Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 1st July 2009
17 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google has today added a number of updates to the way labels work in GMail.
The popular email app now lets you drag and drop your labels to see them act more like folders of sorts. They can be placed above your chat list and sit along side drafts, starred and the other core labels.
You can now also hide labels that you just generally don’t use. They’re not technically hidden of course, they’re simply placed in a “more” section, making them convenient to access when you might need them again.
You can edit labels in bulk in your settings panel too, but most excitingly (at least for me), you can now drag and drop messages into labels – making the app more desktop like than ever before.
The blog post announcing the update, highlights the fact that this will mean the end of one of Gmail’s first lab features – Right-Side Labels. Google say they always had aimed to make the most popular Gmail lab features an fully integrated part of gmail in the long term, and it appears that Right-Side Labels is the first to make the cut.
Disappointingly, I can’t see the new features enabled in Google Apps just yet. If anyone does, please do let us know.
Written on 21st May 2009
5 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Passionate Google news and tip blog, Google OS, have spotted an interesting bit of GMail code that suggests some unique organisation features are on the way.
Titled “Magic Inbox” or “Icebox Inbox”, the concept is reportedly based on a RarePlay report that explains the possibility of mapping out relationships between email parties and ordering them by priority based on incoming/outgoing email traffic, speed and frequency of replies.
More digging into GMail’s code suggests that we will soon be able to organise our inbox’s based on this level of priority.
As cool as this may sound, removing the “on behalf of” and ordering by date are more obvious priorities in my opinion. Whilst automatigically ordering by priority may be interesting to try out, manual organisation of my email so I know exactly where everything is at a given time, makes me sleep easier. Of course, I am likely to bite my tongue once the feature is released.
Written on 19th May 2009
3 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
As we mentioned last week, Google has now officially launched translation in GMail.
It comes in the form of a labs plugin and to enable it, simply visit Labs tab under Settings, and when you receive an email in any foreign language Google Translate supports (41 in all), Gmail will let you translate it into a language you can understand.
Awesomely, if your email conversation includes multiple Gmail users, each member can translate the email into their own preferred language without messing things around for other readers. Seriously cool and another big reason to use Gmail over other email providers.
Although it’s by no means perfect, its oh SO much better than nothing.
Written on 19th May 2009
2 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Scammers (and yes they are predominantly Nigerian) are accessing GMail accounts and emailing friends of yours requesting money.
This has actually happened to a good friend of mine just last week who received an email from a friend in her contacts list, but the content of the email was stereotypical of a “you have $10000 waiting for you” – clearly not actually from the actual friend.
Consumer affairs blog, The Consumerist, notes another example, this time the scammer actually used GTalk to impersonate someone’s friend.
“Andy logged in to Gmail on Sunday, and his friend Jeff started to chat with him. Things seemed a bit off, but Andy really became suspicious when Jeff asked him to wire $500 to an injured friend in Nigeria.”
This is the chat transcript of the conversation, and  although amusing, it is in fact rather scary in my opinion. Thankfully Scammer!Jeff gives away a number of obvious signs that he is not in fact the real Jeff, but how long before these scammers (and hackers) become cleverer.
Scammer!Jeff: hello
Andy:: gmornin
Scammer!Jeff: good morning
Scammer!Jeff: how was ur night
Andy:: decent. we had a graduation party for maggie (more…)
Written on 14th May 2009
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A few of my friends are still stuck at Hotmail. I know because at least one a month one of them unknowingly spams his or her AddressBook when their accounts get hacked. I don’t even warn them anymore because I find the whole issue just too embarrassing.
Sometimes I ask them why they don’t move. The usual answers are that they don’t see the benefit, are used to the interface but mostly it is because they have an email archive dating back years and all their addresses in there.
For that last issue Google has now released a very useful “Import everything into Gmail” feature. It will be available to new accounts and they will slowly roll it out to all existing users over the next couple of months. This is how it should work:
- Click the Settings link.
- Under the Accounts and Import tab, click the Import mail and contacts button.
- In the new window that opens, enter the email address of the account you’d like to import contacts from. Click Continue.
- Enter the password for your other email account and click Continue.
- Select all the checkboxes that apply:
- If you choose to import contacts, the information in your contacts list in your old account will be imported to your Contacts section in Gmail.
- If you select the Import mail checkbox, your existing messages in that account will be imported to your Gmail inbox.
