, who now works on FriendFeed. Among the interesting topics and decisions he covers, Fox gives the thinking behind why Gmail was designed with labels, rather than the traditional folder concept that people are used to in email. When you hear his answer, it makes complete sense:

Ironically, labels is a great example of when it’s best to not rely on existing design patterns, since in this case that would give the users a false understanding of the feature. Conversations were the most fundamental difference between Gmail and prior email applications. By treating messages in the same conversation as a single entity instead of separate emails, we gave users (especially users on mailing lists and those who get a lot of email) some real power.

The problem is that conversations meant we couldn’t have folders. The logic went like this: If you move a message from the Inbox into a folder and then another message came in on the same conversation, the conversation would pop back in to the Inbox (as it should). Should it
still be in the folder as well? It’s very inefficient to move it back in to the folder each time, frustrated that it keeps popping out. And if it stays in the folder and the inbox, then how do you get it out of the inbox? If you throw it away it would throw away the conversation from everywhere, or maybe it should just throw it away from the Inbox and remain in the folder, in which case if you really wanted to delete something you’d either have to find it in all folders it was ever placed in, or you’d have to have some sort of ’super delete’ which, as it turned out, was a far more troublesome difference to grasp than that of multiple-inclusion folders (which is what labels are).

So instead of deleting from the inbox, or re-moving, you could ’archive’ the conversation (whether or not it was in another folder) and it would just take care of it.

Another way to look at the problem is if you have filters set up to put messages from certain people or with certain keywords in folders, the same conversation could appear in multiple folders because one message put it in ’family’ and another put it in ’vacation’. Then you have the same problem of a single item appearing within multiple containers that people have been trained to understand only hold originals or copies, not aliases, and you run into the same confusion with some users trying to delete out of a folder to keep a conversation in another folder, or expecting it to vanish from everywhere. Either way you’re going to have a huge number of users who either can’t delete or are accidentally deleting, which was a much bigger problem than calling them ’labels’ and teaching them about multiple-inclusion..

Xoopit Turns Gmail Social and Organizes Your Email Files

Tonight I started testing out Xoopit, a web-service that integrates with your Gmail account and organizes the social content within.  It's in early development, and so it has limited features and only seems to index the most recent few months of my email, but the results are very cool.  Now I can browse through all of the photos attached in my email like they're a photo album.  I can also view all of the Youtube videos that have been linked to in emails, and see a list of all of the files that have been attached.  This essentially indexes, archives, and organizes all of the media associated with your Gmail messages.  Right now this basically only works for YouTube, Flickr, Picassa, Shutterfly, and Kodak, but more support will come and I'm sure more features will come. Also, there is no detailed information about the actual contact with your friends, such as seeing send/receive rates, response times, etc.  There is some "info stream" and content prioritization if you log in to your account on the Xoopit website, but this should all be integrated into Gmail.

So far Xobni doesn't seem to have broken Gmail or slowed it down.  It leaves itself pretty un-intrusive up at the top of the Gmail interface.  If it continues to show no negative impact on my email consumption, and doesn't break after a few weeks (like other Gmail integrated extensions), it has a chance to be a mainstay.  I'll report back on my experience overall.

A few months ago I tried out a service called Xobni that completely wowed me right at the start.  It did similar things stripping out and organizing media, but more importantly it brought "conversation view" that is so popular in Gmail directly into Outlook.  It also provided instantaneous search, and showed social information around contacts such as what I listed above in a wish-list (quantitative rankings, response times, etc.).  The biggest feature it had was that it identified the phone numbers and addresses that people included in emails and filled this information in on the contact cards within Outlook, almost like magic.  Xobni had a chance to revolutionize Microsoft Outlook, and it still could, but unfortunately it slowed Outlook to a crawl, and given how slow it is already with company-server integration, Xobni's negative impact in this area forced me to un-install it despite all of it's other great features.  Hopefully Xobni and Xoopit both continue to grow in feature set and become more efficient.

[Xoopit via Techcrunch]

Yesterday's post reviewed: Web, Tech, Music, and Entertainment Analysis

Yesterday's post ended up being much longer than expected, so I wanted to sum up the major points made in the numerous sections:

1. We should be able to make purchases, initiate downloads, and more via text messaging.  Pizza Hut and Papa John's are doing it now.
2. Facebook continues to work on the news feed to improve it's value but it needs to open up to more sources of information.
3. Google Reader has a ways to go to become an information hub, and the first place it should look for features is gMail, and then ReadBurner.
4. Musicians need to stop fixating on the album and start embracing the single; the target audience has.
5. Video games are going the way of television and music in the modern era  - free, ad-supported.
6. HBO needs to speed up its embracing of streaming online to keep up with competition and cut off illegal downloading.

Love to hear your comments and thoughts on all of these points.  Read the whole thing here.

