OMG! Gmail Just Got Themes

I can’t believe how awesome this is:

UPDATE: THE POST IS BACK

For some reason, Google deleted the post. It read:

Posted by Annie Chen, Gmail engineer

Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven’t been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we’re launching today, there’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There’s even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers — it’s not exactly practical, but it’s great for testing out your geek cred. We’ve also done a minor facelift to Gmail’s default look to make it crisper and cleaner — you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

As you can see from these photos taken around our office in Zurich, Switzerland, themes have made their way into more than our inboxes — that’s a character from the ninja theme made out of pixel blocks, customized laptop decals, and a giant Zoozimps character on a beam next to my desk:

To customize your inbox, go to the Themes tab under Settings. We’ll be rolling out themes to everyone over the next couple of days, so if you don’t see them yet, check back soon. As for which theme to choose, don’t ask us. We’re neutral

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I’ve been taking a closer look at my Google Reader feeds lately, and, as always, I’m trying to stem the tide so the signal can rise above the noise. I’ve done a little spring cleaning, which for me doesn’t mean unsubscribing – I’m always hesitant to do that – but instead, I’ve been re-categorizing.

Is that feed really a “Can’t Miss” read? Shouldn’t that blogger be on my B-List? Doesn’t this feed belong in my “Ideas” folder?

One of the things that made the most difference was the addition of a brand-new folder I’m calling “noisy tech news.” This is now the home to any feed that drives me batty with zillions of posts per day yet doesn’t really provide that much signal. Why keep these feeds you may wonder? Well, for one thing, it’s great to have them in there for searches.

I’ve also put the aggregate feeds in here for sites like CNET and other producers of mass amounts of content. It’s not to say that CNET doesn’t have signal, but when you subscribe to a bunch of their feeds, you’re likely to see duplicate items and a lot of stuff that’s not relevant to you. However, other CNET favs, like Caroline McCarthy’s The Social for example, went elsewhere so I don’t miss them.

Although information devourer  Louis Gray might cringe at the thought, I can now happily mark this folder as read after a quick scan of headlines without feeling like I’ve missed too much.

Over-Sharers, I’m Looking At You

Now that I’ve gotten my subscriptions under control (ahem, for now), I’m turning my eye to the one area that’s still a bit out of control: you guys. You know know who you are. I mean, I thought I was bad (am I?) with my sharing of maybe 20-30 items per day in Google Reader, but some of you are sharing double that, triple even! Seriously, hundreds of shares. Daily! And all at once! What’s the deal? Now, I know I could just hide those over-sharers using the Google Reader “Hide” button, but the thing is, some of that stuff is actually very good. I don’t want to miss it. But then again, some of it…well, I could do without.

I’m torn. 

Of course what’s share-worthy is an entirely subjective notion, which is one thing that makes the Friends feature so great. It lets interesting stories bubble up and catch my attention, even though I may not subscribe to (or want to subscribe to) the originating blogs.

But what can be done about the uber-sharing? Should I just suck it up and hit j, j, j, j (the keyboard shortcut for flying through feeds) all day long? Should I start scanning headlines here too? Should I gasp hide the noisiest folks from sight?

Does anyone else have this problem? Suggestions welcome. 

Just for fun, I emailed T-Mobile several days ago and told them I had heard they will soon be offering a phone called the HTC Dream which ran Google software. I mentioned that I read about it on the internet and that I wanted to check it out before I decided on the iPhone. I asked when I could expect to see it in stores.

Their response? No HTC Dream! Not even a mention of it coming soon. If I wasn’t a tech geek who already knew better, this sort of communication (see below) would have sent me right to the AT&T store.

Note that this email arrived yesterday – at 10 PM the day before the big Android announcement.

Dear Sarah Perez,

Hi Sarah my name is Steve; thank you for contacting T-Mobile and giving me the chance to help. I see you emailed online customer care regarding the HTC Dream Phone. I know how important it can be to get the latest phone at a great price so I would be delighted to research this for you.

First, Sarah I apologize for the delay in our reply. We are getting an usually high volume of emails and are working to answer them in a timely manner. We appreciate your patience and I hope this has not caused any inconvenience.

I do not show that we will be offering the HTC Dream Phone yet Sarah and we do not offer preorders for phones. We are always updating the list of phones and devices to meet the changing your needs so this may be offered in the future. Regrettably, we do not have access to information on new devices until they are made available to you. I suggest checking back with us at www.t-mobile.com since the list of available devices is updated on an ongoing basis.

