Nimble Books LLC » Gmail

Does gmail fixing a poorly designed feature = adding 2 new ones?

wfz-admin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:30:53 +0000

Not in my book.

The official update feed from the Google Apps team: Gmail adds ‘My Contacts’ and ‘Suggested Contacts’

Gmail now ads people you email with to your contact list after several correspondences, rather than after you email someone for the first time. Contacts you add manually or through an import are aslo saved in ‘My Contacts’. People you haven’t had many email exchanges with are auto-added to ‘Suggested Contacts’, and you can move those people to ‘My Contacts’ at any time.

What moved me to the cloud

wfz-admin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:42:40 +0000

The “Rush to the Cloud” – Not So Fast… « Shepherd’s Pi

You know what was the single factor that moved me to the cloud?

Giant .pst files in Microsoft Outlook.

Gmail 2012 = Microsoft Office 2012?

wfz-admin — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:47:50 +0000

Official Gmail Blog: Gmail blog turns 1: Looking back at our 10 most read tips

The more things change, the more they remain the same. A lot of these tips are pretty techie things that most users will never do.

(How many people will use the AND NOT operator, -foo, when searching gmail?)

gmail is rapidly becoming more feature-laden and complex–is this an inevitable product maturity trajectory that will make gmail 2012 = Microsoft Office 2012?

I suspect so–but there will still be one key difference which remains the primary reason why I permanently switched from Office in 2005. No more giant .pst files!

But wait! Gmail seems slower now …

wfz-admin — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:15:20 +0000

Official Gmail Blog: A need for speed: the path to a faster loading sequence
We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster. Gmails architecture eliminates many of the delays in reading mail by employing techniques like prefetching, but recently we decided to take a close look at some other key parts of Gmail to see if we could speed things up.

So much so that I recently went into the settings and changed maximum threads per page from 50 to 25. I also tried the basic html version. It is too frustrating.

Gmail team: why not give us a clock?

When I was at LexisNexis, I was product manager for the web version of Lexis, and we spent a tremendous amount of time on performance improvement. As the gmail team’s post suggests, it is very hard work.It’s hard to tell what’s even happening without extensive experimentation and instrumentation, and then when you make changes, there are always people who see zero or negative improvement. I feel for the gmail team, but I have to be honest — gmail really does seem slower to me.

I wonder if gmail has advertently or inadvertently taken a step away from managed performance. When I was at LexisNexis, we were absolutelly appalled to learn that the backend search engine had a “governor” on it which slowed down any search that came back too fast. The idea was to manage customer experience by making every search take the same amount of time, no matter whether it was busy time or not. Perception is reality: it’s important whether response time is consistent.

Google’s Universal Nav Bar — WTF can’t it be customized!!??

wfz-admin — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:34:44 +0000

UPDATE: now the gmail nav bar has a multi-source dropdown. YAY!!! Good job G.

Official Google Blog: Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer

Also, in terms of integration and navigation, today we introduced a new universal navigation bar at the top of all Google web pages to provide easier navigation to your favorite Google products, such as Gmail.

Great idea on having a universal nav bar.

WTF can’t it be customized so that I can display a list of all my favorite services? This ain’t rocket science, folks.

Hopefully that’s next.

Technorati Tags: Google nav bar, Google UI

[poll=4]

Google Does Universal Search, Only Six Years After They Thought of It

wfz-admin — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:32:59 +0000

A close friend of mine at LexisNexis spent a couple of years of his life around 2001 trying to get LexisNexis to implement this capability across its 33,000 sources. His vision was very similar to the one Google has just released, but from his relatively lowly position as one of the people in the company who actually knew what he was talking about, he couldn’t move the glacier. In a way, it’s rather validating to see that it took Google six years to do, even with all the advantages of momentum, excess capital, and VIP sponsorship.

