Entries Tagged 'Google' ↓

Google is silently rolling out a new version of their email offering. GMail has features that made the competition jealous and forced them to build new easy to use interfaces. GMail has been and is still popular because of the wonderful interface with an intelligent use of AJAX.

Today my account was automatically upgraded to the new version and though the features or UI have not drastically changed they have left an option to switch back to the old version.

The more actions menu has new options added to it. Select a message and select Filter messages like these from the menu and you are prompted with a new page to create a new filter.

There is also a mute option which allows you to stop the message received sound alerts while you are using the Google Talk integrated with Gmail.

GMail’s contact manager was definietely better than the competiton and now it gets even better. Earlier Gmail added the option to group contacts and new the contact manager in itself is a great applicaiton.

Click on image to view larger version. Sorry for the crappy editing, was feeling a bit lazy to edit in Photoshop.
Google announced introduction of IMAP for GMail and if you havent got the upgrade yet you are going to get it in this big upgrade.

GMail is the first web based client that changed the way people thought of email storage or may bethe one that made people to never think of storage. And whats a GMail upgrade without a storage increase. The new version has added 2GB to the existing 2.7GB making email storage more ridiculous to be worried about.

And changing between Basic HTML version and the standard AJAX version is easier than ever. There are links in the footer to make the switch.

The colors are now a bit softer. The notifier which used to tell us of our actions now uses a lighter yellow and it sure is better looking now than earlier.

Well what can I say, I’m so sad and depressed with what Google said to me today. Google called me a computer virus :( Oh you mighty Google, how ever mighty you might be, you can’t call a real person a computer script. People use CAPTCHA to avoid this situation, but you guys at Google used a CAPTCHA but still you called me a computer, too bad, real bad.

How it all happened

I was trying to create a new Google mail account, yaa I already have many but this desire thing, it never dies. I was trying to get hold of an impressive name when this insult was thrown at me. I tried quite a lot of combinations for my username, may be this is what pissed Google off.

Computers may be impressive electronic devices, but when some one praises the work done by a computer, they are actually praising the the algorithm that made the computer do that task which was in fact written by a human but when things like this happen, its the algorithm creators that are culprits.

I was a bit freaked out but again trusted in the mighty Google, becasue as soon as i logged into my GMail it agev a message
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

I have seen “We’re experiencing problems”  messages many times before but this one said “your GMail account is experiencing error”, the next thought was did i do something strange today or did i violate some polocies or something or did someone try to hack into my account? After a while I just relaxed and thought may be its just the GMail team having some problem with the system and they even said “don’t worry” in the message Lets see how long it takes them to get the fault rectified as I don’t worry about my primary email account

Alright Google has been playing prank with us every April 1st since April 2000 when they said they were going to introduce the Google Mentalplex, a new search technology. Its April 1st again and we now have a new feature on GMail, GMail Paper, sounds really really prank like.

You Click, We stack, You Get. Ok so the site says you can order any number of prints 1 or thousand or ten thousand, but what about the cost of printing and mailing them? They have and anser for this too

The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations

What if your e-mail has music files as attachments?

MP3 and WAV files will not be printed

Ok now doesnt that sound funny enough? Who prints ads in 36pt. Helvetica except when its APril 1st and we obviously know that MP3 and WAV files cannot be printed, do they have to answer question? And just image the privacy concerns, anyone on the way could possibly read the e-mail, people were just uneasy when bots were reading their email so that targeted advertising could be possible but now when your email goes to print someone has to put it in the envelope and there is a very good chance that they may get curious sometime or the other.]

Even if it is really true that Google will send us our email via regular mail on request, just image the amount of abuse the service is going to face, there are very few good people in the world who use free services only when it is necessary and apparently you and me are not one of them. The world would be just so curious to see if the mail will really reach them and will end up seding unnecessary requests. And image the amount of paper required to print all this, even if they use recyclabla paper what about the envelopes and stamps? Going by the size of the pacage the woman in the picture is receiving this is just another April fool’s prank from Google.

This April there is more for us, we have another new service from Google, Google Teaspoon (Google TiSP)

Apparently Google TiSP is a high speed internet service which works through your toilet !

Take a look at this diagram and you will know

You should actually go read this one on the Google website, its just hilarious, there is a comparsion chart too so that you can easily choose the plan. This is how the final setup will look like

Haha this was a good one Google, it was really fun to read through the service and its Press Release !

Links

GMail Paper

GMail TiSP

And if you feel like you didnt get enough, you can go have a look at the list of Google pranks at Wikipedia

2000: Google MentalPlex
2002: Pigeon Rank
2004: Google Lunar/Copernicus Center
2005: Google Gulp
2006: Google Romance
2007: Gmail Paper
2007: Google TiSP

Update: Here is the Official announcement that GMail Paper is not a real service but just an April fools’ joke.