Filed under: email, google — Rocky Agrawal @ 1:12 pm
I’ve been using Gmail for about two years now. For my needs (read: search and wireless), it’s the best email product out there. Paul K. pointed at Better Gmail, a Firefox extension that makes it even better, solving a few nagging issues.
The extension is really a collection of a number of scripts that improve Gmail. There are 18 options total. My favorites:
Attachment icons. In the list view, it shows different icons for files that are attached to messages based on file type.
Filter assistant. Filters are the bastard stepchild of email. They’ve been around for decades, can make managing your mail much easier, yet they’re typically so complicated that even power users like me don’t bother creating them. Filter assistant makes it a piece of cake.
Label colors. Puts bright, bold chicklets in place of Gmail’s labels. I use this in conjunction with filters to identify different types of mail in my Inbox. I can easily scan the list and figure out what needs attention.
One click conversations. Adds in an icon next to the names of people who send you mail. Clicking on the icon brings up all recent conversations with that person.
Secure. This forces Gmail into secure mode. I highly recommend this if you frequently use Wifi. I recommend it even if you don’t.
These are must-have features that really should be part of Gmail itself.
Attachment reminder, date search and signature float are also nice add-ons, especially if you use your Gmail account for business purposes.
As I was taking off from SFO yesterday, I noticed the Virgin logo on three smaller airplanes. On closer inspection, the Airbuses had Virgin America’s livery. I was tempted to snap a picture, but resisted out of fear of being tackled by an air marshal.
The airline will be based in San Francisco with initial flights to JFK. Dulles is among the initial airports targeted for expansion.
Virgin Atlantic is one of my favorite airlines. Although U.S. law severely restricts the amount of influence Richard Branson can have on the company (one of DOT’s requirements was that Virgin America replace its CEO because of his ties to Branson), I hope that they can bring some of that high level of service to American aviation.
The planes seem well outfitted for people flying out of the San Francisco area. Among the features touted on Virgin’s Web site: 9″ screens, power ports, RJ-45 and USB jacks and touch-screen food ordering. And that’s in coach. Planes will have Internet access. The Web 2.0 set can use the plane’s seat-to-seat social network to interact with other passengers.
Virgin America even offers a blogger-friendly video of its Linux-based in-flight entertainment features. The video includes some technical details. Virgin says they will also be inviting Linux developers to create custom applications for the IFE.
(If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you may need to click through to the post to see the video.)
I won a Wii at the Web 2.0 Expo, courtesy of Ask’s ExperTease contest. Among the questions on my path to victory:
What Silicon Valley founder is rumored to have had cosmetic surgery? Answer here.
What Valley CEO threw a desk at a teacher in elementary school? Hint 1: Steve Ballmer is not a Valley CEO. Hint 2: Despite his world-famous temper, it’s not Larry Ellison. Answer here.
Which current Google VP dated a Google co-founder? Hint: Google’s co-founders are male and not gay. Answer here.
Of course, the “answers” are just what has been rumored; it’s gossip and not necessarily true. I wasn’t able to find any reference to the desk-throwing incident. The cosmetic surgery rumor was originally posted on Valleywag with no evidence and seems to have been removed from the site. (I’m pointing to a Google-cached copy.)
As I was researching this piece, I noticed that for all of the executives mentioned, except the Googlers, the top Google result is their Wikipedia entries. For the Googlers, the top result is their Google corporate profile pages. Microsoft, Oracle and other companies may want to work on their SEO.
Note to my boss: I don’t spend all day on Valleywag. Honest.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced at his Web 2.0 keynote that Google will be releasing a presentations application. (TechCrunch coverage here.)
There are lots of interesting aspects to this, especially for Microsoft fans/foes. But I found one thing especially interesting: As far back as I can remember, Google has never pre-announced a product.
Sure, there’s always a lot of speculation about what Google is going to do — calendar, chat, checkout all got a lot of buzz before their release. But Google didn’t make an announcement until the day they were available.
Am I wrong? Did I miss a pre-announcement?
Update: From the Google blog, presentations is coming as the result of an acquisition of Tonic.
Hotels have lost much of their ancillary revenue from me over the last few years. With unlimited roaming plans in the U.S. and the ease of buying prepaid cell service overseas, I only use hotel phones for wake up calls and room-to-room calls.
With EV-DO, they’re likely to lose revenue from their overpriced Internet access as well. I’ve been using Sprint’s Mobile Broadband as I’ve been traveling over the last two weeks. I get unlimited data access for $60 a month.
I’ve used it in a number of different environments:
In hotel rooms. With 8 hotel nights this month, I’ve saved $80 in hotel Internet charges, based on the hotels’ relatively reasonable rates of $10/night. (I’ve paid as much as $35 per night.) More importantly, I don’t have to worry about whether the hotel network works. Many hotel networks are run by off-site companies; if you have a problem you’ll get blank stares from the front desk.
On Acela. With EV-DO, I can work on the 2 hour 45 minute trip to New York. The coverage is spotty, dropping to the slower (dial up speed) 1XRTT standard at times. Although it roams seamlessly to 1XRTT, it doesn’t seem to transition back automatically. I also found myself roaming on Verizon’s 1XRTT network; I might have better luck with Verizon’s service. Verizon and Sprint have free roaming on their 1XRTT networks, but not on EV-DO.
At the Web 2.0 Expo conference. I’m writing this blog post in between sessions. While much of the audience here is having trouble using the conference Wifi network, I’m able to get online without any problems.
Mobile broadband is somewhat of a misnomer. It is slower than most broadband connections; it’s about as fast as the slowest home DSL connections. I would estimate the typical speed I’ve gotten is 250kbps down/100 kbps up on Sprint’s Revision A network. This is less than the “typical” speeds advertised and well under the peak speeds advertised. The image below is an actual speed test from my laptop.
You won’t be able to watch TV-quality video from your Slingbox, but the speed is good enough for most business applications.
For any business with people who travel frequently, this is a slam dunk. Even one extra hour of productivity pays for the one month cost of the service. Because data is unlimited, you could have a stack of five or six cards that people sign out when traveling. (Sprint offers a metered usage plan, but anyone who is reading this blog will want the unlimited plan.)
The one downside is that as with most products offered by wireless carriers, you have to sign up for two years. By then, you’ll be wanting a Wimax connection.
I was reminded this morning about how adamant California hotels are about wake up calls.
I woke up about 15 minutes before my scheduled 7:30 wake up call. I started getting ready for the day. Apparently they called twice while I was in the shower. As I got out of the shower, someone from hotel security had come into my room to make sure I was OK.
This has happened before, but only in California. Most hotels just give up after a couple of calls. Is there some sort of law that requires hotels to ensure their guests are awake when they wanted to be? (California does have some nutty laws.) Are hotels here worried about liability if I miss an important meeting?
Today’s Search Engine Strategies panel discussion on search and privacy was easily the least attended session I went to, with fewer than 24 people in the audience throughout the session.
If the turnout was any indication of people’s interest in privacy, privacy is a lost cause. Why the low turnout? My bet is that it’s because there isn’t a direct ROI. The privacy session was competing with sessions like how to game (read: spam) social networking sites to increase your profits.
That’s too bad. There was a lot of thoughtful discussion in the session on privacy issues. Among the speakers was David Gallagher, a New York Times editor who talked about the process the paper used to find Thelma Arnold. Lance Cottrell from Anonymizer discussed products individuals can use to protect their personal data.
As I’ve been traveling over the last few weeks, I’ve been amazed with the number of businesses that make it difficult for people to visit them in person.
I’m not talking about online retailers who don’t want customers showing up at their doorsteps. I’m talking about businesses whose very livelihoods depend on getting people in their doors. In the last three weeks, I’ve looked up at least three businesses that have made getting there harder than it needs to be: Massanutten Resort, John’s Restaurant and Markt.
Massanutten didn’t provide an address on their Web site, making it impossible to put it into the GPS on my car. John’s and Markt provide addresses on their front page, but present this key information in images.
Web sites for local business, especially restaurants, are often created by Web designers whose main interest is in wowing the business owners with their flash or graphic design skills, not building a user-friendly Web site.
Not only does it make it hard on users, it can hurt search engine rankings. Markt’s Web site is so poorly designed (everything is an image) that you can’t even find it on the first page of Google search results.
Here are my tips for people designing local Web sites:
Make sure that you put your address on your Web site. Many people use online maps sites to get driving directions. You might have written your own eloquent directions, but they don’t start at my door. Provide a link to an online map provider. It’s free. There’s no reason not to. If you know that the directions from Yahoo Maps, Google Maps or Mapquest are wrong, tell me! Monticello does a good job of this.
Put your address in plain text on your Web site. I can’t copy-and-paste an image into an SMS or easily email it to friends.
Write your directions as bullet points, not big blocks of text. Some people will be printing out your directions page and reading it while they drive. It’s a lot easier to keep track of your place in bullets than in paragraphs.
If you’re in an area where mass transit is used heavily, include the nearest subway stops and the lines they are on.
I was trying to determine how profitable Tribune’s online operations would be if they blocked sites from displaying links to their stories. The answer: “Not very.”
The stats for washingtonpost.com and nytimes.com (which have much stronger online operations than Tribune) are dismal. Of all the people who visit the washingtonpost.com site in a given month, less than 14% visit the home page, according to comScore data. For nytimes.com, that number is 20%.
People are getting to newspaper Web sites from a wide range of sources. Google News, the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post are among the top traffic drivers to latimes.com, washingtonpost.com and nytimes.com. The long tail of the blogosphere is also a heavy contributor.
Newspapers need to borrow techniques from direct marketers to convert those passing visitors into regular readers (or at least RSS feed subscribers). On that first hit from a new reader they need to:
Show them the story they came to see! Putting up a big firewall here is a wasted opportunity.
Deliver other stories the reader might be interested in. You know why they came - they might want more on that topic.
Make it easy to subscribe to your content on that topic. If someone lands on a Tom Sietsema restaurant review from a link, let them 1-click subscribe for the rest.
Newcomer Dash is seeking 2,000 drivers across the country to beta test a new concept in satellite navigation. Instead of relying primarily on data stored on a DVD or flash memory, Dash Express uses two-way Internet connectivity to a deliver an impressive array of features.
This approach would tackle many of the items on my GPS wish list. Among the highlights:
Two way communication. This enables quicker, automatic updates of map data, as well as interactive features.
Live traffic and routing. Real-time and historical traffic data are used in calculating routes. The Dash Express unit also serves as a traffic probe, reporting back information on speed and location to help improve traffic forecasts for other Dash users. (I presume that the data will also be sold to other traffic providers.)
Yahoo! Local Search integration.
Send to car. You can program your destination from your PC.
There’s no indication on their Web site about how the Internet connectivity is handled. Some GPS units will pair with Bluetooth mobile phones, but my hunch is Dash will resell wholesale data from one of the major carriers.
As I was taking off from SFO yesterday, I noticed the Virgin logo on three smaller airplanes. On closer inspection, the Airbuses had 
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