Googleness
August 25th, 2005 by JoshAs always, new stuff coming out of Google today and yesterday:
- For those of us who use Gmail as a backend to our own domain email address (e.g. all my @skaroff.com emails get forwarded to a Gmail account), Google has introduced multiple account support. Just go to Settings > Accounts in Gmail and you can add multiple email addresses. Now when you compose a message you can select what account you’re sending from and that address is what shows up in the From field. Finally no more relying on the Reply-To field.
AND Gmail appears to now be open to anyone. No more invitations required. Though you do seem to need a mobile phone…
- I’ve yet to try it, but they’ve upgraded Google Desktop to version 2 beta and added a bunch of features. It now features a sidebar with news, web clippings, weather, email, etc and a plug-in API to allow third party developers to create add ons. On top of that it indexes your hard drive providing instantaneous search of everything on your hard drive and the web at once. Naturally there are privacy concerns, but as Kottke writes, this could be the start of something big.
- Finally, while I wasn’t initially impressed with the client itself, yesterday Google released the initial version of Google Talk, their Gmail integrated instant messaging and voice conferencing platform. The best part is it’s built on the open Jabber protocol so if you use Gaim, Trillian, Adium, or any number of other IM programs that support Jabber, you can get right on the network without any additional software. Ben Guild has instructions on how to set it up.
