New Florence. New Renaissance.

Gmail evolves

Gmail is getting a long due overhaul

Wired describes some of the new features

The Snooze feature will help you declutter your inbox by hiding messages for a set amount of time. For example, if you're reading your mail on your phone at home and notice messages requiring the sort of lengthy response that benefits from a full keyboard, you can snooze the messages until morning.

automatically generated Smart Replies from the mobile version of Gmail, first introduced in 2016, to the full web version. This feature uses artificial intelligence to draft simple replies to emails.

Nudges will remind you about emails that you haven't responded to.

 

Firefox Quantum

The new Firefox actually manages to evolve the entire browser experience, recognizing the multi-device, ultra-mobile lives we all lead and building a browser that plays along. It's a browser built with privacy in mind, automatically stopping invisible trackers and making your history available to you and no one else. It's better than Chrome, faster than Chrome, smarter than Chrome. It's my new go-to browser.

The speed thing is real, by the way. Mozilla did a lot of engineering work to allow its browser to take advantage of all the multi-core processing power on modern devices, and it shows.

Wired

The changing face of popular websites

The Washington Post has a nice analysis of the changes in Top 20 sites over the last two decades

“The first year here is 1996, when the web was … young. Several of the top 20 sites were college sites, thanks to colleges having invested early in the internet. AOL and Yahoo were there too, as they have been ever since. Mostly, however, the list is garbage nonsense like “GNN” and “Teleport,” which we don’t even know what they are. Notice the ascent of Excite and CNET. They’ll be interesting in the next part of the graph.”

Click on graph to expand

Meeker’s annual Internet report

The always prolific Mary Meeker, now with Kleiner Perkins, is out with her annual report. Prolific as in slide below and 196 others – available for download here

“The State of Apps”

Wakoopa, an application discovery platform, shared the results of their analysis of applications based on 525,000 hours of usage tracked across 75,000 users.

The title is a bit misleading. It only covers desktop and web apps but is full of analysis by time of day, by user age etc.

Here is one view of the data.

An “American Idol” for Startups

 "The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second."

Digits - WSJ Blog

"One web startup you could not live without"

Om Malik surveys a group of his followers on Twitter (so don't generalize to rest of world), and asks them to pick one web service they find most useful - Google and Yahoo! properties excluded

"Three startups that got a lot of mentions were: Evernote, FriendFeed and Mint.com. Sure there were mentions of Digg and Facebook, but those three got most mentions. Remember The Milk, Xobni and Dropbox were other names that were mentioned."

GMail Labs: Experimental features

 Features to make GMail even more helpful such as Goggles, which makes you solve math to make sure you are still awake or sober before you send mail ; the addict feature forces you to take a 15 minute break by blocking your screen; and still others useful such as the recent addition of texting from a chat session.

But the emphasis is on experimental - as Google says these features are experimental and:

• They may break at any time.
• Similarly, they may disappear temporarily or permanently.
• They may work so well that they graduate and become regular features.

Web 2.0 and Football

"How good is the system? Good enough that the New York Jets signed an exclusive contract with the company that prohibits any other team in the AFC East from signing up to use it this year. The software passed an unexpected test when Brett Favre was traded to the Jets right before training camp and needed a crash course in the Jets offense. The team credited Huddle with getting the legend up to date. The Cornhuskers, and a handful of high school teams, are also using the system.

At the heart of Huddle is the ability to watch game footage from the comfort of one's couch. Teams capture and log their video using their standard methods; Huddle seamlessly, and immediately, offers the video on its shared site. Just like the Blackberry freed the businessman from the cube, Huddle lets players leave the video room. Coaches can log into their accounts and tag video with telestrations, voice, and text. They can then send those clips to players for their review or even create tests, to check just how well a player knows the playbook or realizes his in-game mistakes. Diagrams can be created using Xbox-like technology and then linked to video examples."

Popular Science

Here's NY Times coverage

see also my earlier post on other technologies in Football

"The Birth of the Internet"

Courtesy of Om Malik, I saw this National Science Foundation gallery of videos and photos cataloging milestones of the evolution of the WWW.