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Saturday, February 27, 2010

Gmail Adds Search Auto complete, Navigation Shortcuts, Attachment Detector, and More

Gmail has officially integrated several features into Gmail, including features like Search autocomplete, Go to Label, Forgotten attachment detector, YouTube previews, and more.

» Search autocomplete automatically suggests search criteria based on common searches

» Go to Label adds excellent keyboard shortcuts for navigating your account

» Forgotten attachment detector alerts you before you send an attachment-less message that appears to promise one

» YouTube preview, like it sounds, lets you watch linked videos inside Gmail without opening a new window

» Custom label colors lets you set any color to any label; and the vacation dates feature lets you set the dates you'll be away so your auto-responders don't go out before or after your vacation begins or ends.

On the flip side, Gmail also retired five less popular features:

» Muzzle

» Fixed Width Font

» Email Addict

» Location in Signature

» Random Signature

Got another Labs feature you'd like to see graduate Labs and join the default Gmail feature set? Got one you'd like to see retired? Let's hear it in the comments.

Gmail Labs graduation and retirement [Official Gmail Blog]

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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Google Buzz!! Explained.

500x_google_buzz

Google announced a new service, Google Buzz, that automatically brings social networking into Gmail and the rest of the Google-sphere.

What's Buzz All About?

Buzz's five key features

  • Automatic friends lists (friends are added automatically who you have emailed on Gmail)
  • "Rich fast sharing" combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed, and it includes full-sized photo browsing
  • Public and private sharing (swap between family and friends)
  • Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like Facebook might, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all Buzz thread content)
  • "Recommended Buzz" puts friend-of-friend content into your stream, even if you're not acquainted. Recommendations learn over time with your feedback.

Buzz lets you share photos, video, links to web sites, and other content from all over the web with your closest contacts or with the public at large.It lives inside Gmail and integrates automatically with your most frequent Gmail contacts.

Apart from working directly inside Gmail, it can pull content from Twitter, from Flickr, and from various other popular social sites from across the web. Currently social services supported include:

Flickr || Twitter ||Picasa Web || YouTube || Blogger

When you publicly post something via Buzz, it automatically and instantaneously adds the post to your Google Profile page (which it creates for you if you haven't already created one). If you want to post privately, you can create and choose specific groups you want to share with—in what looks like an attempt to offer both the public aspects of Twitter and the private aspects of Facebook.

Google says they want Buzz to be the poster child for what it means to make a social tool that plays nice—one that has an open API, that respects the user's privacy decisions, and that doesn't lock up your data.

 

Interested? Let's hear what you think in the comments.

Google Buzz
Google Buzz in Gmail [Official Gmail Blog]
Introducing Google Buzz [Official Google Blog]