It seems as though Gmail Mobile went through a serious update within the last day. The previous mobile version was quite ugly and pretty much makes you want to stay away. The new version is true to the spirit of Gmail with an intuitive interface and a nice clean layout.

This comes the same day Google announced the iPhone version of Google Calendar. It looks like Google is getting deeper and deeper into developing applications that belong on mobile devices — it’s too bad data plans, at least in Canada, will run you about $100 a month.

[Thanks David, Google Operating System]

Google just launched a new version of Google Calendar specifically designed for the iPhone. To check it out, visit the calendar.google.com from your iPhone browser, or download the Firefox addon that lets you update your UserAgent to make websites think you are using one.

Google Calendar for the iPhone is quite simple and is a lot easier to use than the normal mobile interface. Here is a screenshot:

Gooogle Reader for iPhone
The second unannounced application for the iPhone is Google Reader. Again, it is much sexier than the original mobile interface for the service. It has a distinct iPhone feel and I’m sure it will be used often by iPhone users. This comes after Google made a version of Google Reader for the Wii that makes good use of the Wiimote.

Google seems to be launching iPhone apps left and right — maybe the actual search engine or Gmail will be next? To give the new iPhone interface a try, download “User Agent Switcher” for Firefox and change your user agent temporarily to this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

[via Gmail blog]

After discovering that Google is testing a new version of Gmail yesterday, I decided to take a closer look at more of the snippets that need to be translated for Gmail. Most of them seem to be straight forward and correspond to existing features, however there are some interesting ones that don’t seem to fit anywhere.

Here are two new features that will be launched either before, or after Gmail 2.0:

Google Gears integration
It was hinted at in recent reports, but there has been no hard evidence of Google’s plans to integrate Google Gears with Gmail until now. Two snippets of text are in the translation queue that, to me, prove beyond any doubt that Gears will be a part of Gmail. The two snippets of text are “Gears not installed” and “Disable Local Store” as seen in the screenshots below.

View account activity
Have you ever had the suspicion that someone has been logging into your email account? Or do you just want peace of mind knowing that you are the only one accessing your account? You will soon be able to see how many computers or browser sessions are currently in your account and their IP address. In addition to real-time account activity, it appears you will be able to see past account activity too. Here are some of the snippets of text that will be used: “This account is currently being used in {number} other locations”, and “Last account activity: at IP [details]”.

Gmail is due for some serious updates — it’s been too long since anything has changed on the service, and you know its developers aren’t sitting around wondering what to do. I don’t have any guesses as to the timeframe for the release of these features or Gmail 2.0, but this is definitely a promising sign of good things to come.

Gmail was launched on April 1, 2004, and has revolutionized the way many of us use email. The interface has remained largely untouched since it launched, but get ready, it’s soon to undergo a change in what they describe as a “New Version”. Only a select few people have access to use the new interface — mainly employees and trusted people outside the company called “Trusted Testers“.

Unfortunately, there are no leaked screenshots to look at yet, but if you are one of the lucky few testers, I would love to take a peek.

How do I know they are working on a “New Version”? Well, Google lets every-day users who are fluent in both English and another language translate small snippets of English text into the language of their choice. This is how they can offer services in several languages without spending a dime on professional translators. Unfortunately, exposing sensitive information in this manner makes it hard to keep a secret.

One of my readers, who wishes to remain anonymous, stumbled across an interesting snippet of text (which I confirmed exists) spilling the beans on a new version of Gmail that is either currently being tested, or about to be released to testing in short order. It’s small, but telling — here is a screenshot of the text he was asked to translate.

What do you hope the new version of Gmail has in store for us? Do you think the transformation will be as large as the one Google Docs recently went through?

Google held a super secret meeting with a select few developers behind closed doors yesterday — I guess the NDA wasn’t enough to keep attendees from talking to Michael Arrington though. The meeting, according to Michael, outlined Googles plans to develop an open API that will eventually expose social graphs to any application that wants it.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

Google knows our relationships well. It is relatively trivial for them to analyze data found in their many services like Orkut and Gmail — both of wich give Google a pretty clear picture of who we know. We’re already seeing signs of social applications coming from Google with applications like “Google Shared Stuff” that I blogged about yesterday. In fact, I think Google Shared Stuff is the first Google application that uses this top secret API that will be publicly launched on November 5th.

Soon, hopefully anyone will be able to create services that mash up these exposed social networks — if it’s as easy to use as I hope, we could see a new breed of social network sites crop up sometime soon after the 5th of November.

No, that’s not a comment — it’s the name of a new service that Google silently rolled out today that can be found here. Tony Ruscoe on the Google Blogoscoped blog speaks of a new “share” button in Google Video that takes you to the new service.

It’s possible to view the most popular shared stuff, also available filtered by tag and domain, or shared stuff from a particular user. At the moment, many of the shared items are from people testing this service, and I’ve also seen quite a few “adult” links and images in there, so it will be interesting to see how useful these pages are once more people start to share links.

