Gmail’s Conversation View Can Be Disabled
Gmail added an option that allows users to turn off threading. Not everyone likes grouping messages into conversations, but this is one of the few core features that made Gmail stand out.
In most email clients threading is just an optional feature that can be easily disabled. Gmail’s web interface has been inspired by Google Groups, so it’s obvious that threading was an important feature.
Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer that developed Gmail, says that Google tries to increase the adoption of Google Apps by making Gmail more enterprise-friendly.
It’s my opinion that when designing products, especially new products, it’s better to have some people love it than have everyone tolerate it. This generally means aiming for simplicity and philosophical consistency. If you’re aiming for “everyone tolerates it”, then the approach switches more towards creating a “giant pile of features”. I suspect that this change is driven by their desire for greater enterprise adoption (Google apps), where the “more features and checkboxes” approach very often wins out, even if it’s ultimately a worse product.
Google says that the conversation view is not for everyone. “Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years.”
Conversation view can be disabled from the settings page by checking “conversation view off” in the General tab. This option may not be available right away, but Google promises that it “will be rolling out over the next few days”. Google Apps users will only see this option if the administrator has enabled “pre-release features“.
Why would you disable Gmail’s conversation view?
WordPress: New stats plugin
You may have noticed a change to your stat charts a couple of weeks ago. We ditched Flash in place of a more robust charting library called Flot. If you didn’t notice, go check it out because you can view all of the new charts with modern browsers including mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad. Sooo sexy! Today we updated the charts to use bars instead of points and lines. We’ve also made the stats page super sexy.
Each module can be opened and closed, moved, or hidden completely. If you don’t want to see a module, minimize it with one click or use the Screen Options to keep it out of sight. Customize everything and view stats the way you want to.
As you hover over each bar in the chart it changes color and displays a tooltip, giving you more information about the data. If the chart is showing data by day, Saturdays and Sundays have a light gray background to make it easier to see weekly patterns. Under the chart you’ll notice a new area, called “fortune cookies,” where we’ll highlight key stats.
During the redesign we went with bar charts because the end of one day and the beginning of another shouldn’t be connected. Each day starts at zero and we think bar charts work much better for this type of data. We hope you’ll agree once you get used to the change.
In this first phase of the stats redesign we’ve focused on the main page. This will allow us to collect feedback from you so we can tweak everything as we go. We’ve only mentioned a few of the highlights here, so take your stats for a drive around town to get used to the feel. Let us know what you like and what you might change. As we gather feedback we’ll apply a bit of sexy to the other stat pages.
Sites using our Stats plugin on a self-hosted blog will see an update after we iterate on the new design.
Google Docs Adds a Revision History Sidebar
When Google released the new version of Google Docs, one of the missing features was comparing revisions. The latest update to Google Docs brings this feature back, but only for consecutive revisions.
Google Docs adds a sidebar that lists the most recent revisions and lets you preview them. “Click on a time stamp in the right column to see what changes were made at a given time or use the arrow keys to quickly scan through many revisions. Changes are color-coded based on each collaborator, making it easy to tell what has been added or deleted,” explains Google.
Google groups the changes from a short period of time into a single revision, but you can click on “Show more detailed revisions” to see all the changes.
You can also use the up/down keys to scan through revisions and press Escape to go back to the editor.
Google Suggest Filtering
Google Suggest was supposed to help users type a query by providing useful suggestions. Unfortunately, some of the suggestions are offensive and Google had to filter the searches related to pornography, violence, and hate speech.
Google’s over-protective algorithms now filter all the suggestions that include “is evil”, “I hate”, “[ethnic group] are” (for example, “chinese are”). Google Suggest also filters “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the name of a popular Nirvana song.
“Queries in autocomplete are algorithmically determined based on a number of objective factors (including search term popularity) without manual intervention,” explains Google. Google Suggest’s filtering flaws are more obvious, now that Google Instant previews the results without having to press Enter. If you type [google is e], Google no longer previews the results and suggests to “press Enter to search”.
Google Blacklist (not safe work and potentially offensive) lists some of the rules used by Google to censor the list of suggestions. “Like everything these days, great care must be taken to ensure that as few people as possible are offended by anything. Google Instant is no exception. Somewhere within Google there exists a master list of “bad words” and evil concepts that Google Instant is programmed to not act upon, lest someone see something offensive in the instant results… even if that’s exactly what they typed into the search bar.”