[poll=3]

Official Google Blog: Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer

Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer
5/16/2007 04:19:00 PM
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Back in 2001, Eric asked for a brainstorm of a few “splashy” ideas in search. A designer and product manager at the time, I made a few mockups — one of which was for ‘universal search.’ It was a sample search results page for Britney Spears that, in addition to web results, also had news, images, and groups results right on the same page. Even then, we could see that people could easily become overwhelmed with the number of different search tools available on Google — let alone those that would be created over the next few years. This proliferation of tools, while useful, has outgrown the old model of search. We want to help you find the very best answer, even if you don’t know where to look.

That mockup and early observations were the motivation behind the universal search effort we announced earlier today. And while that Britney Spears mockup was the start of Google’s universal search vision, it was instantly obvious that this would be one of the biggest architectural, ranking, and interface challenges we would face at Google. Over several years, with the help of more than 100 people, we’ve built the infrastructure, search algorithms, and presentation mechanisms to provide what we see as just the first step in the evolution toward universal search. Today, we’re making that first step available on google.com by launching the new architecture and using it to blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results.

With universal search, we’re attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results.

Here are a few of my favorite searches that show off the power of universal search:

* steve jobs
* darth vader
* nosferatu

In addition, we’ve rolled out a few new navigation elements and experimental features to help our users better navigate our site and find the information they’re looking for. These include contextual navigation links above the search results that help users “drill down” to specific types of information. For instance, developers who search for [python] will see links for “web,” “blogs,” “books,” “groups,” and “code,” whereas [downtown los angeles] will show a different set of links. Also, in terms of integration and navigation, today we introduced a new universal navigation bar at the top of all Google web pages to provide easier navigation to your favorite Google products, such as Gmail.

While today’s releases are big steps in making the world’s information more easily accessible, these are just the beginning steps toward the universal search vision. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: Google Universal Search, LexisNexis

Docs & Spreadsheets: Good start — now give me one-stop for all Google apps!

wfz-admin — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:23:06 +0000

Official Google Blog: Better together: Docs & Spreadsheets

A good step forward.

Now, please let me configure the list of Google apps that shows up on the top of gmail and the Google home page.

This ain’t rocket science. We’re talking about providing simple html links to the other Google services that I use.

Technorati Tags: Google Docs, Writely,

Google web app shortcuts

wfz-admin — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:58:18 +0000

Smallwire » Keyboard shortcuts for every Google webapp

All good geeks know that keyboard shortcuts are the shiznit. I have been a dedicated user of Gmail since I got my hands on an invite over a year ago. I thought I was a power-user until someone told me that you could archive a conversation by pressing ‘y’. “Shortcuts in webapps?!” I screamed. After this mini epiphany/freak-out, I ran around the help files of all my favourite webapps, looking for the shortcuts. Here they are. They’re useful. Go wild.

Very useful. Would be nice to see these in a table so we can see what are the common elements.

Technorati Tags: Google, gmail, Google Reader

Google Notebook: Slow Down and Integrate!

wfz-admin — Fri, 12 May 2006 16:28:54 +0000

TechCrunch » Blog Archive » Google Notebook Screen Shots
A Google employee named Erica Joy has posted a number of screen shots of Google Notebook, which will launch next week at google.com/notebook.

Notebook looks like it is designed to be a flat out del.icio.us competitor, allowing you to gather content from around the web, add metadata like categories and, if you like, publish the information. More from Philip Lenssen.

Cool, but, where is the integration? with Search, Reader and gmail? I wish they would start connecting some of these new services before rolling anymore out …

[Tech Fun] Google Reader beta

wfzimmerman — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 18:14:00 +0000

Reader: “Google Reader “

Wow. Yet another fabulous web-based application from Google. I’m in love.

Uploading my 90-item OPML file felt too slow.

Kelsey’s having some trouble adding feeds. Seems like there may be some redirects not working.

Neat UI concept: the “lens”.

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Posted by wfzimmerman to Tech Fun at 10/07/2005 05:00:45 PM