- If you want, you can also select the Import new mail checkbox so that messages sent to your old account for the next 30 days will be imported to your Gmail account. These messages won’t appear in Gmail immediately once they’re sent to your other account, but should update within a day or two.
- Finally, you can automatically apply a label to your imported messages to indicate that those were sent to your other account.
- Click Start Import. The import will continue if you leave the Settings page or sign out of Gmail.
- Your contacts and/or messages will be imported. It may take 24-48 hours before you see your imported messages, so don’t worry if they’re not there as soon as you click OK. You can check the status of your import by clicking the Accounts and Imports tab on the Settings page. Once the import is complete, you’ll see a confirmation message at the top of your inbox.
If that doesn’t work the feature isn’t rolled out for your account yet. More information can be found at this “Importing contacts and mail” document at Gmail. Let us know if it worked out for you!
Written on 13th May 2009
9 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google’s product management director, Matthew Glotzbach, announced yesterday that Google would be integrating on the fly language translation into Gmail as early as this week.
He announced the update during his keynote address at the CeBit conference and exhibition in Sydney on Tuesday.
Via one click, Gmail will automatically detect the original language and translate the email ‘inline’ into your specified language.
There were rumours that translation would be launched early in May commemorating the 5th anniversary of GMail, but that wasn’t to be.
With any luck, the translation service should be made available to both Gmail and Google Apps as early as Wednesday.
via SteveRubel via MacWorld
Written on 6th May 2009
0 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google have just announced a number of new Google Mobile features and improvements, many of which will make iPhone users drool with envy.
Gmail users can now select multiple-threads to easily archive, delete, label or mute several threads at once, something we tend to take for granted on the desktop.
The big news however is on the media front.
Android users can now record and upload videos to YouTube as easy as ‘record and share’, something iPhone’s appear to be a long way off. You can also able to select privacy settings making it easy to share video with the world or a select group of people.
Picasa users are also in for a treat and can also upload photos directly from their phone to PicasaWeb. Just like YouTube- after taking a picture tap ’share’ when viewing a photo and select Picasa.
That’s not all, voice recognition on Android has reportedly been improved, making it easier to find what you’re looking for and fast.
Written on 10th April 2009
1 COMMENT
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
GMail have just announced another labs feature which allows you to insert images directly into your emails. To get it working, enable the feature in Labs, click save and you should see the icon in your toolbar.
You can insert images from your computer or via a URL. Frustratingly, I seem to be able to get it working in Firefox but Safari, no luck just yet. I assume internet explorer and other browsers are ok.
Gmail do note however, that Gmail recipients will need to click on “display images below” before any embedded images are viewable.
Written on 8th April 2009
4 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Download via deluxe themes
Written on 7th April 2009
0 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Although we’re still awaiting the day Google announces local apps for the iPhone, it’s still good to see them improve their mobile webapps.
Today, Google introduces a number of significant enhancements to both GMail and Google Calendar on the iPhone and Android. The most immediate update is the navigation bar above all your Google Apps, making navigation between each a piece of pie.
![[iPhone/Android] Gmail and Calendar Updates: Access with with no connection...amongst other improvements.](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/gmailpost1.jpg "gmailpost1")
For Gmail, Google have improved speed when performing typical activities, altered the underlying architecture of the app to allow for quicker enhancements in the future. Interestingly, thanks to Gears and HTML5, you can also still access recently read messages and even compose over a poor or even non-existent network connection.
Multiple selection of messages has also been integrated, making the entire experience far more desktop GMail like.
Google Calendar has also drastically improved, making it possible to actually edit your schedule in detail directly from your mobile. You can change your attendance status, edit the details, and add or remove guests and just like GMail, your calendar will still start up and show your last viewed events even with no connectivity.
To access the new Calendar, head to google.com/calendar/gp for normal gmail users or  google.com/m/a/yourdomain for Google Apps users.
Why Still WebApps?
Google’s response:
“Well, from a product perspective, web apps allow us to iterate quickly, so users benefit because they will see new features appear in the browser without having to download anything. We can experiment rapidly by learning how people use the features and then choose whether to invest further in that direction or move on. Using the browser as a delivery platform also means that users will see new feature releases happening more frequently because we can maximize our engineering efficiency by sharing code across device families. Looking at this release of Gmail, there is 90%+ code share between the Android and iPhone experience. As new devices come on the market with high-end browsers, most of the work is already done.”
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