Sarah, if you would like to take advantage of one of our offers please let us know and we will be happy to process your order for you. You can also upgrade online by:

1) Login to http://www.my.t-mobile.com.
2) Click "Phone & Accessories"
3) Under the "Handset Upgrade" section click "Upgrade your phone".

If you have more questions Sarah, please reply referencing case # (removed) You can call Customer Care toll free at 1-800-937-8997 or 611 then SEND from your phone and we will be happy to help you. Thank you Sarah, for being a valued T-Mobile customer since September of 2002.

Yeah, 2002. I guess they figure I’m not going anywhere. Ha! I’m counting the days until my contract expires.

As you may know, I recently decided I couldn’t wait any longer for my iPhone (I’m waiting until my T-Mobile contract expires), so I bought an iPod Touch instead. For the most part, this has turned out rather well. I can now try a lot of the iPhone apps that are available today with the exception of those that are location-based and require the iPhone’s GPS. Since most places I go have Wi-Fi, the lack of “internet everywhere” hasn’t been a huge drawback except for on a few occasions like our recent road trip to Palm Beach, where I was stuck playing games and surfing the horrid little browser on my Blackberry Pearl.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that an offline RSS reader would be an ideal app to add to my iPod Touch since reading through feeds is one of my primary activities…in life, it seems. (That has to change by the way, I want my life back). What would be even better than an offline RSS reader, I decided, would be an offline RSS reader that synced with my Google Reader account. I didn’t imagine this concoction even existed, but I searched through the app store anyway.

And then, there it was! An RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. It’s called Byline and it’s available in the app store for $9.99. Now normally, I don’t purchase paid applications, but this one sounded too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it was.

After setting up my account, the app began archiving 58 items. 58?, I wondered…why only 58 when I have over 900 feeds in my Google Reader? I can blow through 50 items in a matter of minutes! Then it occurred to me to delve into the settings. Surely, there’s a setting that says “take my whole dang reader offline,” right? Well, no. You can specify how many “new” items should display: 25 (the default), 50, 75, 100, or 200. I changed that to 200.  There’s also a setting under “offline browsing” to display “new items,” which is strangely set to “off” by default. I turned that on, too.

Now the app is archiving 376 items. (Where is it getting these numbers?) Although that’s better, it’s still not my entire set of feeds. And since there’s no way to customize which folders/tags are archived, who knows what I’ll get. I can’t browse by tags either, whether online or off.

While I am somewhat grateful that an offline Google Reader even exists, my affection for what could have been an amazing application is tempered by the fact that, quite frankly, it’s doing a half-a**ed job. I realize that not everyone would want to wait while 1000+ items are archived, but if I’m planning ahead for an extended period when I’m going to be away from Wi-Fi (road trip, airline flight, etc.), I see no reason why I can’t specify that in the settings and then wait patiently.

I guess I’m still in search of a decent offline Google Reader, then. Any other suggestions?

You certainly have to hand it to the spammers – they are nothing if not resourceful. I have no idea how they’re doing this, but lately I’ve been getting tons (and I mean tons) of spam in my Gmail inbox. Not my Spam folder but my actual inbox. Although my email address is publicly available, it wasn’t until recently that I’ve actually seen spam in my inbox – usually, the Gmail spam filter kept most of it out of sight. Well, no more, it seems.

The latest tactic appears to be using Google’s own Groups to bypass the spam filter. I guess Google doesn’t like to block links to their own sites.

The emails will resemble the following:

The email address will (appear to) be from someone at Yahoo. And despite the fact that the subject line has the word “Viagra” in it – a clear indication to most spam filters about the nature of this email – the email doesn’t not get blocked.

Why’s that? I imagine it’s because the body of the email contains a link to groups.google.com – a site where the spammers are apparently taking up residence.

I clicked one of the links (I know, I don’t need a lecture about how dangerous that was); I just had to investigate. The page really does look like a real Google Groups page, albeit one with a splashy intro page. In fact, the URL in the address even reads http://groups.google.com/group/spammy_name_of_group_here:

So, is that how it’s going to be, huh? Google is letting the spammers come through because it’s driving pageviews to Google Groups? Not cool, Google, not cool.

