Technologizer

Given Facebook’s immense popularity, it comes as no surprise that it is the top place to share information, according to Mashable and sharing widget maker AddToAny. Facebook accounts for 24% of the sharing of links to articles, videos and other content, far outpacing second-place e-mail at 11%. E-mail’s hold on the second slot is in jeopardy though, as Twitter quickly rises through the ranks. The microblogging site accounts for 10.8% of information shared, AddToAny says.

E-mail’s demise as a sharing medium is not a surprise either: Its use among netizens stands at 65.1 percent, while “community sites” reach 66.8 percent. That data seems a bit odd, given that to do anything online, you need an e-mail address. Try signing up for Facebook without one. My guess is that figure refers toactive e-mail users.

At last week’s New Hampshire Social Media Breakfast, John Herman, a teacher at Epping (New Hampshire) High School, said his students barely use e-mail, mainly as a way to sign up for other services before forgetting their passwords and never checking e-mail again. Herman’s story is anecdotal, but does show e-mail’s decline as a central hub for information sharing.

Good or bad, e-mail is not going away. Corporations are not going to share vital company data via Facebook or other public service. But, social networks are perfect for sharing non-critical information with group of people and then aggregating responses from the recipients. Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social networks could be the antidote for the dreaded “reply-all” disease. Rather than in-boxes cluttered with “Me too” and “That’s great!” replies from a litany of people you may not know, social networks are serving as the catchall for everyone’s need to chime in and giving hope to those that desire to “zero” their inboxes.

Gmail’s Labels, which started out as a contrarian alternative to the folders used by every other e-mail app on the planet, are getting more and more folder-like.  Google is moving the list of Labels to sit right below your inbox (you know, where folders generally reside) and now lets you drag e-mails to a Label to organize messages (you know, the way you can with folders). You can also drag Labels onto messages, and can hide Labels.

Unlike many new Gmail features, these aren’t debuting as Gmail Labs experiments–Google is rolling them out to everybody right away. (They haven’t shown up in my Gmail accounts yet, though.)

With these changes in place, I’d say that Labels effectively are folders. Except that one e-mail can be organized with multiple Labels at a time.

Now, if Google would only let me undo Conversation threads and see my inbox in an old-fashioned unthreaded view–or at least put the newest message at the top of a conversation–it would be pretty much perfect.

I’m at a Google Apps press event at San Francisco’s Clift hotel, where Google execs are talking up Google Apps as a Microsoft Office alternative for big companies. They’re bragging about their productivity apps (one rep just said that Gmail is the world’s best e-mail app, period) and touting large companies that have deployed Apps to thousands of users. But the morning’s big news involves something Google is doing to help companies keep on using part of Office–namely Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. It’s a piece of software that lets companies stop using Microsoft’s Exchange Server, but keep on allowing users to run Outlook. As the name suggests, it does so by letting Outlook sync with Google Apps. (It runs on Windows and is now included with the for-pay Premier and educational versions of Google Apps.)

Why would anyone want to keep using Outlook if Gmail is so great? Representatives from big Google Apps customers such as Genentech are here at the event, and they’re saying that some users within their organizations are simply comfortable with Outlook and have no desire to give it up. Apps Sync lets them continue to wrangle e-mail and calendaring in Outlook, and silently syncs messages, folders, appointments, and other data to and from the cloud, so it’s available within both Outlook and Google Apps services such as Gmail and Google Calendar. Companies also get access to all the other features and services that Apps makes possible, such as push Gmail for BlackBerry phones.

Google’s move here is an interesting reflection of the real world, which is one in which Microsoft Office is an undeniable fact of life. I like Google Apps–hey, I’m a customer myself–but think Google has a major challenge ahead of it if it’s trying to lure a meaningful percentage of the world’s companies away from Office. (The company won’t disclose how many paying users Apps has.) Living with Office rather than trying to utterly replace it makes a lot of sense.