Technorati Tags: text messaging,sms,pizza hut,papa johns,facebook,news feed,google reader,gmail,readburner,music,musicians,albums,video games,ad-supported,hbo

Weekend Web, Tech, Commerce, Music, and Entertainment News from the Reader

It seems like there were a lot of small, interesting, news stories that came up in Google Reader (My RSS Reader) in the last three days, so I thought I'd lay them out briefly:

• Fred Wilson calls for companies to implement purchasing through text messaging, noting that texting is now a primary way that most people communicate, and small things like movie/song purchases could easily be activated through SMS. Jott is showing how much can be done via short voice and SMS. Interestingly I read in the same weekend that Pizza Hut and Papa Johns are now accepting pizza orders via text message; I don't advocate eating their pizza, but if sub-par fast pizza chains can leverage modern technology, I'm sure other commercial companies can take the next step.
• Facebook continues to refine the way information is added to the newsfeed, and what rights 3rd parties (applications) have in interacting with users en mass. I'm a big fan of the information stream (I wish people leveraged social resources more), and expect that it will change in a big way this year. Companies like friendfeed are showing more interesting progress, and that same technology could be used in Facebook to make the newsfeed more all-encompassing and more valuable. In any case it's good to see that Facebook is continually looking to improve user-experience and information value. [see my friendfeed page here or at the right of my blog or left of my facebook profile]
• Google Operating System has an interesting article outlining how Google Reader could benefit from features that exist in Gmail. All of the suggestions are strong, could leverage long term value out of Google Reader (similar to how adding search functions changed the information store value of Google Reader), and when you think about it, seem obvious. Another interesting web application, ReadBurner, is leveraging the shared item function from Google Reader to create a Digg competitor of sorts; this seems like an obvious application that Google could do natively stronger than ReadBurner could do, and I don't see how they can stay out of this space. Hopefully innovation rolls out in a big way in Google Reader this year.
• Mark Cuban wrote about how musicians need to let go of the concept of the music album, and recognize the success of micro-payment / micro-purchasing, i.e. the $0.99 cent single. He says 27 single tracks sold more than 100k times in a single week, which shows how big the single is, how big our threshold for small, inexpensive purchases is, and calls for bands to start offering subscription-type single track models. It's a good idea, and the next in a long line of suggestions that are being made across the web about how the music business could reform to fit the changing digital entertainment sales landscape. The larger point is this - the music industry is not dead; there is a lot of money to be made, all it takes is recognition that making money will require flexibility and innovation.
• EA announced they will begin offering games to be downloaded and ad-supported. This is newsworthy because it's the first real venture into ad-supported video games beyond the Pogo / Real Arcade / etc. free online casual games subset. EA is recognizing that there can be more engaging, higher-level games that fall between the casual game and the hard-core game, which will attract players if the price is right, which means if the price is free. By offering these games by online download, it also means that they can sell dynamic advertising to be streamed in like Massive does with XBox360, and that's a valuable opportunity for advertisers, which means it's a valuable proposition for EA. This could be a market-changing move by a company that has traditionally relied on a few big key franchises that come out at a significant price year after year to the same fans.
• HBO has started testing an online offering where HBO subscribers can access content via streaming broadband. On-demand movies seems like a must, with Netflix, Apple, and others offering it. The real question, though, is how they are going to combat piracy. Networks are finding that offering free content with ad-support online is a great alternative revenue stream and alternative offering to make illegal downloading less worthwhile (it is often about content accessibility). HBO isn't addressing this problem by only having offerings for their current subscribers. Ultimately all content that people can get for free somewhere (legally or illegally) needs to be unlocked and offered via value proposition to the masses.

Technorati Tags: google reader,gmail,sms,rss,text messaging,texting,hbo,broadband tv,streaming content,EA,video games,free,download,music,mark cuban,readburner,digg,facebook

Google Spurs Change

Google Operating System has an interesting post called "winning even when you lose" where they discuss how Google spurs change in industries regardless of if it loses the apparent arms race.  The few examples given, of which there are likely many more, are:

Email - 2004 - Gmail launches with 1GB of free storage compared to Yahoo's 4MB of free storage.  In response, Yahoo grew to 100MB, then 1GB a year later, and finally, is now uncapped, while Google is only at 6GB for free (although it's growing at all times)

Instant Messaging - 2005 - Google Talk launches as an open standards chat program meant to exchange IMs with all open IM clients (although at the time that meant none of the big 3 competitors - AIM, Y! Messenger, or MSN Messenger).  In response Yahoo and Microsoft teamed up to link their IM services later that year.

Mobile Phones - 2007 - Google announced that it would bid for the 700MHz spectrum in the US, declaring four conditions of open applications and devices.  Later that year Verizon Wireless finally announces that it will open its wireless network to 3rd party devices and software.

Social Networks - 2007 - Google launches OpenSocial, an open widget application platform, and a month later Facebook announces it will open it's widget application platform for use on other social networks.

GMail and Facebook plug-in for AOL AIM

AOL is quietly rolling out some great plug-ins for AOL AIM. Back in October they launched a Facebook plug-in that alerts you to when friends write on your wall, send you a message, or update their profile. Today they launched a Gmail extension that allows you to receive Gmail email alerts from AIM. More email clients will be supported in the future. These things could be really popular, how come AOL doesn't promote them at all?

Technorati Tags: aol, aim, facebook, greenhouse, plug-in, gmail