The “socialification” of Google products continues with some very cool tweaks announced by the Gmail team today. The product has improved its contact search and will now surface more information about them, such as previous email conversations as well as a photo and their Google+ profile link.

Here’s what the team had to say about it today:

When you search for an email address, the search results will now show you contact details in addition to that person’s profile photo and the emails sent from and to them. From here, you can start a chat, call their phone and more. Plus, if your contacts have a Google+ profile, this information will stay up to date automatically.

You can get to these same results in a variety of ways including the people widget, contacts and the chat list search menu.

By surfacing this type of information and contact choices, you can now set off any number of actions when you’re looking for the person that you’d like to have a conversation with. You can of course email them, call them, or chat over text and video.

In addition to the surfacing of contact information, the Gmail team is now making Google+ circles more actionable in the product too:

In addition to adding contact details to search results, we’ve made some improvements to the circles integration announced in December. When you select a circle, you’ll now see profile photos of people in that circle at the top right of the page. Plus, when you click on these images you’ll be taken directly to search results with contact details.

Circles are also now supported in search and filters. Find messages from a specific circle by typing circle:[circle name] in the search box. You can also find mail from any of your circled contacts by searching with has:circle. You can refine your search even further with other criteria and create filters based on circles. This means you can now view all the unread emails from your ‘Friends’ circle or automatically star every message that comes from your ‘VIP’ circle.

This makes Circles not only a “Google+ thing”, but a product-wide tool to interact with groups of people. All of these changes make absolute sense when you think about how often you use Google’s email product. For most of us, we have Gmail up in a tab throughout the entire day, making it a perfect hub for socializing.

These changes will be rolling out for everyone starting today.

The march towards merging all of Google’s products continues, and this time it’s Google Contacts that’s getting the social treatment.

The Google Contacts team announced last night that address book information will start being displayed on your friends Google+ profiles, if you have them stored.

This is a pretty handy update and doesn’t require you to add or remove any information on your end, since the details are completely populated from the visitors Google Contact account.

Many of you, like me, use Google Contacts to manage your personal address book (contacts.google.com). If that’s the case, then starting today we’ll include this contact info on your friends’ Google+ profiles — for your eyes only, of course.

This way, if you have your roommate’s new phone number in Google Contacts, it’ll also be available when you stop by his profile. Just look for the new “Details from Google Contacts” section.

There are no privacy concerns as this only shows up for the viewer, which is a more secure way to handle this information than Facebook does. Facebook lets users optionally share their contact information and then choose who they can display it to.

It’s becoming clearer that Google is starting to use its services in harmony, rather than make us jump from one browser tab to another like we’ve had to do previously.

As we continue to follow the fallout from Path’s address book practices, other popular apps are starting to issue statements on the issue. This has turned into an industry-wide issue and Apple has stated it will now require “explicit permission” for apps that want access to your address book.

One popular app that has been proactive in reaching its users about the address book concerns is Foodspotting, which put up a blog post on the matter today. In it, the company states:

We wanted to reassure you that Foodspotting never has and never will use your iPhone contacts without your permission. The only time address book info is ever sent to Foodspotting is when you explicitly ask us to find friends from your address book by tapping, “Follow People > Find iPhone Contacts,” and we never store any of this data on our servers.

Foodspotting goes on to say that it wants to make its address book practices more transparent so that its userbase doesn’t have to worry about using its app moving forward.

Even though it’s not storing your address book data when you use the “Find iPhone Contacts” feature of the app, the company will add a popup requiring you to give Foodspotting explicit permission to go through your address book.

The company says its current practice is took grab the names and email addresses of your friends from your address book to check against its server to see if your friends are on the service. Foodspotting says it immediately deletes the data once this check is complete and points out that “No phone numbers or names are transferred.”

However, the data is currently transferred to Foodspotting in a way that’s not so secure, which the company says it will address in a future update:

What are the concerns?
While your address book data is being sent to Foodspotting (which only takes seconds), there is a very slight chance that hackers could access your contacts’ email addresses if they happen to be on the same wifi network as you and monitoring your activity. (When doing any online activities on an unsecure wifi network, you’re subject to this sort of risk.) It only applies to Foodspotting users’ iPhone Contacts when and if you are logged in and use “Find iPhone Contacts” before our next update.

