Finally: E-mail scheduling coming to Gmail
No, not from Google, but from a browser plug-in called Boomerang for Gmail.

A company called Baydin sells a $14.95 product for Outlook called Boomerang for Outlook, which enables you to reschedule the delivery of e-mails you’ve received and also to schedule the sending of e-mails for some specific time in the future.

I’m sure Boomerang for Outlook, which I have not tried, adds convenience. But Outlook doesn’t need e-mail scheduling, because that functionality is already built-in.

Gmail, on the other hand, desperately needs it. Which is why Baydin’s Boomerang for Gmail will probably be very welcome. The product is a browser plug-in for both Firefox and Chrome currently in beta mode. If you sign up at the Baydin site, they’ll send you an invitation code. Or so they say. I’m still waiting for mine.

To use Boomerang, just click on a “Receive Later” button that the plug in adds. Then you select a date and time. Boomerang moves your message into Archives until the specified time, at which point it moves it back into your inbox, marks it “unread” and puts a star on it.

When in Gmail’s Compose mode, Boomerang offers a “Send Later” button. Clicking it lets you choose exactly when.

Read more @ http://www.itworld.com/internet/117967/finally-e-mail-scheduling-coming-gmail

User Problem
I’m including a Google Map on a page where users can sign up for a service. The page is accessed via SSL, and before I included the map, the entire page was transmitted securely. Now, however, browsers complain that portions of the page (the map) are transmitted insecurely. I understand the user information is still secure, but my users probably won’t.

How can I change this page so that the google map is still available and users may still interact with it, but the entire page is delivered via SSL?

Google words ..

Previously, when a Google Map was embedded in an encrypted web page, users would get a pop-up message saying the page included both secure and non-secure content. No one likes pop-up messages and the extra clicks they require

Google Solution

The Google Maps JavaScript API V2, Google Static Maps API, Google Maps API for Flash, and Google Maps API HTTP services can be accessed over a secure (HTTPS) connection by Google Maps API Premier customers. If the Google Maps APIs are used with a free Maps API key on a secure site, the browser may warn the user about non-secure objects on the screen.

Other possible tweaks

The easiest way would be to proxy the connection to Google Maps. Depending on how much the user interacts with google maps, this may be really easy or a little annoying.

You can use an SSL proxy script. I did that with a client’s site which uses the Enterprise License, and the client’s Google representative confirmed for us that it is OK to do it this way. I’m not sure if it is OK to do it with the free license, but I assume it is OK too.

Use Firefox which only shows a warning in the status bar

Have a custom link or button on the page that opens the map in a separate window. In our case the users did not want to see the map all the time. Therefore, I have the link on the relevant page and they can click it to open the map when they wish. They will still see the warning but only when they have to look at the map and not every single time they load the account page.

Implement Yahoo Maps instead, which has a simple querystring-based API to pass a location in, and retrieve an XML document containing a URL to a map image. Users can’t pan/zoom, but it’s a simple compromise, they can click a button to open a full map.

Stumped by foreign languages when you’re traveling? Google Inc. is working on software that translates text captured by a phone camera.

At a demonstration Tuesday at Mobile World Congress, a cell phone trade show in Barcelona, an engineer shot a picture of a German dinner menu with a phone running Google Inc.’s Android software. An application on the phone sent the shot to Google’s servers, which sent a translation back to the phone.

It translated “Fruhlingssalat mit Wildkrautern” as “Spring salad with wild herbs.”

There was no word on when the software would be available.

Software that translates text from pictures is already available for some phones, but generally does the processing on the phone. By sending the image to its servers for processing, Google can apply a lot more computing power, for faster, more accurate results. The phone still won’t order for you, though — you’ll have to point at the menu.

The demonstration was part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech at the trade show, the largest for the wireless industry. He said phone applications that take advantage of “cloud computing” — servers accessible through the wireless network — will bring powerful changes to the industry.

Buzz URL : http://www.google.com/buzz

Google and Facebook are on a collision course in the increasingly competitive market for social networking services.

On Tuesday, Google introduced a new service called Google Buzz, a way for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The service will compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are capturing an increasing percentage of the time people spend online.

The links shared on those social networks are also sending a growing amount of traffic to sites across the Web, potentially weakening Google’s position as the prime navigation tool on the Internet.

Separately, Facebook plans to announce on Wednesday that it is improving the live chat service on its site by allowing it to be integrated into other services like AIM, AOL’s instant messaging network, which is among the most popular in the United States.

Buzz is Google’s boldest attempt to build a social network that can compete with Facebook and Twitter. The service is built into Gmail, which already has 176 million users, according to comScore, a market research company. And Buzz comes with a built-in circle of friends, a group that is automatically selected by Google based on the people that a user communicates with most frequently in Gmail and on Google’s chat service.

Like other social services, Buzz allows users to post status updates that include text; photos from services like Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr; videos from YouTube; and messages from Twitter. Analysts say many of its features mimic those of Facebook.

“It is a direct challenge to Facebook, in particular,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst with the Altimeter Group.

Still, Buzz faces a struggle against Facebook, which recently announced, on the occasion of its sixth birthday, that it had 400 million users. Buzz also risks further overwhelming people who are struggling with Web services that generate ever-increasing amounts of information.

But Google executives said that, on the contrary, Buzz would help tackle the problem of information overload, as Google would apply its algorithms to help people find the information most relevant to them.

“The stream of messages has become a torrent,” Bradley Horowitz, vice president for product development at Google, said in an interview. “We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”

Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said that by offering social communications, which have primarily been used for entertainment purposes, Buzz would bridge the gap between work and leisure.

“Bridging those two worlds is very powerful,” Mr. Brin said at a press conference, adding that he had used Buzz to help him write an Op-Ed article for The New York Times by soliciting input from other Google employees.

Google has also woven Buzz into mobile phones, through a mobile Web site and a Google mapping application. Users will be able to see updates that friends have posted from particular spots.

Read complete story @ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/technology/internet/10social.html