The first thing you will see when you visit the site is a list of “stuff” people you know have shared, and things like the number of times those particular items have been viewed. This is actually quite an interesting idea. Patrick Altoft, whose blog I found using Google Shared Stuff, gives us five reasons that we should all give the new service a try. He brings up a very good point — it’s like signing up for Digg and having 500 real “friends” out of the gate. Unlike most social sites, you don’t have to build your network because it already exists through your Gmail contacts.

It’s not hard to imagine, if the planets line up, that this service could be a fierce competitor, or “complimentary service”, to Digg.

Along with its new name (Google Docs & Spreadsheets is now just Google Docs), users are now free to upload Powerpoint presentations or start a new presentation by starting from scratch. That said, I am wondering why Google released such an incomplete product? It’s basically useless for business users who want to make professional looking presentations. This is so far away from a Powerpoint killer that it’s embarrassing I thought it might have had a chance.

Where do I start? Well, first off, there is no support for exporting a document to Powerpoint or as .odp (the open document format for presentations). I guess this isn’t truly a complimentary service to other office suites anymore like they have repeated over and over. Uploading Powerpoint presentations is basically useless too — it butchered the one I tested with.

Most companies have their own Powerpoint template they use to make sure presentations all have the same look and feel. And with that said — don’t bother trying to use it. There is no way to create your own template or upload one that already exists. If you have images that make up your template, you can add them to each slide but they have to be less than 2MB otherwise you will be out of luck. Oh, by the way, your presentation can’t exceed 10MB either.

How about those awful transitions and sounds that your boss likes to use? Well, you will be glad to know that Google Docs doesn’t support transitions or sound at all. There will be no more bouncing text, no fading images, and no screeching sliding text if your company decides to use Google Presentations. In fact, that might actually be a selling feature?

Oh, and bulleted points are sometimes nice to do one at a time — but you can’t do that either. You have to create a copy of the previous slide and add an extra point to emulate click events — who has time to do that?

It baffles me that they decided to launch this product without support for any of the most common features in most presentation software. What do you think? Will this tool useful for anybody?

A few months ago Justin Rosenstein, a developer on the GDrive project at Google, accepted a position at Facebook. He is just one of the many Googlers who recently found greener grass at the very popular social network site.

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven’t already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.

Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while — the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life. — Justin Rosenstein

Justin was the product manager for Google Pages and was also listed as the developer contact for Platypus (GDrive) in the leaked login page for the service. Hints suggest that Gdrive has been ready for launch a couple years already — maybe this is a sign that developers working on that project became frustrated enough to leave the company? This happened most publicly with the Dodgeball founders who saw their application become stagnant in the hands of Google.

[Thanks Nate!]

Unconfirmed reports of an offline Gmail offering started making their rounds yesterday — it looks like they began with this Hindustan Times article. If these rumors are true, offline support powered by Google Gears will be launched this year. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that makes it possible for developers to take their web applications offline where it makes sense.

Currently, Google Reader is their only service using Gears, but it seems to be a natural fit for several other services that can currently only be used while connected. An offline component for services like Google Docs, Picasa Web, Blogger and Gmail would definitely make sense.

It will be interesting to see how Google makes this work though — depending on the number (and size) of messages in your inbox, the amount of space required to store them could be up to 3GB (plus any additional storage you have purchased). Without full-text storage of every message in your account, things like search cannot be included in an offline version of Gmail, and clients like Outlook will remain the preferred choice of business users.

Disk space is cheap, but this problem is likely why Gmail doesn’t currently use Gears. The same holds true for services like Google Docs too — depending on the number of documents, large amounts of local storage may be required to launch an offline version that works as users expect.

Microsoft’s proposal for the fast track of the OOXML standard was recently shot down by the ISO. Google concludes that Microsoft’s OOXML should never be standardized due to things like reliance on proprietary elements and simply not enough time to review the >6000 page document that outlines the standard.

• for a specification of this size, it was not given enough time for review;
• the undocumented features of OOXML prevents its implementation by other vendors;
• dependencies on other Microsoft proprietary formats and their technical defects makes it difficult to fully implement; and
• the overall cost for vendors of implementing multiple standards (hence the lack of OOXML implementations in the marketplace).

If the ISO was to put as much effort into approving this document, it should take them 18 years as opposed to 2 for the ODF standard (which, according to Google, accomplishes almost exactly the same thing). Microsoft is pushing for this redundant standard because it “gives vendors and users a choice” — however Google rebuts by saying consumer choice is actually damaged by the existence of multiple standards. This is obvious if you look at past examples of incompatible standards that had the same function (ie. Betamax)

I’m not certain if this development actually prevents OOXML from ever becoming a standard, but regardless, it’s a huge win for the Open Document Format (ODF).