The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘inbox’

This morning, Google is making a slight update to Wave to help users unclog their inbox from public waves. Previously, you could see public waves in your inbox, which was fairly annoying. Now for a wave to appear in your inbox, you need to “follow” the wave.

When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. But when you see a public wave that you would like to get updates on and monitor the conversation, you can chose to follow it by hitting the follow button in the wave panel toolbar. You can also archive waves, which will removes waves from your inbox. When there is an update to an archived wave, it will appear in your inbox again. And you can switch between following and unfollowing a wave as much and as often as you like.

Google says the “unfollow” feature replaces the mute command. You can still find waves that you are not following by searching for them or if you have organized them into saved searches or folders. The feature certainly gives your more control over your inbox, which is always a good thing. Google needs to continue adding more intuitive features to help users better understand the innovative, but confusing communications product.

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Look what just showed up in our inbox: the trailer for Beaterator , Rockstar and Timbaland’s PSP and iPhone effort to bring the joy and excitement of beaterating to a new generation of Pete Rocks. Hopefully this video explains, once and for all, that, no, Beaterator isn’t a “music game,” but rather a music creator , à la Ableton Live.

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Video: This is the Beaterator trailer

Sorry for the delay, kids. It’s been a little busy around CG HQ. Without further ado, here are the winners of the Target exclusive Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Superion action figure

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Contest Winners: Target exclusive Hasbro Transformers Superion

When Microsoft announced at E3 that you’d soon be able to buy, earn, and win props for your Xbox Live Avatar, they also disclosed that there was a terminal tucked away somewhere in their booth where you could sign yourself up for an exclusive E3 trophy. It wasn’t really “hidden” per se, but it was absurdly hard to find

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E3 Trophy avatar props start hitting inboxes

Son of a gun-diddily-un. Just as I’m about to leave the house to fix my uncle’s broken computer—doesn’t it suck being “the computer guy” in the family?—I come across this great interview . It’s from The Sound of Young America, a public radio program based in L.A., and is with the music critic of the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot.

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Author of Ripped, Greg Kot, says the music industry only has itself to blame for piracy

When it comes to email, less is more. So I applaud Gmail’s efforts to try to reduce all the unwanted emails in my inbox. Its latest attempt to make it easier to unsubscribe from unwanted email newsletters is well-intentioned, but falls flat on its face in its current form. When you report a newsletter as spam, you may now see the notification box above asking you if you want to automagically unsubscribe as well. You would click “Unsubscribe and report as spam” and Gmail will unsubscribe for you.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, that is because it is. First of all, it only works for messages which include a “List-Unsusbcribe” header in the email with an accompanying “mailto” URL. No self=respecting spammer would include those. But wait, it gets worse. The feature is purposely unactivated for known spammers. Brad Taylor, writes on the Gmail Blog:

This only works for some senders right now. We’re actively encouraging senders to support auto-unsubscribe — we think 100% should. We won’t provide the unsubscribe option on messages from spammers: we can’t trust that they’ll actually unsubscribe you, and they might even send you more spam. So you’ll only see the unsubscribe option for senders that we’re pretty sure are not spammers and will actually honor your unsubscribe request. We’re being pretty conservative about which senders to trust in the beginning; over time, we hope to offer the ability to unsubscribe from more email.

Just to repeat that: the unsubscribe-from-spam-newsletters feature does not work for known spam. Okay, I guess that makes sense. It’s a losing battle, and spammers will obviously not cooperate. But why then combine this feature with the report-spam button in teh first place?

The Gmail team should separate the two functions. It should just make an unsubscribe button appear on email newsletters which contain the correct header information. I get annoyed at all the email newsletters that come into my inbox, but they are not all spam. Some of them I even subscribed to myself in moments of weakness, although most of them I have no idea how they start appearing in my inbox. But even for the unwanted ones, I realize it is not necessarily the publisher of those email newsletters who signed me up. And not all of them deserve being labeled as spam. I just want an easy way to unsubscribe.

Can you give that to me, Gmail?