Apparently, I missed this little update on the Feedly blog: “feedly + google search experiment.” It read:

One of the first pieces of feedback we received when we launched beta 1 was to extend feedly’s search capabilities. Paul was the first to raise this issue but many more requested a similar feature. We chewed on the idea for a few weeks, experimenting will multiple approaches. We will over the next two weeks push out some of the proof of concepts and listen to what people think.

The first proof of concept is integration with Google Search. Here is an example: when you go on Google and search for iphone 3G, you have the option to see the feedly search results for iphone 3G:

 

This approach tries to add a pinch of personalization and social filtering to the search experience.

I’ve been googling for awhile since that blog post about the update, so I don’t know how I didn’t see this in action until now, but it’s…well frankly, it’s incredible. Check it out:

Hmmm, I think I have to go blog this for RWW now. It’s just too good.

Over the weekend, Louis Gray posted on his blog “Roll Your Own Blog Leaderboard With Google Reader Trends.” After seeing his article, of course I had to look at My Google Reader trends, too. A couple of things immediately jumped out at me. One, I’m guilty of self-promotion and My Google Reader trends certainly reveal that. Two, some of my top shared items are from other people’s shared items. I’m a re-sharer!

Let’s take a look at whose items made my list. Here is the stuff I share:

1. Rob Diana’s Recommendations (wow, go Rob!)
2. Read/WriteWeb (guilty!)
3. Items shared by louisgray
4. Corvida Raven’s Recommendations 
5. (jeff)isageek’s recommendations
6. Franklin P’s recommendations
7. louisgray.com
8. Caleb Elston’s Recommendations
9. Shey Smith’s Recommendations
10. SheGeeks
11. Mashable! (I believe this is Steven’s doing)
12. WinExtra (see?)
13. Items shared by Robert Scoble (no list is complete without Scoble)
14. SitePoint Blogs (I miss Josh on RWW, but he’s still his awesome self here)
15. chrisbrogan.com’s recommendations
16. Silicon Alley Insider
17. Adam Ostrow’s Recommendations
18. MG Siegler’s Recommendations
19. Profy.Com (I told you to read this blog)
20. sarahintampa (guilty again!)
21. The Inquisitr » Tech
22. CenterNetworks (a one-man blogging machine!)
23. VentureBeat
24. TechCrunch
25. Alexander van Elsas’s Recommendations
26. LiveSide - Windows Live news and interviews
27. The Social Times
28. ParisLemon
29. Steve Spalding’s Recommendations
30. David Risley
31. AppScout
32. Lifehacker
33. I’m Not Actually a Geek
34. Regular Geek
35. Inside Facebook
36. Marshall Kirkpatrick
37. MediaPost | Online Media News
38. Download Squad
39. Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior
40. SEO and Tech Daily
41. CrackBerry.com blogs
42. Mark Evans
43. The Social Networker
44. ZDNet Blogs
45. Stay N’ Alive

The reason why some of these items say “Recommendations” and some say “Items Shared” is due to the Feedly Firefox plugin. If you haven’t already heard, the Feedly plugin taps into Google Reader and gives you access to anyone’s Shared Items, even if they don’t appear in your Google Friends list. This is extremely useful since the only way to be “Google Friends” with someone is to either email with them or chat with them. But with Feedly, you get immediate access to anyone’s shares, just by following them on Feedly.

For example, if you want to see my shares, follow me here: http://www.feedly.com/feedly#preview/user/15218633955327620808/state/com.google/broadcast

If you’re using Feedly and share tech/social media stuff, I would like to follow you too, so please leave your Feedly profile URL in the comments.

This is a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

What are the three hottest web 2.0 social services right now?  Judging by the latest buzz amongst early adopters, these services are Brightkite, FriendFeed and that perennial love/hate favorite, Twitter.  What’s interesting about each of these services is that Google is noticeably absent from the market. Or is it?

Brightkite is the latest in a string of “geo-social networks” that allows members to check in at real world places via SMS, notifying their Brightkite friends of their physical location - just perfect for those spur of the moment stalkings serendipitous meetings with your nearest and dearest. (You can read more about what Brightkite has to offer over at ReadWriteWeb.)

