The ability to place free calls to (and receive calls from) landlines via Google Voice from within Gmail is one of Google’s least flashy but most useful offerings. (The quality is spectacular–I never bother with a headphone, and nobody’s ever asked me “Hey, am I on speaker?”). And now Google says this service will remain free through the end of next year.

I do have a request, though–one I suspect Google will eventually address: I’d like to be able to place and make calls from within Google Voice itself, not just Gmail.

I have two Gmail accounts: a personal one and a Google Apps one (at Technologizer.com) which I use for work. The fact that I can’t be logged into both at one time in the same browser is a hassle. I’d hoped today’s introduction of a Gmail feature that lets you grant access to another user (including yourself, at another Gmail account) would fix this. But it turns out you can only let in e-mail accounts at the same domain, so the new feature doesn’t help me. (When I’m on a Mac, I use a program called Mailplane to hop back and forth between the two accounts with one click.)

Google has tweaked Gmail’s interesting, ambitious, and occasionally aggravating Priority Inbox feature. One feature sounds essential: It now explains why it thinks a particular message is important.

Google Apps–the suite of Web-based productivity tools that’s useful for everybody from individual consumers to big businesses–is among Google has come up with to date. But if you have a Google Apps account, there’s been far more stuff that wasn’t available than was: everything from major services such as Picasa and Google Voice to potentially useful obscurities such as Google Base. That’s because logging into a Google Apps account only provided access to Gmail, the Google Docs office editors, Google Sites, and a few other services.

Starting today, that’s changed: Sign up for Google Apps, and you can use your account to access more than sixty Google services. Why did it take so long? The company says it wanted to make sure that its infrastructure was ready to handle it. And it wasn’t always sure that companies would want a consumery service such as the Picasa’s photo albums to be part of a business-oriented offering like Google Apps. But it says that many customers have asked for Picasa, Blogger, and other services that haven’t been part of Apps. And some of the new arrivals, such as Google Analytics, are very businessy.

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Hey, I can’t get into either of my Gmail accounts. Looks like I have plenty of company.

Social networks threw the order of the inbox into disarray. Now, a start-up is seeking to encapsulate every interaction–regardless of where it occurs–into a unified search engine.

A private beta of Introspectr launched last Wednesday following its demo at NYC Tech Meetup that Tuesday night. I was there, and liked what I saw.

Introspectr indexes your Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. It also pulls in content from external URLs such as Bit.ly links embedded in Tweets.

Co-founder Simon Murtha-Smith demonstrated finding a lost apple crisp recipe. The recipe was not named; it was simply referred to as “AC” in a message, followed by a URL. Introspectr still managed to locate the recipe.

The idea is not exactly new, but something like Introspectr could become a necessity for those of us who have an active social life. Gmail solved the e-mail search problem, but e-mail only captures a fragment of today’s conversations.

Google’s Buzz was an attempt to pull social networking into Gmail, but from my perspective it was an oddball addition that didn’t fit. Introspectr is what Google’s inbox should behave like today. It’s simple, and it works.

I suspect that ZDnet’s Christopher Dawson is right: Google decided to let users disable Gmail conversation view in part to make its e-mail service more appealing to great big companies with lots of employees who aren’t used to threaded discussions.

Like me, my friend and former colleague Ed Albro has blogged about Gmail’s new option for shutting off Conversation View. Unlike me, he comes down on the side of conversations. Decisively so. You might even say he’s strident on the topic:

From what I can tell from reading through the complaints on the Gmail forum, people don’t like conversation view because they like to keep their inbox tidy and the threaded approach doesn’t let them kill off individual emails in a conversation. In other words, they want to keep their boss’s original email about the monthly budget, but not Joe’s harangue about people using too many pencils.

[snip]

Another common argument from anti-Conversation View crowd is that all those messages they can’t kill are making their inbox too bulky. Come on people: A basic Gmail account now provides 7.5 GB of storage. Unless your threaded conversations include lots of people attaching high-def video files, those individual messages you can’t kill aren’t making a dent in your overall storage.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have the option to turn off Conversation View – I’m just saying you shouldn’t exercise it.

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It’s been one of Gmail’s defining features since day one. Many people swear by it, and competitors have copied it. But for some of us, it creates more problems than it solves–and now, at long last, we can turn it off.

I speak of Conversation View, which clusters together all the e-mails in a thread, so they occupy only one line in your inbox and you can see the entirety of a discussion in one place. Google is confirming a rumor from June by announcing today that it’s possible to disable conversations, so that messages are displayed discretely in the way that was the norm in the pre-Gmail era. (It sounds like it may take a few days until the option shows up for everybody, and individuals in companies that use the Google Apps version of Gmail will only see the option if their administrators choose to allow the use of pre-release features.)

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I’m still deciding how I feel about Gmail’s Priority Inbox. But it’s good to see some of its functionality migrate to Google’s Gmail app for Android. (Now Google just needs to deal with the absurd fact that Android has one e-mail app for Gmail and another for everything else–each of which has only some of the features you want.)

Is Gmail an e-mail service or a comprehensive receptacle for just about every Web-based service you’ll ever need? This guest post at TechCrunch argues that it should stay focused on getting e-mail right.

Google is making one of larger changes to Gmail it’s ever instituted. It’s an clutter-taming feature called Priority Inbox, and the company is apparently pretty sure people will love it: Rather than rolling it out as a Labs experiment, Google is turning on the feature for everyone right away. The company prebriefed me last week and has let me try it out for the past few days.

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I’ve been using Gmail’s new free voice calling feature over the past couple of days. For a while, I thought that the Google Buzz blowup proved it was a bad idea to introduce non-e-mail features into Gmail, period. Now I now that if it’s the right feature done the right way, it can make perfect sense.

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What’s Google’s new Google-Voice-inside-Gmail feature about? It depends on who you ask.

Here’s Ryan Singel of Wired:

And here’s Peter Nowak, author of a book and a blog called Sex, Bombs & Burgers:

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I try to restrain myself from calling any new tech product or service a killer. But Google just announced that it’s integrating Google Voice into Gmail, turning its e-mail service into a fully Web-based Voice-over-IP system that lets you talk to people with landlines and cell phones all over the world. And…well, it looks like it could be an awfully compelling Skype alternative. Especially since calls to cell phones and landlines in the U.S. and Canada that you’d pay for with Skype are free.

The integration adds a cool new feature to Gmail, but as a long-time Google Voice addict, I’m even more excited about what it does for that service. Now those of us with Google Voice numbers can use it in a new way, and without burning through mobile phone minutes.

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Small but useful new Gmail labs feature: the ability to search both Gmail and Google Docs with one click.