{ via waxy.org }
Google Translate’s Conversation Mode
Google has recently demoed a new feature that will make Google Translate a lot more useful: conversation mode. Instead of typing the text you want to translate, you can just speak it and Google will convert speech into text, translate the text and use text-to-speech to output the result. You can already do that if you install the Google Translate app from the Android Market. Conversation mode lets you quickly switch between two languages, so that two people can have a conversation even if they speak different languages.
“Google showed off a new application that translates conversations on Android mobiles at a recent conference in Germany. Google employees held a conversation over two Android mobiles with one person speaking German and the other English. The application worked its magic after each persons statement and then referred the translated message back to the other person,” reported Simon Thomas.
Unfortunately, the results aren’t always great. Google Translate’s conversation mode will be released in a few months.
{ spotted by François Beaufort }
Google Apps:Upgrade with Tata Communications for local pricing, billing and support in INDIA
Google and Tata Communications are collaborating to offer a portfolio of business tools powered by Google Apps for enterprises in India. Together, Google is bringing value-added applications to Indian businesses while offering localised pricing, billing and support.
Highlights of the Tata Communications solution powered by Google Apps include:
- Email – With 25GB of storage
- Calendar – With resource management
- Chat – Instant messaging with video/voice chat and file transfer
- Documents – Document creation and management
- Sites – Intranet/portal building and file hosting service
- Video for business – A company wide video hosting service
- Control panel – To manage the account and users
A domain, with any number of accounts, is also eligible for local phone and email support, and our 99.9% uptime service level agreement.
Google Me: a Social Upgrade, Not a New Service
Eric Schmidt said at the Google Zeitgeist conference that Google will add social features to the existing services, but it won’t launch a standalone product to compete with Facebook.
“We’re trying to take Google’s core products and add a social component. If you think about it, it’s obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better. Everybody has convinced themselves that there’s some huge project about to get announced next week. And I can assure you that’s not the case,” said Eric Schmidt, according to MSNBC.
Google’s CEO also said that “the best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information.”
Wall Street Journal speculates that YouTube is one of the services that will add more social features. For example, you’ll be able to see when a video is watched by many of your friends.
Ever since Google Profiles has been launched, back in 2007, Google added social features to services like Google Maps, Google Reader, iGoogle, but failed to create a compelling interface that integrates all these features. The most important attempt to integrate Google’s social services is Google Buzz and Google should focus on improving Buzz, create a standalone interface for people that don’t use Gmail, adding more privacy features, introducing reciprocal friendship and building a meaningful social graph.
Until Google users can answer the question: “who are my Google friends?”, Google will never be able to develop successful social services. Are they the Google Chat buddies, the contacts from the Friends group, the people you follow in Google Buzz? Google ignored for many years Gmail’s contact manager and automatically added entries to the address book when you replied to Gmail messages. The problem was only solved when Google launched a business version of Gmail and users wanted to sync their contacts. Now Google will have to solve the friendship issue.
Staging Server Now Defaults to YouTube API Version 2
YouTube Google Data API currently exists in two flavors: version 1 and
version 2. If you’re not explicitly requesting version 2 of the API,
then you’re using the default, version 1.
As we add new functionality to the API, it’s invariably added to version 2: features like partial responses/updates, extended access controls, captioning support, and YouTube Insight statistics are
only available to developers accessing the newer release. We’ve kept
version 1 running as-is for a while now, and will continue to do so for
months to come, but we’re taking the first step to transition
developers off of version 1 of the API by changing the default in our staging server environment to version 2.
We
expect to default the production environment to version 2 before the
end of the year, and we will post again when we have more definite
dates. In the meantime, if you are still using version 1 of the API,
please prepare for the change by taking one of the following steps:
- Modify a test version of your code to access stage.gdata.youtube.com URLs as described in this blog post. You’ll automatically default to version 2, and you can test and make changes to your code against the staging server.
- Start explicitly requesting version 2 using the v=2 URL parameter or GData-Version HTTP request header.
Most of the YouTube API client libraries provide methods for switching
between API versions, and they will take care of setting the
appropriate GData-Version header for you. You may need to modify your code to make it compatible with version 2. - If
you know that your code is incompatible with version 2 of the YouTube
API and you can’t fix things yet, start explicitly requesting version 1
of the API. Note that this is not a long-term solution, as all code
will eventually need to be migrated off of version 1.