FriendFeed (for those living in the stone age or still pining for the days of Compuserve) is a ‘”social aggregator” start-up by a bunch of ex-Googlers that lets users aggregate the output of a large number of online services into a central point.  According to the FriendFeed FAQ, the goal of the service is to “make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information“.  While that sounds like a steaming pile of aspirational nothing to me, FriendFeed has been picked up enthusiastically by the early adopter crowd.  It can crawl websites for your publicly available information and it also supports a long list of sites with APIs such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Mixx and last.fm (here’s the full list ).  Part of the excitement - and controversy - around FriendFeed is that the service enables other FriendFeed users to leave comments on your items in FriendFeed itself, providing not just an aggregation of your content but an aggregation of comments on your content.

And as for Twitter… well, if you haven’t heard about Twitter by now you’re probably reading this page by accident anyway.

But What About Jaiku?

In October 2007 Google acquired Jaiku, the Finnish social network that was the brainchild of two ex-Nokia employees Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen . Jaiku first came to the attention of many when Leo Laporte announced on his blog in April 2007 he was moving over to Jaiku from Twitter due to confusion between Twitter and his TWiT podcast network.  The influx of new users was sufficient to actually crash the service (such is the power of the Leo effect).

Let’s check off what features Jaiku boasts:

1. A geo-aware mobile phone app that reads your location based on names reported by mobile phone towers

2. The ability to import information from a selection of website APIs as well as any RSS feed

3. 140 char SMS friendly micro-blog status updates

… not to mention a slick user interface and threaded comments.

However, following the acquisition by Google, the silence was deafening. The usually highly responsive dev team didn’t post nearly as often. The API went missing in action a number of times. The normally rock solid service often either crawled to a halt or regularly reported 503 gateway errors (a database problem).  The blog went quiet, although the developers raised their heads above the trenches in January of this year to proclaim “big things are coming” (‘We’ve joined Google. Now what?’).  In April it was announced that Jaiku was being ported to the Google App Engine, which goes someway to explaining the lack of development.  Unfortunately, the momentum was lost.  Users started to slip back to Twitter.  Developers just didn’t seem interested in taking advantage of the API so there no was no widespread developer ecosystem like the one that sprung up around Twitter.

Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.

Of course, Google does have some history doing the same thing before:  Dodgeball, anyone?

This has been a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

How excited was I when I heard that there was now a Google Reader Adobe AIR application that would let me browser through my feeds outside a browser? Pretty freaking excited! But then I thought "wait - why do I need this?" This doesn’t really help me solve a problem. With Twhirl, for example, I get easier access to all of Twitter’s features and it refreshes my tweets for me. Google Reader, though, isn’t really broken. (Well, except for NO SUBFOLDERS, which is literally killing me).

But, for the most part, Google Reader in the browser works just fine. ReadAir on the other hand, lacks a major feature: keyboard shortcuts. I don’t even think about it anymore, it’s just j, j, j, j, j, k, j all day long. I can’t imagine having to give them up just to use an AIR app.

That being said, it seems that adding keyboard shortcuts to the app is an upcoming feature, as is an offline mode, continuation, and alternate themes that don’t make it look like a Mac app (thank god). Maybe I’ll just have to check back later, then. (via DownloadSquad)

Today, Google announced a new site for developers which will help them build gadgets for the iGoogle, the customized Google homepage. In addition to info about the site, available here, the announcement also mentioned some of iGoogle’s new features, including left navigation, a maximized or "canvas view" option for gadgets, and social features for gadgets using the OpenSocial APIs.

I was very curious about the social features, which are described as including a friends list and displaying activities through a special updates gadget.

Reading through the FAQ, what this appears to mean is that iGoogle is going social. A special gadget called the "friends manager gadget" is being included in the developer tools, says the FAQ. Developers can share activities with other devs who have access to the Sandbox. However, the FAQ continues, stating "This is not the final network that will be used in iGoogle. Users will have full control over who their friends are and will be able to easily modify their list of friends. Stay tuned for details."

So, what is the "final network," then? Apparently, it will be a some sort of social network based around users’ iGoogle pages.

Another reference to this future network is hinted at in the FAQ, when reading a Q&A about iGoogle profiles. In an iGoogle profile, states the FAQ, you can modify your profile data (displayname and thumbnail) using the profile gadget. Again, the mysterious final network is referred to: "This is not the final profile or data that will be used in iGoogle. Stay tuned for details."

Reading on and making interpretations, I see there’s a gadget dialog box that will be for users to invite their friends to add a gadget, and gadgets with social features will need to receive permission from the user upon install.

More details about the new iGoogle Sandbox are displayed in this video: