Gmail Bug A Good Lesson In Preparedness

Expect the unexpected... even if you are Google. Sometimes as software developers, regardless of how much you've done to mitigate risk, code goes out the door that has unexpected results. 

Over the weekend Google's Gmail team "...released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email." The trouble is that even with all of the redundancy built into their data centers, the bug deleted all online copies of the affected users data, which meant that the team was forced to restore from backup tapes. This is a time consuming process, especially when dealing with 0.02% of mail held by Gmail.

While those of us who have had to deal with these hair pulling ordeals can understand and sympathize with the development team, most users will not. Rest assured that the backup and recovery strategy has accomplished what it was intended to do. If anything, this is a valuable lesson in backing up data. What's your strategy? If your laptop took a tumble would you be able to recover?  

Facebook To Announce Gmail Rival?

Facebook is hosting a "special event" today in San Francisco, and much of the speculation is pointing to an e-mail service to compete with Google's Gmail. The two companies have been at odds lately with Google banning Facebook from importing G-mail users contact lists after Facebook refused to allow the export of it's user's friends and contacts.

According to TechCrunch Facebook's new project codenamed "Project Titan" is being called the "Gmail killer".

With so little regard for personal data Facebook will not be my choice of web based mail providers, Gmail is quite simply the best. That said, with half a billion users Facebook is bound to get the less technical amongst them to drink the kool-ade and jump on board. 

Source: BBC

Priority Inbox, Gmail - Now With Even More Awesomeness

I have virtually replaced all of my other email clients and accounts with Gmail, the transition has been gradual and was spurred largely by my acquisition of an Android phone over a year ago. Until that time my Gmail account was definitely used but not nearly to the extent that it has been since. Now Google has unveiled another reason to love Gmail with the release of Priority Inbox. Gmail was already good at sniffing out spam but with priority inbox Gmail learns, over time, what is important to you by analyzing which mail you open and beyond that what you reply to. It's more than just starring an email, it... well... prioritizes your mail to make it easy to find the really important stuff. If I haven't sold you then you must check out the dance of joy that this happy fella does!

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Source: The Official Google Blog

Google Takes On Skype

The Official Google Blog has announced a new service within gmail that will allow you to make free gmail to telephone calls to Canadian and US numbers and low rate calls to other nations. The service is said to be offered only to gmail users in the US, but the CBC reported yesterday that if you are a Canadian with a gmail account and have your language setting tweaked to English (US) then the service will also be available to you. The roll out is happening over the next few days, so don't panic if you don't see the option just yet. You will need to install the video and voice chat add-on to enable the functionality but it's a quick and painless install. According to the blog post the service will remain free at least for the remainder of the year, similar to Skype's roll-out of Skype Out a few years back. I don't make a lot of phone calls, but I'm bound to be making Google my choice of carrier at least until 2011.

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Gmail Outage Caused By Miscalculation

For several hours yesterday many of Gmail's 150 million users were unable to send or receive email via the service and the online community was all a twitter (couldn't resist).

"We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service," said the firm's Ben Treynor in a blog post.

"Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologise to all of you - today's outage was a big deal, and we're treating it as such."

Treynor blamed the outage on a miscalculation by system engineers who had taken some of the services servers offline for maintenance, routing the traffic to other servers which caved under the increased flow of traffic.

If you were like me, the first sign of trouble arrived in the flood of tweets about the incident on Twitter. It was bigger news than a celebrity death! At least amongst those of whom I follow.

Microsoft - Google Battle Over University E-Mail Management

Google and Microsoft are giving away hosted e-mail services to universities and colleges around the globe in the hope to hook students when they graduate. For the schools involved it's a can't lose proposition, cutting costs of both hardware and human resources and offering a bigger and better service to the students.

Jeff Keltner, head of Google's Apps for Education team says that administrators appreciate the cost savings and security benefits. "They walk away saying my data is probably safer in Google's data center than anywhere I would house it myself," he says. "And they appreciate the advantages to having data in the cloud, rather than residing on phones or laptops, which are devices that tend to get lost."

A 2008 national Campus Computing Project (CCP) survey indicates that 57% of schools who had outsourced said that they had opted for Google, while 38% had partnered with Microsoft.

Source: Time.com

Google's Plans For The Future Include Voice Search

"We believe voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business," said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. "Look how far we have come. I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it's amazing. It's working. It's reached a tipping point. It's growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it,"

Gundotra indicated that voice search is a technology that is getting better and better the more that it is used, increasing in accuracy by 15% since the launch of the service on the iPhone, which he attributes to the increased number of users and the resulting increase in data.

