The idea is relatively simple. The Priority Inbox component watches your e-mail, what you read and reply to, what you delete and other signals and tries to ‘learn’ what you consider important. It then separates your Inbox into 3 sections: Important (at the top naturally), the Starred items, and Everything Else.
We treat computers and other devices like people: we empathize with them, argue with them, and form bonds with them. We even lie to them to protect their feelings.
After being tutored by a computer, half of the participants were asked about the computer’s performance by the computer itself and the other half were asked by an identical computer across the room. Remarkably, the participants gave significantly more positive responses to the computer that asked about itself than they did to the computer across the room. These weren’t overly sensitive people: They were graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering, all of whom insisted that they would never be polite to a computer.
Guess where you can now make a phone call from? Gmail. Yes, Gmail. If you’ve been using video chat already, then you are already set up for making calls. If not, you’ll have to take a minute or two to install a plugin.
Until the end of the year, calls to the US and Canada are free, and calls to other countries start at $0.02 per minute. Naturally, we have to mention Skype as they’re a direct competitor, and Google’s rates are surprisingly low and beat Skype’s.
Security company Nmap, decided to toy with one of their scripts which pulls back favicons from websites and turn it into a map of all the icons it found in the top million. Surprisingly, only about 328k were found. What was more interesting was how they arrange it into a huge image with the size of each site’s icon drawn proportional to its traffic.
Google is testing out ‘live as-you-type search results’. At least that’s what I’m calling it. Google calls it ’streaming’. So far, this is not available to everyone, nor is it clear that it will be. Although with such a bells-and-whistles type feature, it’s hard not to see it becoming standard.
We all really relate to movies, don’t we? We jump to see movie-versions of books and compelling news stories. Well how about a movie version of the origins of Facebook? Well, that’s actually coming to a movie theater near you this Fall. It’s called “The Social Network“. The trailer is after the jump.
But not to be left out, some other aspiring, comedic filmmakers have put out their own versions of ‘trailers’ for movies about YouTube and now Twitter!
Paul Graham writes about what he felt went wrong at Yahoo. He has first-hand experience – his company, Viaweb, was bought by Yahoo and he worked there for a while.
Google’ing is definitely becoming a bigger part of everyone’s lives. Just take this story on the Google Blog about people using the search engine to find health information.
I particularly love the first one about the woman and her father who googled (is it a common verb now?) how to deliver a baby. And did!
After last week’s New York Times story about Google and Verizon getting into bed to (presumably) discuss flaunting the net neutrality convention, Google was quick to respond that they were doing no such thing. Verizon and Google then quickly followed that up with a press conference today to further repudiate the claim and have also published a joint policy proposal backing an ‘open Internet’. This proposal even includes enforceable prohibition of traffic favoritism.
Now, what they’re saying quietly is that wireless and wired will get separate treatment. In a related op-ed piece, Robert Cringely thinks that while Google and Verizon may be publicly backing net neutrality, they may still be getting together to help each other out, possibly with data centers in shipping containers plopped right down next to Verizon data centers and major Internet access points. Sounds crazy, but isn’t.
Who to believe? Time will tell. Us little end-consumer folks can only hope it works out well for us.
Another one of those ‘at last’ features: Google now has a multiple account sign-in feature, so you don’t need to use a different browser or logout-and-login in order to check a different Google account.
For now, this feature only works with a select few G-services, but they include Gmail, Calendar, Reader & Voice.
Be careful though with this feature – it’s not exactly trivial, so you’ll want to read the help on it. By the way, if you’d rather not use this, there’s a neat Greasemonkey Script called Google Account Multi-Login that works similarly.
Google’ing is definitely becoming a bigger part of everyone’s lives. Just take 
