Posts Tagged ‘gmail’

Gmail to Add Twitter-Like Clutter

While I can’t say that I’m surprised, I’m a bit frustrated and disappointed in Google over the recent news that they are adding a Twitter-like clutter status to the Gmail interface. While I appreciate fancy new tools built into apps I already use as much as the next geek, I really, really don’t need yet another social networking tool to update, integrate, and look at. Seriously, it’s not new content. Does anyone really put unique content on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and every other social networking site they belong to? I certainly don’t and don’t know anyone who does. My accounts are all inter-twined and I’m tired of having to filter out the duplicate data on those sites. Adding yet another list of the same things from my friends is just clutter in a used-to-be clean interface.

UPDATE:

According to a Slashdot article today, the problem looks like it may be much worse. According to the article, Gmail will be adding Facebook-like photo albums and comment feeds. Fortunately, the Gmail social networking tools are opt-in, so perhaps I won’t have to see the clutter when I don’t want to? We’ll see.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Feb 9th, 2010

Google Adds Push Mail to Sync for iPhone, Windows Mobile

In a blog post from the Google Enterprise Apps team, Google has announced that syncing iPhones and Windows Mobile phones with Gmail via ActiveSync now allows users to sync mail as a push account. Until now, users had to use ActiveSync (or Google Sync as Google likes to call it on the server-side) for calendars and contacts and exclude mail from syncing. Then the user had to setup their Gmail account as a separate IMAP account on the iPhone/Win Mo to get their email. It appears that push email is available to both the Enterprise and free personal account customers.

As far as I’m aware, we still have no word on whether Gmail will support some of the more advanced features of ActiveSync the way that Exchange (and now Zimbra 6.0) can. So far, Exchange competitor Zimbra can do things like initiate wipes to mobile devices, lock devices when an incorrect password is entered, and pause (and resume) syncing to the device.

Gmail has differentiated itself from the market, however, as being the only free email provider (that I’ve heard of) that offers push mail, contacts, and calendars via ActiveSync (or other similar way to your choice of device). Others (like Hotmail) aren’t even offering IMAP access to external mail clients to free customers.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 22nd, 2009

Gmail Gets Drag-and-Drop

gmail-drag-n-drop I love the Gmail interface, but one of the things that I miss going from my Zimbra accounts at work to Gmail is that there’s no drag-and-drop. Well, that all changed when I logged into my account today. I don’t know that I would call drag-and-drop in a web email client a killer feature, necessarily, but as Google works to make web applications feel more like desktop applications, features like drag-and-drop will become more and more important. I was actually surprised that it took this long for them to bring this feature to Gmail. In a world where the push is to mix cloud and desktop applications, having these interfaces the same is going to be crucial.

The drag-and-drop interface does leave a bit to be desired as you actually have to grab a handle to the left of the message rather than just grabbing the message itself, but it’s something. I would expect that you would be able to just click and hold on either the subject or the sender within the interface to grab the message as this is the behavior in most desktop clients, but we will see.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jul 2nd, 2009