inspiredworlds.com

A lot of people use the popular gmail client. It’s only been around for 4 years, and it is rapidly catching up to hotmail, Yahoo mail and AOL Mail. The techcrunch blog reports:

“According to Google launched Gmail only four years ago, and it is now the fourth most popular e-mail service on the Web after Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and Windows Live Hotmail. In 2008, it saw some serious growth in the U.S. Google doesn’t break out the number of Gmail users, but comScore estimates unique monthly visitors. According to the latest stats, the number of people visiting Gmail grew 43 percent last year to 29.6 million.”

That’s some serious growth. I’ve got 3 gmail accounts along with 2 other ones for my domain www.inspiredworlds.com. I switched to gmail because it was new at the time and the incredible storage space. But I’m not going to harp about Gmail’s growth.

Google Labs & Gmail Labs

I wanted to highlight this feature which I have known about for a while, but never used. It’s called Gmail Labs. Google has an experimental arm called “Google Labs” which has products that are available but they are not quite ready yet. As part of this, there is gmail labs which contains a host of innovative and experimental features. It’s not ready for public roll out, but you can try it out and leave feedback for them.

The premise is that a google engineer can come up with an idea during lunch time, and have it implemented within a couple of hours. That’s incredible. It doesn’t go through a lengthy process of review, analysis, testing – it just rolled out for experiementation for users. I believe that’s the best way to find out if something will be popular.

It allows google to get new products out there for testing by the public and to get a superior advantage in the market place by being the first to go to market. How many companies would do this?

You can try out gmail labs by clicking on “settings” in the right hand corner of your gmail account. Then you click on labs and you can try out a bunch of nifty features.

Features I’m experimenting with

I’ve currently trialing the following Gmail Lab features:

1. Switched the chat coumn to the right hand side.

2. When I right click on my mouse I get a quarter circle which allows me to navigate to the previous email or the next one.

3. Send & archive button: How often do you send an email and then go to the sent box and archive it. This is awesome. They should have this as a default in Microsoft Outlook. I would use this everytime to archive work emails to clients.

4. Default “reply all”: Normally all email clients are just “reply”, so it assumes you want to reply to everyone as a default.

The catch with Gmail lab features is that they are experimental and can be taken down. There is also a fail safe button to restore back to your normal settings. This is what I like about Google, the ability to come up with innovative products and also to push the boundaries of normal accepted practices.

I’m out like hotmail,

Matthew Ho.

www.inspiredworlds.com

I read about 5 – 6 different Google Blogs such as the Official Google Blog, Adwords Agency Blog, Adsense and the Gmail Blog. It’s necessary for me to keep up to date with what’s happening in the world of Google. The great thing about Google is that they have a lot of different departments blogging and keeping the dialogue open with the general community at large. They’ve got 100′s of blogs and I think it’s great. As soon as something new happens, these guys blog about it and it’s really setting the standard for other organisations.

One of the more interesting blogs I have come across is the Google Public Policy Blog. It’s probably not as well read as the other blogs but I would argue that its just as important. An indicator of how popular a blog is the feedburner counter (i.e. how many people subscribe). It’s only at 5,475 compared with 529,000 on the official Google Blog.

Its important to hear about Google’s views on public policy and government. As an organisation, it has really become monolothic and huge like almost overnight – its only really a decade old. Compare this with other other organisations of similar size which probably took decades to build  i.e. 30 – 100 years . It is a very influential organisation which interacts with millions of people on a daily basis through search, email, video, RSS, advertising, maps and so on.

Google is so dominant in the field of search it is without peer. Hence, when they tried to do a business deal with Yahoo to display ads, people were jumping up and down like mad. It has to deal with a lot of issues such as its monopolistic practices, anti-trust,  influence on the U.S government through lobbying on access to more bandwidth access for the community, net neutrality, green energy, etc..

The blog could be no more than a mouthpiece for Google’s lobbying efforts to Washington. But from what I have read, it has a lot of interesting information on its views and thought policies. I probably find this more interesting than most people as well, since I’m a qualified lawyer who now works in digital marketing.

On a related note, the interaction between law and the internet continues to evolve. One of the big issues at the moment are the legal issues around user generated content (UGC). I’m probably in a unique position because I’m one of the few people that subscribe and regularly read the Law Society and other legal publications and also marketing publications such as B&T. I can see that its attracting a lot of attention because the talk is heating up in these magazines and on the web. UGC is stuff that users of social media generate, e.g. facebook and youtube videos, flickr photos, etc… The legal issues are around ownership, copyright, defamation, privacy and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I’m out like a decade,

Matthew Ho.

Just drank too much coke.

Two things I’ve come across in the past 24 hrs:

- Confluence. I’ve spoken to two friends about creating a wiki, and I’ve been recommended Confluence made by Atlassian, a company specialising in collaboration software. It’s also got a sharepoint extender which could come in handy as my company uses it. Sharepoint seems more useful for document management as opposed to using it for wiki’s and blogs. Twiki is also available as free open source.

- Yahoo and Google merger deal: This has been going on for a while, looks like its closer to happening subject to anti trust and regulatory review.

I’m out like too much coke.