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 technology behind sending an email has become an afterthought to most of us. It’s not because the process isn’t potentially interesting, it’s because email has become such a huge part of our daily lives. Basically, we take it for granted.

Google decided to share more about what goes on behind the scenes with “The Story of Send“, which is a website accompanied by a cool video that tells you more than you ever thought you needed to know about the process of sending email.

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

If you’re anything like me, you send and receive a lot of emails every day. But have you ever wondered where your message goes after you hit “send?” How does an email travel from your computer to your friend’s smartphone across the country or around the world?

We’re answering those questions with Story of Send, a new site that gives you a behind-the-scenes look into how all that virtual information makes its journey through the real world—from your Internet service provider to our data centers and beyond. Along the way, you’ll discover everything from where we filter for spam and scan for viruses to how we’re minimizing our impact on the environment through energy efficiency and renewable power.

This behind-the-scenes look is an extension of Google Green, the part of the company that focuses on using renewable energy to power its data centers.

Head on over to “The Story of Send” and follow the interactive timeline that Google has designed to enlighten you on how some of its backend processes work:

Be sure to catch the cool video, too:

Up until now, email notifications for Google+ were about as useful as an email notification from Google+. All you were able to do was view the content and click through to interact with the post. Yep, it was pretty useless.

Over time, the Gmail team has added more social functionality, such as Google+ history to its people widgets, along with photo and video thumbnails.

Today, the Gmail team has announced that email notifications from Google+ are now fully functional, meaning you’ll be able to interact with the content that you’re sent right from your inbox.

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

On the desktop, in addition to adding people to circles, and viewing recent Google+ content in the people widget, we’re now making Google+ notification emails in Gmail completely interactive:

- You can view, comment on, and +1 posts from inside your inbox
- Your comments appear in the Google+ stream in real-time, and
- Responses from others instantly appear in Gmail, as part of the notification message

I’ve personally turned off the email notifications since they weren’t very useful to me. Google+ is a real-time service and I never really got the point of flooding my inbox with things that I had to click.

The fact that I can now interact with the post changes everything and I’ll probably be turning the notifications back on. By letting me +1 or comment on a post from within my inbox, I don’t have to be taken out of my flow to be social.

It seems like some of the thoughts behind Wave and Buzz are sneaking their way back into Google products, in a good way. The idea of having a fully interactive and collaborative environment surrounding you at all times is the way of the future.

In my opinion, Google is doing an outstanding job of weaving all of its products together without making you change the way you do things.

I thoroughly enjoy the fact that most teams at Google have a “Labs” section of their product which allow them to try out new features and ideas in a live environment. Sometimes these ideas catch on, and sadly, sometimes they don’t.

Today, the Gmail team announced that one super popular labs feature was making its way to the actual product, and that’s automatic message translation. It’s a handy feature that translates emails on the fly without you having to know what language it’s even in.

This is a feature that I’ve been enjoying on Google’s Chrome browser, making it extremely seamless to translate content on the fly. By using this tool in Gmail, you’ll be able to answer in the sender’s native language as well. Here’s what the team had to say about the feature’s graduation today:

Since message translation was one of the most popular labs, we decided it was time to graduate from Gmail Labs and move into the real world. Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email. The next time you receive a message in a language other than your own, just click on Translate message in the header at the top of the message.

In case you’ve never tried the feature out, here’s what it looks like in action:

The way that you automatically feel bi-lingual thanks to this feature is almost like magic.

In addition to the translate tool coming out of Gmail labs, two other features have made their way into the full product as well; Title Tweaks and Smart Mute. The Title Tweaks feature changes the title in your browser’s tab to tell you that you have new messages and Smart Mute keeps those really loud and obnoxious threads out of your inbox.

Unfortunately, along with new features, the Gmail team must retire some older labs items that never really took off in popularity. Those features are:

Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats and SMS in Chat gadget. Please note that the SMS in Chat lab is not being retired, just the gadget associated with it.

