Initial reaction? Well, it works. But so does Meebo, and a host of other web based IM services. So whats new? Clearly, the archival of chat transcripts is a big plus. I wish I had this feature common across ALL my IM accounts. Right now I just have to use Kopete’s history plugin, and keep histories synced across all my different machines with [[http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/|Unison]] and its a pain.

But its good to see that Google is trying hard to open up Google talk. I just checked whether I could add my Google Talk account to my regular Jabber account (@jabber.org) and it works! And with all the work behind [[http://code.google.com/apis/talk/about.html|libjingle]], soon all of the IMs would be able to provide voice chat through a single, open, standardized protocol (I believe Kopete already has implemented support for Jingle in their development branch). I wonder how Skype will react to this development — my guess is that they will emphasize more on the telephony and VoIP aspects of their service.

Gmail now allows you to specify alternate “From” addresses. In Gmail, go to Settings -> Accounts

This is //so// cool!

So I was talking about Google. Hell, everyone’s talking about Google. Just look at them: first the search engine, then desktop search, then blogging, then photo management, then gmail, then google maps, then google scholar, then local search, then sattelites, then video searches. Using innovative user interfaces built using existing technology, Google has taken web applications to an entirely new level. Google maps and gmail are just as interactive and perhaps more responsive than most of our desktop applications. Combine that with the fact that in the near future, a signifant fraction of Internet users will be connected using broadband and we’ve potentially got the next **big** thing happening.

No wonder a lot of people are worried. Grapevine has it that Google might be working on a whole slew of web based applications. If Google can do for desktop publishing and home office what it did for maps and mail, it could revolutionize the desktop market. Consider this scenario (this idea is not original, I read it somewhere, but can’t locate the source now. Please let me know if you find it): you have just one software on your desktop: a web browser. The rest of the stuff is hosted on Google: Google Mail, Google Photos, Google Maps, Google Office, Google Telephony. The cost of your desktop goes down tremendously! all you need is a thin client able to run a browser, and a good Internet connection. You don’t even need a hard drive, Google stores everything for you. Best of all, you’ve got instant accesibility from all over the world for free. Would you even need a laptop now?

Here are some interesting recent reads on Google:

* [[http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,1050065,00.html|Search and Destroy (on Fortune.com)]]
* [[http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050322.gtflgooglemar22/BNStory/Technology/|The God Good Google]]
* [[http://adamjh.blogspot.com/2005/05/graduation.html | Graduation speech]]
* [[http://www.betanews.com/article/Google_Preps_Video_Distribution_Service/1113441557|Video distribution platform]]

However, I did things a bit different. My requirements were simple: backup all email, both incoming and outgoing, and make optimal use of Gmail’s search capability. So, I create two Gmail accounts: diwaker.received and diwaker.sent

For incoming mail, I put the following in my .procmailrc: (for explaination on how this works, see ”man procmailrc” and ”man procmailex”)


:0 c
! diwaker.received@gmail.com


For outgoing mail, (I use KMail as my client), I simply specified diwaker.sent@gmail.com as my default BCC address, and thats it, I’m all set!

Just thought some of you might find it useful :)

PS: those email addresses are not real, in case this page is harvested by bots :-D

Thanks to Gmail, a lot of non-Gmail users are also going to be able to enjoy larger storage space for their inboxes. Yahoo! is deploying larger inboxes for both free and premium email members over the summers. A mostly obscure Aventure Mail is offering 2GB for free for the first 10000 customers.

I thought the way people were buying and selling and swapping Gmail accounts was almost ridiculous. I mean, Gmail is so hot simply because it symbolises “cool” — I’m not sure how many people are after Gmail from the point of view of its utility or functionality. But where is all this going to lead? I mean what after 1GB? And how does this impact spam?

With Yahoo’s anti-spam proposal gaining momentum, we’re hoping that the amount of spam will reduce in the future. But it seems to me that more storage for inboxes might also imply more spam as well. Though that relationship is quite obscure, its more like a gut feeling. As Gmail suggests, archive, don’t delete.

Most people I know hate spam because they have to delete the stuff manually. If spam filtering really becomes effective, at what point will spam stop being a PITA, if at all it ever will. If you look at the most popular networking applications through the decades, starting in the 1970′s, you’ll see that email has been a constant contender. And it still remains, and will probably remain for the next decade as well.