» Smart Phones, Web Design, Google or whatever
Posts tagged email
Yahoo! Acquires eGroups, Google Acquires Neotonic
Aug 27th
Tech Lead Manager of the Gmail delivery team
“Yahoo! Acquires eGroups” AND “Google Acquires Neotonic”
Those two news flashes are probably two of the more exciting statements Brandon Long has ever read -
real life-changers.
Under What did you do before joining Google? in the latest Faces of Gmail post, Brandon reveals he worked at eGroups, which was acquired by Yahoo! back in 2000. It took a little digging to find out that his statement “I founded Neotonic Software which wrote a web application for email customer support” may indicate a little humility. In fact Google acquired Neotonic back in 2004. So, the latest face of Gmail, Brandon Long was director for a company bought by Yahoo!, then went on to found a company bought by Google. Not only that, Google evidently kept him around – maybe to make sure he didn’t found another spinoff?
What’s Brandon’s typical day like?
My typical day involves catching up on email from our teams in other timezones (Google Engineering never sleeps). I also stay on top of escalations from our support team, keep abreast of the running service with our SREs (Site Reliability Engineers), and make sure my team doesn’t have any blockages. Finally, I still manage to keep my hands in the codebase, working as part of the team. When I have some extra time, I take a peek in the Gmail help forum to see if there’s anything brewing or any help I can offer.
Read the rest of Faces of Gmail: Brandon Long.
HTML5 Desktop Notifications for Gmail and Chat
Jan 27th
For Chrome users, and thanks to HTML5 Desktop Notifications don’t have to miss new emails and chats in Gmail just because you aren’t in your Gmail window. Maybe you’ve switched to a different tab, browser or program and missed an important reply via Gmail or Gmail chat? No more, thanks to HTML5 Desktop Notifications.
Google has thought this new feature out, so you can enable notifications for Gmail, or Chats, or both; and you’ll get a popup notification whenever you get a new message.
Google is already planning to make desktop notifications available for other browsers so that you can enjoy it even if you don’t use Chrome.
Gmail Tasks Wants You!
Oct 26th
Google is asking for help improving Tasks and I’ve got a couple of ideas that I think would be pretty useful. Very similar to what Armo said (http://goo.gl/mod/7XCq) about flexibility between Tasks and Email and links to the original entry.
At the risk of some repetition of Armo’s post I’d love to see Tasks, Gmail, Google Docs and Calendar integrated to the point that any of one could be turned into any of the other with links back to whatever is needed.
Was that nebulous enough? Here’s an example… let’s say I have an appointment I’ve entered into my 
GCalendar for a doctor’s appointment six months from now. I setup the appointment with an email reminder (as I usually do) to remind me before the appointment so I can let my boss know – all of this is normal so far. Additionally, I need to bring my medication list to the appointment and I found a website with some great info I want to talk to my doctor about when I have the appointment also. It would be great if I could open a Google Doc an type in my medication list and associate that with the GCalendar event/reminder, and have a Task pop up the day before in whatever Task list is currently active during the time the event reminder is fire off reminding me, and possibly linking to the website with that great info I want to discuss with my doc, along with another link to my Google Doc (meds list).
At the risk of being redundant while trying to explain in one situation how this could all fit together, the email reminder would arrive with the website link to that great info, have my Google doc attached, and a handy link to Google Maps based on the info I entered into the calendar event.
Now I’m covered… on that day six months in the future if I am in GCalendar, or in Gmail using Tasks, or reading email I cannot miss my appointment – even if I ignore the emails. Of course, emails and Google docs could have links to GCalendar Events, etc… etc… so that they all interact with, link to and manage information between and with one another.
DO MORE
Gmail Task Poll – let your voice and ideas be heard, and let the Gmail Tasks team know what you want.
iPhone, iPod Touch and Windows Mobile Get Push Email
Sep 22nd
Now get email pushed to iPhone and Windows Mobile with Google Sync. Evidently when Google Sync was released without this feature and Google responded to the
Once you’re set up, new messages are normally pushed to your phone within seconds. While this type of speed is pretty awesome, push connections tend to use more power than fetching at intervals, so don’t be surprised if your battery life isn’t quite what it used to be. We’ve done a lot of work to optimize power usage, but if you prefer to save battery life, you can always turn off push in your phone’s settings and fetch mail every 30 or 60 minutes instead.
No doubt many iPhone, Windows Mobile and iPod Touch users will be appreciating this new feature!
MORE
Google Sync
Don’t forget that attachment!
Sep 17th
When attaching certain documents to emails I usually start out the email by saying “Attached is the report about….” or whatever and sometimes I dig around to get the file size and exact filename and include that, too. I think its good netiquette to tell people what I’ve sent them, along with the filename and the file size so they can see at-a-glance if they can open the file (e.g. do they have MS Excel?) or if the download of the file will be too long (maybe the recipient is in a rush and using dial-up?).
Just that little distraction means I sometimes forget to attach the document I was so thoughtfully describing. Now Gmail has thought of that. New in Labs: Forgotten attachment detector says:
Many of us have experienced the embarrassment of having sent a message without attaching the file we said we were going to attach. Turn on the Forgotten Attachment Detector in Labs, and you’ll get an alert if you mention attaching a file but forget to do so.
So why are you still reading this? Go ahead and turn your Gmail Forgotten attachment detector on and give it a text drive!