Google rolled out new functionality within Gmail Wednesday that would help ease the pain of switching e-mail providers. The backend of the service is provided by TrueSwitch, and works with a host of providers including AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, Verizon, and Yahoo (a full list is provided here).

The service will automatically import your mail from your previous account along with your contacts. In addition, it will allow you to import mail from your old account for a period of 30 days, and would add a label to these messages if the user so desires.

All newly-created Gmail accounts now have the functionality. Google said it is also busy rolling it out to existing accountholders, who might also be interested in using the import service.

While I’ve been using Gmail for quite awhile and have no need for functionality like this, I can see how this would be helpful to those wanting to take the plunge. The first few days with a new email account can be painful as one switches everything over.

This makes that process a whole lot simpler. Can’t argue with that, or the fact that its free.

I’ve officially given up trying to keep pace with each and every feature Google adds to Gmail, but this one looks neat: There’s a new Gmail Labs option that enables in e-mail viewing of Flickr and Picasa photos, YouTube videos, and Yelp reviews. Gmail notices links to this content, and simply embeds it in your message so you don’t need to click away to see what a friend has sent you.

Google says it’s interested in talking to other companies with services that could be embedded into Gmail–and it would be pretty neat if the idea was extended to just about any sort of content that anyone ever links to in an e-mail…

When I hit the sack early this a.m., Gmail was working fine for me. I was one of the lucky ones, apparently: During the wee hours in the U.S., many users of Google’s free e-mail service encountered an outage that lasted for two and a half hours, according to the Official Google Blog. (Why Google acknowledged the glitch on that blog and not at the Official Gmail Blog, I can’t say.)

Gmail outages are nothing extraordinary: I wrote about one major one last August, and a hiccup a couple of weeks ago. And it’s pretty darn common in my experience for Gmail to fail to load–I’m used to it, and just try again until it works. But is the service any flakier than your average Web site? I dunno. As one of the most-used, most-essential services on the Internet, Gmail is under the biggest of microscopes: When it misbehaves, millions of people take notice, and a major crimp is put in their work. Even if it’s actually more reliable than the average service–which it might be.

Google has apologized and says it isn’t yet sure what happened: I’d love to see the company follow up with a post discussing the outage, its cause, and the company’s response. I’m curious, for instance, whether there’s a single explanation for the multiple problems that the service has had in the past few months.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling Pollyannish about this and other major Internet outages: Somebody up there is reminding us that when you give up software for Web-based services, you run the risk of losing access to your data. Even when that data is in the hands of the single company that knows more than any other about delivering reliable services to millions of folks all at one time….

I may be more excited about this than I am about offline Gmail access: Google has made a minor change to Gmail’s user interface that makes it–for some of us, anyhow–a far more appealing service.

Here’s the new Gmail menu bar:

What’s new are the “Move to” and “Labels” items. The latter simply moves the ability to apply a Label to an e-mail into its own menu, which makes it easier to get at the command. (Until now, you’ve had to burrow to the bottom of “More actions” to get at Labels.)

But “Move to” is the addition I’m so enthusiastic about: It lets you apply a Label and move an e-mail out of your inbox into Google’s archive with one click. Essentially, it duplicates the functionality that every other e-mail client on earth provides by allowing you to plunk an e-mail into a folder, thereby filing it away by subject matter and getting it out of your way. Kinda amazing that Google didn’t let you do it until now. (You’ve had to apply the Label and move the e-mail to the archive in two distinct steps–in theory not a biggie, but extra work is extra work. I’ve tended to ignore the problem, which means my inbox is bursting at the seams.)

Google has also introduced keyboard shortcuts and auto-complete functionality that let you label and move messages without touching your mouse; I’m not that much of a shortcut guy, so I’m less jazzed up about these. But some people will be very happy, I bet.