I’m actually quite sad about the retirement of Mail Googles, which in case you forgot was a tool that tried to keep you from sending emails too late at night when you were drunk. When clicking the “send” button on a new email, you would be presented with a few mathematical problems that I couldn’t seem to figure out sober sometimes:

Goodbye Mail Googles, thanks for saving me from many an embarrassment.

I’ve been using Gmail for as long as I can remember, and unfortunately I have more unread emails than I care to admit. The service is my lifeblood, but one thing that’s missing is the ability to gain insight into how active I am in sending and receiving email. Is there a certain time of day where I get more emails than others? That’s the type of thing I’d love to know.

A Developer Programs Engineer on the Gmail team, Saurabh Gupta, has posted a note about a neat little Google Apps script called “Gmail Meter” which will send you a report at the beginning of every month with interesting data about your email interactions, as well as the ability to set up your own custom reports.

It’s not an official Google app mind you, but it seems like a pretty robust script. Installing it requires you to set up a new spreadsheet within Google Docs, using the same account that you have for Gmail.

Out of the box, the app will show you:

- Statistics on the volume of email you send and receive, along with breakdowns of how many messages you’ve starred and marked important
- Daily traffic estimates showing you which days are your heaviest “email days”
- Categories of emails which will tell you how you’re using Gmail labels to manage your messages
- How long it takes for you to respond to an email the first time, showing you how efficient, or inefficient you are with email
- Word count tabulations which can give you an overall sense of if you’re too wordy

The installation process requires you to go to Tools > Script Gallery. Search for “Gmail Meter” and click Install within your newly set up spreadsheet. Here’s a quick video tutorial that will take you through the steps:

Once you’re all set up, you’ll start getting emails at the beginning of the month which will keep you on the straight and narrow as far as managing email goes. Who knows, it might turn you into an email pro. Or in my case, it might scare me away from using email completely.

Hopefully Google will integrate something like this into the Gmail product so that we can get stats in real-time and not have to install any scripts.

As expected, more of Google’s products are getting the social treatment with Google+ functionality. The latest project to get further “Plussed” is Gmail, and the features are actually quite handy.

The “people” widget that shows up when you hover over one of your friends in Gmail, will now include thumbnails of recent photos and videos they’ve posted on Google+, along with the other recent updates they’ve shared.

Here’s what the team had to say about the feature:

Gmail and Google+ are both great places to share images and videos with your friends, and we’re always looking for ways to make this easier. We’ve been showing recent Google+ posts in the people widget for some time, and a few weeks ago we added the ability for you to share YouTube videos from your email to your Google+ stream.

Today, we’re expanding recent Google+ posts in the people widget to include thumbnails of the photos and videos shared in the post. We’re also making it easier to share inline images in emails — just hover your mouse over the image in your email and you will see an option to share it on Google+. We’re still rolling out the update, so if you don’t see it yet, sit tight.

Here’s what the people widget might look like once the feature hits your Gmail account:

The ability to share an inline image from your inbox by just hovering over it is a handy addition to the share button that Gmail added for Google+ last year.

This is further proof that Google is all about social, and there’s no turning back now. It’s also further proof that when people are using any Google product, they’ll also be a Google+ user, whether they visit the destination site or not.

It appears that some users are having issues with Gmail right now and are unable to access their accounts.

Upon visiting the Google Mail status page, you can see that the issue has been verified and is being worked on currently. The message on the page reads:

4/17/12 9:42 AM
We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly.

If you’re trying to access your hosted Gmail account, you might find this error:

The outages are being reported on Twitter rapidly, with some people taking this opportunity to make light of the situation and ponder moving to another service:

Gmail is down. SETTING UP A HOTMAIL ACCOUNT BRB

— Forrest Kobayashi (@forrestkoba) April 17, 2012

If you came to twitter to find if #gmail is down. It is.

