Gmail Adds Folders by Improving Label Management

For those who wondered "when do we get folders in Gmail?", there's a good news: even though Gmail still uses labels, you can treat them like folders starting from today.

Gmail added a "move to" drop-down that combines two actions that were difficult to find or difficult to understand: labeling and archiving. Instead of clicking on "More actions", selecting a label and then archiving the message, you can now click on "Move to" and select a label.

Those who like keyboard shortcuts will be happy to know that the "Move to" drop-down can be selected by typing "v" and you can type the first letters of a label to select it.


A similar functionality is available for the new "Labels" drop-down, but you can select multiple labels.


So what's the difference between the two drop-downs?

"Move to" applies the label selected from the list and removes the label of the current view. Keyboard shortcut: v.

"Labels" lets you add or remove labels from the list in a single action. You no longer have to repeatedly click on "More actions" to add multiple labels. Keyboard shortcut: l.

"One of the features that makes Gmail different is its use of labels instead of folders. Sure, labels can serve pretty much the same purpose -- they can help organize mail or flag messages for follow up. And unlike with folders, messages can have several labels, so if I get an email from a friend about a trip we're taking together, I can add both a "Friends" and a "Travel" label to it. But it's not always obvious how to use labels, especially for people who are new to Gmail and used to using folders, and it hasn't helped that some common tasks have been more complicated than they should be," mentions Gmail's blog.

If you don't see the new features in your Gmail account, they'll be enabled in the next few hours. While the new functionality is a huge improvement, the design refresh is a step backwards. "Gmail just changed its archive, report, move icons from their fun bubbly shape to rectangular attached uglies," commented Garry S., a reader of this blog.

{ Thanks, gxg and Garry. }

Chat With a Martian in Google Earth 5

Open the latest version of Google Earth, switch to "Mars" and search for "Meliza". Click on the small robotic icon and you'll be able to chat with Meliza, a friendly relative of Eliza, one of the first chat bots. A message informs Earthlings that "Meliza is using an account on a different planet. There may be translation errors." The chat bot has some predefined text related to Mars and it can't answer to many questions, but it's always ready to rephrase your messages.

Here's Meliza's first message: "Greetings, Earthling! What do you think of Google Mars?Have you checked out Valles Marineris? It's like the Grand Canyon, but bigger. Mars is so much better than Earth!"


In other news, Google and NASA sponsor Singularity University. "In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near, a comfort-rattling forecast of a few decades hence when artificial intelligence will overtake human capability and an array of other huge leaps will fundamentally alter our lives. Now, Kurzweil is helping to launch a university rooted in the book's predictions. In June, Singularity University is scheduled to open with a faculty replete with scientific celebrities, and an initial class of 30 students at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley."

{ Thanks, Tom. }

Google Earth 5 Plus the Ocean

Google Earth 5, the latest version of Google's 3D geo-browser, brings an important feature from the discontinued Google Earth Plus, which used to cost $20/year. You can now read tracks and waypoints from a GPS device like Magellan and Garmin and you can import GPS files in GPX and LOC format.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to visualize geographical changes over time. Google Earth shows historical imagery that goes back to the 40s in some places like San Francisco.


If you find an interesting way to visualize a location, there's a new "record a tour" option that saves the places you visit in Google Earth and lets you replay the tour. Unfortunately, you can't export a tour in a video format using the free version of Google Earth, but the good news is that you can record a voice commentary.

Google Earth is no longer just about the Earth and stars, now you can use it to view imagery and terrain of Mars by clicking on the planet icon.


While all these additions useful, you'll most likely download Google Earth 5 to explore the ocean. "Dive beneath the surface and visit the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. Explore the ocean with top marine experts including National Geographic and BBC. Learn about ocean observations, climate change, and endangered species. Discover new places including surf, dive, and travel hot spots and shipwrecks."


Google Earth 5 for Windows, Linux and Mac can be downloaded from earth.google.com. The Windows version is not download directly: you first install Google Update, which downloads the setup and then installs the application. For those who can't use Google Update, here's a direct link to the Windows client.

Tip: Before installing Google Earth, read the user guide.

Standalone Versions of Google Tasks for iPhone and iGoogle

There's a new interface for Google Tasks, the experiment initially launched as part of Gmail Labs. Now you can view and edit your tasks on an iPhone by visiting http://mail.google.com/tasks/iphone (a shorter URL: gmail.com/tasks).



Google also launched an iGoogle gadget that provides similar functionality. The gadget is only a wrapper for the standalone version available at http://mail.google.com/tasks/ig, a page you can bookmark or add it to your sidebar in browsers that support this feature (Firefox, Opera).



Gmail Blog explains that the most important competitor for Google Tasks is paper (I remember a similar statement regarding Google Calendar). "Among the world's leading productivity tools is an advanced technology known as paper. Many of the world's top corporations and most active internet users have adopted paper as a method of organizing their daily lives. (...) When we set out to build Tasks (now in Gmail Labs), one of our goals was to improve upon paper. With the version of Tasks in Gmail, we focused on making editing very fast and simple -- as close to paper as we could."

Hopefully the next iterations will bring a proper standalone version, the integration with Google Calendar and an API that will facilitate synchronization with other applications. That will give Google Tasks competitive edge over paper.

7 New Languages in Google Translate

Expect 7 new languages in Google Translate soon: Albanian (9-13 million speakers*), Estonian (1.1 million speakers), Galician (3-4 million speakers), Hungarian (15 million speakers), Maltese (around 400,000 speakers), Thai (60-65 million speakers) and Turkish (63 million speakers). Many of the comments from a previous post requested Turkish, so Google listened to the feedback.


Another change is that the English dictionary has been improved significantly and it includes synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, detailed definitions and examples from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary.


Update (a day later): As previously announced, the new languages have been added to Google Translate.


* Source: Wikipedia.

Google Flags All Search Results as Malware

Many users report that Google started to flag all search results as malware. The problem is that Google no longer links to the search results flagged as malware and it sends users to a diagnostic page. Apparently, the bug has been fixed in about half an hour.

"This is by far the strangest thing I have ever seen on Google, but I don't know if it is happening to everyone or just me. With every search I do (as of two minutes ago), every page is marked This site may harm your computer," reported Albert Rodenius.

"Google has been acting up in extremely odd ways the last 24 hours. Right now, every single site on the web gets the message This site may harm your computer in its search result. (I never knew the Internet was that dangerous). Second, the number of server errors over the past 24 hours I've run into has been astonishing; over half my Google search queries have returned 404, long before the unsafe sites problem showed up. Now, most of the time when I click on the This site may harm your computer link, I get a server error," mentioned Greg Spira, a reader of this blog.


{ Thanks to everyone who reported the issue. Screenshot from Aris Giannakakis. }

Update: Google's blog says that "this was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users. (...) Google flags search results with the message This site may harm your computer if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. (...) Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms. We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes."

Manual Feed Updates in Google Reader

If your Google Reader subscriptions aren't up-to-date or you suspect that a blog has published posts that haven't been indexed by Google Reader, just click on "Refresh". That button usually checks if there are new posts cached by Google Reader, but when you open an individual subscription the button forces an update and loads the new posts. Alternatively, you could just press "r" to update the feed.

In the screenshot below, you can see that Google Reader loaded two new posts from VentureBeat after clicking on the "Refresh" button.


{ via Google Reader's Twitter page }