While most mainstream users of the app have no idea that there are even concerns about the practices of apps grabbing a copy of their address books, it is great to see companies taking this opportunity to look at what they’re doing and make it more secure. Whether most users won’t ever realize there was a potential risk or issue before the next update, the ones that do will be more likely to suggest Foodspotting to their friends because of this kind of action and transparency.

Our friends at Lifehacker shared a heck of a tip today. Setting up Google’s Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts on your iOS device can be a multi-step process. This tip makes it all one step.

Thank goodness for this, because we know that the official Google Gmail App for iOS was a flop.

It’s a bit of a hack, but it definitely works:

The key is when setting up a new Email account, choose Microsoft Exchange instead of Gmail. It gives you access to contacts and calendars, and everything will sync on your iOS device seamlessly. Whenever you add a new contact or calendar invite, everything will move over in real-time.

• Open up the Settings app on your iOS device and go to the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” section. Hit “Add Account”.
• From there, choose Microsoft Exchange as the type of account (again, don’t choose Gmail).
• Type in your Gmail address under Email. Leave the Domain field blank and enter your full Gmail address under Username (including the @gmail.com, @googlemail.com, or other suffix). Type in your password and give it any description you like. Mine’s just called “Gmail”.
• Press the Next button at the top of the screen. It should pop up a message saying Unable to Verify Certificate—if it does, just hit cancel. Then, type m.google.com in the new “Server” box that shows up at the top of the screen. Then tap Next.

After that, you should be ready to rock with no headaches. Everything will update in real-time so there’s no need to do manual syncs or worry about push notifications. Thank you Lifehacker!

If you’re a fan of the puzzle piece dropping game Tetris, then you’ll enjoy the app DropIn. It was created in a day by the LinkedIn team to show how useful the LinkedIn API can be.

The premise is simple, and very reminiscent of TweetBricks, which used your Twitter friends in a game of Tetris.

This game is actually fun, and can educate you on what your LinkedIn contacts are up to these days.

Playing DropIn

The blocks that are used in the Tetris game will be replaced by the avatars of your LinkedIn contacts. The neat part is that if you click anyone on the puzzle blocks, you’ll be shown the latest information about them from their LinkedIn profile.

Imagine telling someone that you learned about their new job during a game of Tetris.

DropIn is a fun way to pass the time and do a little bit of networking, too.

The controls are rather easy and use your keyboard for the interactions.

Unfortunately you can’t share or save your high scores, which kills some of the opportunities to get people to keep playing. However, for an app built in a day, what can you really expect?

I suggest playing DropIn on a larger sized monitor, as I couldn’t get the whole screen to show up correctly on my 11-inch MacBook Air. Other than that, the app is great, and might inspire you to develop new games or apps using the LinkedIn API.

Finding all of your online “stuff” is difficult. You have email, tweets, and Facebook status updates. You toss them all into the internet. If you were to try and find one of these items, it could be pretty difficult. Sure, search in Gmail is pretty great, but Twitter’s search isn’t so great, and neither is Facebook’s. Greplin is a “personal search engine that allows you to search all your online data in one easy place.”

Greplin says its goal is to “make Greplin the search bar for your life.” That’s a lofty goal, but we can immediately see why Greplin is such an important service. We interviewed the 19 year old founder of Greplin, Daniel Gross, in March.

The first thing you do is sign up for free. After that you can connect to your accounts, and the most popular ones are free, which is nice. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Calendars, Google Docs, and Google Contacts should get you searching for things you thought were gone, fast. Greplin has other site connections available for a $4.99 a month (or $49.99 a year) upgrade. It’s all about your personal online habits though, so there’s no requirement to upgrade.

Once you’ve connected your accounts (it’s secure, Greplin promises), you should start seeing that your data is available to search on within about 20 minutes. The company does search indexes every 20 minutes after that.

The power of Greplin is that you don’t have to have all of these connected accounts open in other browsers or tabs. To find things, all you need to do is bring up the Greplin site, or use the Greplin iOS app to do so.

The search for “Zee” above, shows results sorted by “People” and “Streams”, and as of this writing, it was pretty much in real-time as you can see by the tweets.

Google is the king of search, most would argue, but not many people would trust Google with all of their internet logins, so Greplin may have found a huge niche for itself if the company can prove to be trustworthy and of course provide a great search experience.

via RWW