Unlike Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, I don’t think Gmail has reached perfection. And it won’t until it either improves the threaded-conversation interface or makes it optional. But between features that Google launches as Gmail Labs options (such as offline access) and ones it just rolls out for everybody (like the new Label interface), the company is improving Gmail at a dizzying rate…

Want me to ignore your e-mail? Can do. Just leave the subject line blank, stick your entire message into one, long, 300-word sentence, or use cutesy, curlicued fonts I can’t decipher. Oh, yeah, make sure you use a lavender background and neon green type.

Get ready, I have dozens of ways for you to make sure your e-mail is read.

I’m providing these tips as a public service. Ah, heck, that’s not true. The topic’s entirely for me. I’m persnickety about e-mail because I go nuts trying to plow through the 50 or so e-mails I get each day from TechBite subscribers. Too many are loaded with things that make my head hurt and my eyes water.

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The Official Gmail Blog bears good news this afternoon: Gmail’s “Labs” experimental-feature proving ground is adding offline access, letting you read and send e-mail even when you don’t have a live Internet connection. Once you turn it on, you can choose between an online mode, an offline mode, and a “flaky connection” one that behaves as if you were online but synchronizes mail in the background as possible.

The blog post goes to pains not to raise folks’ expectations too high: “Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature, so don’t be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven’t been completely ironed out yet.” And truth to tell, Gmail already plays nicely with e-mail clients that support POP and IMAP, so it’s already easy enough to use Gmail even when you can’t get to Gmail. But I’m still looking forward to trying out the new feature (which hasn’t been enabled in my Gmail account yet, although Google says it should show up shortly).

Offline Gmail uses Gears, the Google technology for offline browser access that Google Docs also takes advantage of. Docs uses Gears to provide a pretty skimpy subset of the online version’s capabilities–you can only edit word-processing documents, and lose a lot of features–but Google’s blog post says “Our goal is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience whether you’re using the data cached on your computer or talking directly to the server.” (One question which the Google blog post doesn’t appear to answer: Can I download every kilobyte of the gigabytes of e-mail that sit in my Gmail account to my hard drive, so there’s truly no distinction between Gmail’s online and offline flavors?)

Gears is an exciting piece of technology, but it seems safe to say that it doesn’t make building offline apps into a cakewalk: It was introduced back in May, 2007 and there are still only a handful of services (from Google or anyone else) that take advantage of it. At first, I assumed the launch of Gears meant offline Gmail was imminent; then I forgot it might even be a possibility. And now I’m pleased to see that it’s been in the works all along.

At the pace that major Web services are figuring out how to go offline, I think it’s possible that Internet access will get close to pervasive before offline access can be assumed. Once you can get on the Net from an airplane or the boonies, you might only care about offline access for those rare moments when your connection (or Gmail itself) has temporarily conked out. Even then, it would still be handy…

Rumors are swirling about social networking giant MySpace’s next possible move: a free e-mail service for its users. TechCrunch reported Thursday that sources told it the company has such a service in development, and at its launch it would already be the third largest e-mail provider without having to lift a finger.

Essentially, your MySpace ID would become your email@myspace.com. It’s not far-fetched to expect MySpace to integrate the e-mail functionality right in to the current messaging product, although I’d venture to guess they’d have to rejigger it a bit to make it work for non MySpace messages a bit better.

Is this smart for the social networking giant? You bet your bottom it is. MySpace is already trying hard to keep users on its pages longer, and nothing would do that more than e-mail. People check their e-mail several times a day — some several times an hour – and each time there is the opportunity to sell another ad impression.

MySpace is neither confirming nor denying the reports.

For a long time, Zoho has been the most ambitious provider of Web apps around when it came to the sheer variety of services it offered–from a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool to stuff for invoicing, HR functions, and project management. Bu there’s one app that’s so obvious that I somehow hadn’t noticed that the company didn’t offer it–and that was e-mail.

As of today, it does. Zoho Mail is live, and while the world wasn’t in desparate need of another browser-based e-mail service, it does have a few notable features. And in particular, it seems to be designed to be a Gmail alternative that’s in some ways more flexible:

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