Stay
tuned over the coming months for more announcements about the change to
the default in production, and the eventual decommission of version 1,
currently scheduled for October 2011.
Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team
Gmail Stats
Graph Your Inbox is a Google Chrome extension that shows interesting stats about your Gmail account. The extension lets you type one or more queries and plots the results on a graph.
“Our inboxes contain a tremendous amount of information. Nearly every substantive action we take online generates email, from buying goods to booking flights to social network activity. Despite this large amount of data, extracting and graphing this information can be extremely difficult,” says Bill Zeller, who developed the extension.
You can use Gmail’s advanced search operators to refine your query. For example, the from: operator lets you restrict the results to one or more senders, the subject: operator restricts the results to the messages that have your keywords in the subject line, the label: operator finds the messages that have a certain label. You can search for label:chat to visualize your chats, label:buzz to visualize your Buzz messages or label:important for messages classified as important.
The nice thing about this extension is that you can click on one of the datapoints to view the corresponding Gmail conversations. Unfortunately, the extension doesn’t integrate with Gmail’s interface and it’s quite slow, since it processes a lot of messages. It’s not a good idea to try queries that return thousands of results, since Google might disable your account for abnormal usage.
Another important thing: according to the author, “the extension does not save any personal information and does not send any personal information to any server. It does not request or record your email password. This extension does not modify the Gmail website or your email in any way.” After checking the source code, I can confirm that the extension only sends requests to Gmail and iGoogle, which is used for obtaining search results using the Gmail gadget.
{ via Information Aesthetics }
A Google Health update
Google Health launched a bit over two years ago, and since then we’ve been listening to our users, analyzing feedback and conducting research. We’ve learned a lot from you! You’ve confirmed that having a central place online to store and share medical data with whomever you want is important and a step in the right direction. And we’ve added a number of features based on what you’ve asked for so far. But you’ve also told us that it’s not enough; that you’re also looking for tools that will help you act on all your health and wellness concerns. We’ve heard you ask for easier data tracking, more personalization and the ability to set and track progress toward your health goals. We’ve listened, and today we’re announcing a new design and new features for Google Health.
So what’s new? Well, we’ve developed an easier-to-use dashboard that brings together even more of your health and wellness information in one place and makes it easier for you to organize and act on that information. We’ve also heard from you that focusing on wellness, and wellness goals, is a big part of the solution, and that it’s important to record your daily experience and set goals.
So our new re-design better organizes your medical information, while creating a more welcoming place to set goals for yourself and check in daily on your progress. For example, you might want to set a goal around walking more each day or to lower your cholesterol over time. With our new design, you can easily monitor your path to success with a visual graph that shows your progress towards your personalized goal. You can even create custom trackers for other things that you want to monitor like daily sleep, exercise, pregnancy or even how many cups of coffee you drink a day.
We’ve also integrated with several new partners to make it easier for you to collect the data you need to track your progress, including Fitbit, maker of a wearable device that captures health and wellness data such as steps taken, calories burned and sleep quality; and CardioTrainer, one of the top mobile apps for tracking fitness activity and weight loss. In the two weeks since CardioTrainer’s integration went live, CardioTrainer developer WorkSmart Labs reports that users have already uploaded more than 150,000 workouts to Google Health, where they can more easily view, track and set goals around their workouts and monitor them along with other health and wellness information.
Besides tracking progress toward your health goals, our new design also gives you the ability to take notes or keep a journal on your progress for each health condition or medication you’re taking. The new design also delivers information that is more personalized to your particular set of medical conditions or specific medications. You can access improved content links for each medical condition, medication or lab result you have in your Google Health profile. And we’ve made the Google Health profile easier to read and customize, with the ability to hide past items or sections that are outdated or no longer relevant. All of this helps you keep your dashboard up-to-date with current, relevant information, while still letting you maintain a complete health history.
In addition to redesigning the product and forming new partnerships with device and mobile apps developers, we’ve continued to expand our more traditional integrations with hospitals and other healthcare data providers. Three recent highlights include Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Sharp HealthCare.
With this update, we’ve made Google Health an even more powerful tool for organizing all your health information online, and also for achieving your health and wellness goals. We think you’ll find that organized, measurable and engaging information helps make it easier to achieve better health and wellness.
Posted by Aaron Brown
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