— Sarah Evans (@prsarahevans) April 17, 2012

It goes without saying that many companies are suffering from a serious halt to productivity due to this issue. Sure, it’s only been 30 minutes so far, but with all of the time lost from people asking one another if their email is down alone, money is being lost.

UPDATE: Google has provided us with some more information, including how many are affected:

4/17/12 10:18 AM
Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 4/17/12 11:18 AM with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.
This issue is affecting less than 2% of the Google Mail user base. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail.

UPDATE 2:

4/17/12 10:24 AM
Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

A Google spokesperson has issued the following statement to us:

We’re aware that some users are experiencing an error when accessing their Gmail. We’ve implemented a fix and users should be able to access their mail shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE 3: Gmail is back. Feel free to thank Google for nearly an hour of free-time.

4/17/12 10:46 AM
The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

One of the most annoying parts of signing up for a service or app that has social features is that it usually comes along with a metric ton of notification emails. Unfortunately, most of these emails aren’t all that useful.

For the longest time, I used to set filters in Gmail to get rid of the emails that Twitter sent me in regards to who followed me, but the service has done a great job making them more useful. So in turn, I deleted the filters and start checking them out once in a while.

The Google+ email notifications were quite useless for the longest time, letting you know when someone added you to a circle but didn’t give you any other functionality past that. That changed as the Gmail team announced some nice tweaks that allow you to circle someone back directly from the email notification:

Add people to circles right from notifications in Gmail

We’ve made a small tweak that improves Circle notification messages in Gmail. From now on whenever someone adds you to a circle, you can add them back right from the Google+ notification email. Just mouse-over the “Add to Circle” button and pick the circles you want, or create a new circle. The button will show you if this person is already in your circles. Check it out and let us know what you think. #googleplusupdate

The email notification that you get now is extremely functional, giving you the list of all of your existing circles and the ability to create a new one:

If you’re a Gmail user, these changes might change your mind on whether you want to receive the notifications from here on out. I’m going to be turning them back on and giving it a shot.

Overall, Google does a great job at separating the email wheat from the email chaff.

In fact, one of the reasons I’m a rabid Gmail fan is its ability to kick junk email straight to the spam folder where it belongs so I don’t have to waste time doing that. I still check the folder regularly, just to make sure I don’t miss any important messages, but it’s rare for me to find any emails from real people in there.

Which reminds me I still need to respond to that one guy who emailed me the other day to let me know I was chosen to help him access multi-million dollar funds currently trapped in Nigeria, and could get disgustingly rich in the process.

Anyway, sometimes it’s helpful to know why certain messages were sent to the spam folder, and Google this morning announced that it will henceforth start showing a short explanation at the top of each message in the spam folder.

Thus, users can find out why it wound up there in the first place, and learn about any potentially harmful content within the message, Google says.

Needless to say, it will also be useful information for email marketers.

When we use a product daily we get used to how it looks and feels. For a product like Gmail, the experience of using it is so important since we spend hours upon hours checking our email every day.

Gmail launched its new design last November and for the most part I’m a big fan of it. I’m enjoying the return to simplicity that Google is taking with all of its products. Some parts of the new design might not be so appealing to you, and when you have to use it multiple times a day, that can be a pain.

One of the tweaks that some users were complaining about was a switch to icons within the service. Things like “refresh” are now represented with graphics instead of words:

The Gmail team has picked up on the feedback and has announced that you can now switch back to text for those buttons if you like:

Some people loved the new icons. Others, especially low vision users, found words easier to distinguish. We’ve been listening to your feedback and we now have a setting that lets you turn the icons into words. You can make the change by clicking the gear to open Settings, and changing your button labels on the General tab.

To make the change, simply click the gear button for settings and find this option on the General tab:

Once you’ve saved the change, you’ll immediately be presented with words instead of graphics:

The smallest of changes can make all the difference, especially for something as mundane as checking email all day. Nobody wants to be annoyed by it more than they already are.