There was also talk about an offline version of the 5 year old Gmail service and a "no comment" on the rumored acquisition of Twitter.

Source: BBC

Gmail Labs Roll Out Canned Responses

The Official Gmail Blog has posted about a new feature in the Labs called "canned responses". Turning the feature on allows you to save pieces of text as canned responses that can easily be sent in reply to common questions. To take things one step further, combine canned responses with the already available "filters" option "Gmail already lets you create filters based on a combination of keywords, sender, recipients, and more in your incoming messages. Turn on Canned Responses in Labs, and you can set a filter to grab one of your saved responses, create an automated reply, and hit the Send button for you." This duo of features seem like a great solution anyone who receives a relatively high volume of mail. The canned response does not include text from the originator's e-mail but it's a time saver and it's free.

Google Gadgets Get Room To Grow With Canvas View

This past week Google refreshed it's iGoogle pages and to be frank I didn't really care for the changes that much. When you get used to a UI and it suddenly changes on you it takes a little getting used to, and I'm still trying to do that. What I hadn't noticed was a new option called "canvas view" that enables you to maximize any given gadget within the iGoogle page. Though I'm not in love with the left hand navigation changes yet, I do like canvas view. In particular I like what it does for my Gmail gadget, maximizing Gmail allows me to view messages and create new ones right in the gadget where previously it only displayed a quick snippet view of my Gmail messages. Check out this guided tour of the new iGoogle features. According to the Official Google Blog the changes where for users in the US, however they seem to have crept over the northern border to us in Canada as well.

GMail's New Feature - Mail Goggles

"Google strives to make the world's information useful. Mail you send late night on the weekends may be useful but you may regret it the next morning. Solve some simple math problems and you're good to go. Otherwise, get a good night's sleep and try again in the morning." This is the description provided for one of Google's latest GMail features called Mail Goggles. Put Mail Goggles on and GMail will help to save you from the embarrassment of those late night e-mails to your ex or your boss! To activate Mail Goggles select 'Settings' on your GMail page and then locate the feature on the 'Labs' tab and enable. When acitvated goggles monitors the time of day that you press the send link and depending upon your configurable settings will prompt you to answer a number of mathematical questions, get them right and your mail will go through, get them wrong and you'd better sleep it off. Now if only someone would make such a device for your cell phone...

Google Wedding Planner?

Here is a great story about David and Bergin Boyle who used the tools available to them via Google, to plan, organize, and document their wedding day.

• Google Calendar to pick a date that worked for both of their schedules;
  
• Google Docs for documents, to do lists and list of invites, RSVPs and such;
• Google Page Creator to create a web page to inform friends and guests;
• Google Analytics to determine if anyone was using their web site;
• Google Maps to inform guest about the venue and provide suggestions about hotels and sites of interest;
• forms to allow guests to submit their ideas for songs that mean something to them;
• Gmail to communicate with guests; and
  
• Picassa to share wedding photos after the big day.

As one of the commenors on David's blog says "Maybe Google should start a site Google Wedding to have all of this in one site..."

How To Make Local Backups Of Your Web Mail Accounts

Wired's How-to Wiki brings us another practical how-to. With web mail sites such as gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, comes the inherent risk that you may not have Internet connectivity and thus have no access to your mail messages. Wired hooks us up with some easy to follow instructions on making local backups for these popular web mail services. While you may not be able to send or receive new messages offline, at least you'll be able to access the ones already sent and received!

15 useful iGoogle gadgets

Web Worker Daily has compiled a nice list of it's 15 most useful gadgets. If you are like me, your homepage is iGoogle! I use a couple of tabs to manage my rss feeds and the Home tab has my Gmail gadget, a sticky note gadget, a picture of my cat, Google calendar, pacman, and some others. Web Worker Daily's list is a bit more productive and has opened my eyes to some nice tools that I'll be adding, like activity tracker and Document to PDF.

Google addresses security concerns of hosted applications

Google has been busy over the last few years developing and acquiring technology that would end up being hosted applications such as Docs and Spreadsheets, Calendar, Talk and Gmail. While many individuals and small businesses have embraced the hosted concept, big business is a harder sell with security being the major concern. Google has made a large stride towards easing these concerns with news today that they are acquiring Postini, "a global leader in on-demand communications security and compliance solutions". The deal worth $625 million will likely get done in the 3rd quarter of this year, according to the news release. While there are obvious gains for Google, they promise to "continue to support Postini customers and invest in Postini products."