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Comedy Central’s Reno 911! Season 6 in Stores 7/7! Uploaded by wiredset . - Full seasons and entire episodes online. Without further ado, here are the winners of the Reno 911! Season Six DVD box sets .

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Contest Update: Winners of Reno 911!

With the flood of “Hello my dear” and “YOU ARE WINNER” emails in my inbox every morning, I’m actually beginning to tire of the never-ending variety presented by spam. But it’s mail like this that renews my faith in the bots and non-native speakers variating these strange messages

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I never get tired of spam like this: “Purchase Chainsaws”

One almost surefire way to find if a new feature is on the verge of launching is to dig through code. That’s exactly what led to finding a reference to something called “Magic Inbox,” in Gmail. But what is it? Well, it could just be another one of those nifty, but small new features that Google loves to roll out in Gmail Labs at breakneck speed. But there’s a chance it’s something much, much bigger.

Specifically, Google Operating System, which did the digging, believes that the feature likely is a way to sort your Gmail inbox by your social graph. The two references to “friends” in the code, seems to lend some credence to this. Presumably, this would allow you to better filter your inbox based on if you have specified the emailer as a contact. As someone who gets bombarded by email everyday, most of which is not from people I actually know, I would weep with joy if such a feature were implemented. And so would my mom, as she may actually get emails back from me were that the case.

Of course, others have been working on this same idea as well. Yahoo has been saying for a while that it wants to use your inbox as a part of your social graph. Microsoft’s Hotmail has been working on things in the area as well. But given all the work Google has been doing recently to tighten up its social graph across its huge network of services, a social filter in Gmail could be very, very useful.

Users are likely to have security concerns about this as well. Some people want their email client to be completely private and not a part of the social graph. Of course, Google has already been using Gmail as a key starting point for your social graph for a while now, even if you didn’t realize it. Well over a year ago, Google it rolled out its social features to Google Reader, pulling in who it thought your friends were based on who you emailed in Gmail.

This proved to be an awful idea as people you email aren’t necessarily your friends. Google eventually rolled out several updates to this feature to allow users to better tailor their relationships. And that would obviously be a key part of a Gmail social filter as well. You need to be able to separate out your actual friends from those who you simply have contacted in the past, or maybe even correspond with a lot.

While Google hasn’t exactly nailed the social features, it’s pretty clear that the company is thinking about them — a lot. And that your Google Contacts, which started as a part of Gmail, but have since been spun out, are a key part of it.

Google I/O, its large developer conference is taking place next week. Google is likely to use the event to unveil some key new things it has been working on. Could that be a “magic inbox,” which is also called “icebox inbox” in the code? We’ll be there to find out. Maybe Gmail will even leave beta — but probably not.

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Is the IPO drought over? Not quite. But OpenTable’s successful IPO today will give tech startups and VCs a sign of hope that you can still go public eventually if you have a real business. On a day when the Nasdaq is down 2 percent, OpenTable is up 40 percent from its offering price of $20 (which itself kept moving up from $12 to $14 initially). The stock opened at $24, and was trading at around $27.40 last time I checked. With 21.6 million shares outstanding, that gives OpenTable a market capitalization of $605 million on its first day of trading. (The company itself cleared $60 million in the offering).

This is an extremely healthy IPO. Opentable is not a blowout Internet company. But it is a solid Internet company that matters. It pulled in $55.8 million in revenues last year and a net loss of $1 million (largely due to expansion-related costs). In the first quarter of 2009, it managed to turn a net profit of $366,000 on revenues of $16 million. (For a deeper financial analysis, see this earlier post).

OpenTable delivers reservation management software to restaurants through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues. In that sense it is in the same class of software companies as Salesforce—selling software as a service over the Web to business customers. But it also has a friendly (free) consumer-facing side. It is yet another example of enterprise and consumer apps merging in the cloud.

So what does it take for a tech company to IPO these days? If OpenTable is the new measuring stick, a company needs at least $50 million in revenues, have at least one quarter of profits, customers with proven loyalty, and solid growth potential. In other words, it needs to be a real business.

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