Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"In all then we have a mixture of long overdue, interesting and genuinely exciting new features here. Hotmail has been something of a laughing stock in recent years, but with these major changes it looks like it won't be the butt of geeky jokes for much longer. A video preview of the new Hotmail system can be found at the link below and the upgraded service will go live worldwide "in mid-summer"."

If you are not like me, you probably use one of the free webmail services out there. And if you use Hotmail, you probably have noticed or will notice some changes that are afoot. In a world of Tweeting and Facebook, it is nice to know that the good old standby, email, has not been forgotten. Of the changes you can expect, the ones I think people will probably find most useful is the integration with social networking sites and an updated mobile interface. I, unashamedly, use Outlook as my primary email client, mostly because it does serve my needs. With that, I am also a traditionalist when it comes to email and communicating with people. I do not post things on my Facebook wall for the world to see, nor do I tweet what I had to dinner. So while all this integration is great, I am just comforted that if the major webmail providers have seen fit to keep updating their webmail clients, email is not going away!

"Yesterday I was given my Developer Preview account by the Google Wave team. To say I have been eager to try Wave out since watching the original video is something of an understatement! I felt a bit like Charlie unwrapping his chocolate bar and finding a golden ticket. OK well maybe not that excited, but you know, a brand new messaging medium in a world where I receive coming on to a thousand emails, IMs, tweets and SMS messages of day is something to get excited about."

I have seen the video and I have read the impressions that developers are now posting about Google Wave and I admit that I still have not bought into all the hype surrounding this new project by Google. To me, it looks like a mashup between email, instant messaging, threaded conversations (like you find in some forums) and a wiki. Does it look really handy and useful? Yes. Will it revolutionize the way we communicate? Well, maybe. It may just be such a foreign idea that one has to use it for a while to really appreciate what it has to offer, but reports are coming in that a public beta will not be available until September. I am looking forward to it from a work perspective as it looks like it will be a really easy to use collaboration tool, which I am finding is becoming increasingly important in today's business world. Has anyone gotten access to a developer account for Google Wave? Does it really live up to all the hype? Please tell me that this is going to be one of Google's more successful projects.

"Since launching back in 2004, Gmail has set the gold standard for webmail clients, offering a large amount of storage and a highly usable interface, free of charge. But for many people it has remained out of reach - no matter how appealing Gmail might be, they’ve racked up thousands of messages on other services that they simply can’t give up. Today, that changes. Gmail just released a new feature that allows users to import their Email archives and contacts into their Gmail accounts effortlessly."

You would think with all the press about Twitter, Facebook and other social applications, email should be put out to pasture. It seems as if Google still thinks that email is of enough interest to invest some development dollars and come up with a tool to help you migrate everything from other webmail providers. Sure, if you had some time and knew something about rocket science, you could do this yourself, but Gmail's new import option makes moving email addresses a snap. By lowering the barrier for migrating, Google is definately threatening other webmail providers because while email is not hot anymore, it does contain one very important and valuable thing for Google, personal information. The more Google can host services for you, the greater it knows about your life which to them is gold. I'm not a Gmail user though not for privacy reasons. I'm the kind of guy who likes owning his own data so that should a company decide to flip a switch, I'm not blocked for all my stuff. Regardless of who you use for webmail make sure you always backup your contacts and email regularly. If you've got all your eggs in one basket, like Google, for email, documents, spreadsheets, bookmarks and your first born you might find yourself cut off from your own life one day.

A few years ago, I wanted a robust email service for my domain name. After comparing several alternatives, I picked Runbox. It has a lot of great features - virus protection, spam filter, very large email limits and it collects email from other sources including Gmail, Hotmail and my ISP's. I have been very happy with it and it has never let me down. But now, Google offers Gmail for domain names - and it has a free version. After comparing the two, Gmail has a faster webmail interface and has better IMAP support. Plus, Google backs not only incoming email, but outgoing email too, even if you use another program to send it (like Outlook). And, all your email is instantly searchable via Google desktop search. With all that, I have to wonder, will Google eventually take over?

"We hear reports that many users don't archive their email. If you don't regularly click on the "archive" button or never even thought about it, here are some reasons you might want to get in the habit. Archiving just means moving mail out of your inbox and storing it for safekeeping. Your messages will be waiting for you when you click All Mail or search for them."

For all you Gmail users out there, Google lists 9 great reasons to "archive" your mail rather than deleting it. I usually use the Archive button sparingly, but these are some good reasons to start using it if you haven't thought about it before. I can really relate to #8: Procrastination.