Google continues to land the big deals and innovate some of the most useful web apps. They just won a huge deal with Fox Interactive, becoming their preferred search provider for a number of Fox Interactive Media web properties - and that includes the behemoth MySpace.
While I don't always agree with Google and their policies (or politics for that matter) on a variety of issues, they really have created some very useful web applications, which I use frequently each day: Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Notebook.
Gmail
Gmail is a different approach to e-mail. For starters, Google essentially made the e-mail wars obsolute when they began offering 2 GB inboxes. Previously, MSN and Yahoo! charged users for premium inbox upgrade packages that weren't even half as large.But the main difference is through what Google calls "conversations", labels versus folders, and archiving over deleting.
Many folks don't get labels at first. The concept is actually pretty powerful because it's virtual as opposed to physical. An e-mail can have multiple labels like "to-do" and "project-x" versus simply existing in one folder.
The idea of archiving exists due to the size of the inbox. Instead of deleting an e-mail, simply archive it. If someone responds to that e-mail, it automatically gets moved from the archive back to the inbox.
That happens because e-mails are thought of as conversations instead of individual messages. All messages belonging to a single e-mail thread (same subject line) are shown in one window and one entry in your Gmail inbox and that helps keep the inbox a little more tidy.
Gmail also offers integrated chat and for those wishing they could use it to host the e-mail for their domain, hosted Gmail is in testing right now.
You can sign-up for Gmail by requesting an invitation code through your SMS enabled phone.
Next time: Google Calendar
I moved to Gmail almost 2 years ago and love it! No longer do I mess about cleaning up my emails as my mailbox is getting full!
Once I figured out the power of Labels, life was much easier!
I tell everyone I know about Gmail....
Posted by: Darlene | August 09, 2006 at 10:15 AM