Slashdot Mirror
Gmail Gets RSS
Everyone with a UID and Paul Stamatiou writes "Google's Gmail email service now sports a new feature for displaying RSS feeds, dubbed Web Clips. You might remember this name, as it is the same name Google Desktop refers to RSS feeds. Web Clips for Gmail were announced a long time ago sometime during the summer but they were finally stable enough to release to the general public. You can check out the what's new page for Gmail here. Essentially, you subscribe to a bunch of feeds and everytime you log into Gmail it loads the lastest title from each feed which you can scroll through with left/right arrows. Don't forget to check the actual post about Web Clips for Gmail on the Google Blog."
My various daily updated websites that use metafile data to pass a hyperlink (blog with RSS feed for you non-jerk-new-wordphobes) has been getting referrers from gmail since yesterday. I've been getting AOL webmail referrers for a week or so, now it makes sense why this is.
RSS connectivity in the e-mail client is very powerful, maybe the most powerful feature I've seen. I've had trouble getting my audience to download a good RSS reader, but I've seen traffic pick up. Is there a reasonable javascript for "Add this blog to your RSS feeds" that will work with the webmail feed readers?
I'm hiring a 74 year old expert to cowrite 2 blogs and his readers are generally older. Most have e-mail, and as more people flock to webmail for security and efficiency, adding these features is key to helping the new "media" grow. Even for the not retired, easy access to what you want is making generic news outdated.
This news probably pisses off the old media who continue to lose control. If the politicians see their monkeys are powerless, be sure to see regulations on blogs next, via the illegal and unconstitutional FEC and SEC.
I saw it when I opened GMail to do my daily clean up of my GMail archive account. I disabled 99% of it and added Slashdot as the only "Webclip" available. The first (and only) story it showed was from 18 hours ago. Not exactly useful for me I guess.
YMMV.
I noticed one thing that the didnt mention. There are "Sponsered Links" on there. I can live with the side bar but not in RSS feed. But thats just me.
If Slashdot's RSS feed is a default, could Web Clips Slashdot Slashdot?
It takes me about 15 minutes of screwing with browser, firewall, and proxy settings every time I want to check gmail. Screw that! I've gone back to using yahoo. Anyone else had similar experiences?
I have had it for about 6 months. No one else I knew that had Gmail had the webclips...
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Seems they have difficulty deciding how to do RSS..
Pretty sure my gmail has had webclips since at least July ( maybe earlier ), so I don't see what the big deal is...
About half of my Gmail accounts have been displaying these Web Clip things for about two months now.
:/
I finally noticed them turned on by default on my main account sometime this morning - so I guess that maybe counts as news. As much as any Googledot story does
The extra s stands for suckss*
That extra s is a typo
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
I am really looking forward to the lastest titles.
Sounds like it will be the bestest ever.
Not the first time I post about it, but I really see this as the future of RSS: GeoRSS. And you know what, if one company can push the georss standard to general use, yup, it's Google.
What's georss? From slashgisrs: A team is working on Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds. From the overview: "GeoRSS is simple proposal for RSS feeds to also be described by location or Geotagged. We standardize the way in which "where" is encoded with enough simplicity and descriptive power to satisfy most needs to describe the location of Web content. [...] it should serve as an easy-to-use geotagging language that is brief and simple with useful defaults but extensible and upwardly-compatible with more sophisticated formats like the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) GML (Geography Markup Language)".
The Open Geospatial Consortium is really an important body in the geospatial community. They're the one whom just made WMS an ISO Standard.
Animoog.org
Another way to shove AdSense down our throats. So far, it seems like roughly 1 of every 3 clips is an advertisement.
Does anyone else find this totally unexciting? Thank god you can turn this feature off.
Yeah! I am so happy!
Don't mod me funny.
I check all my feeds on My Yahoo once a day, and then once I've read what interests me, I feel done with them. I can't imagine being happy with just randomly presented feeds. Especially one at a time.
Definitely going to stick with My Yahoo for now.
really they need to add a calender. i think this would be the icing on the cake and would be essential imo for people to use gmail as they're primary interface.
1) You say that "we might remember the name" if we use Google Desktop.
2) Google Desktop is only available for Microsoft Windows.
3) You submitted directly to Slashdot.
Therefore, you are implying that the majority of Slashdot readers use Windows? Might want to put on your flame-retardant PJs.
Did anyone else notice that if you click on your Spam folder it displays recipes for SPAM, and if you click on the Trash it shows you recycling tips. :-)
They also added the ability to view Office, OpenOffice, and PDF documents as HTML like their search results. Very useful if you receive documents but don't have the necessary viewers.
Then they also added something on the sidebar to automatically link to maps and shipping trackers if addresses or shipping numbers are mentioned in the email. So if I say: "Yeah man. Party's at 123 Fake Street," presumably it links to it if the recipient has Gmail. Or if FedEx sends me an email with my shipping number, I can just click the link on the side to view it. I think that's pretty slick, and a good use of their text scanning abilities they already use for AdWords.
I didn't even notice the RSS stuff this morning when I logged in so I checked again and it was there. Pretty cool and unintrusive. the first feed I saw on there was from Dictionary.com "voluptuary: a person devoted to luxury and the gratification of sensual appetites." Learn something new everyday I guess.
Everyone loves Google, until of course they become evil and we all hate them.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/It would have been cool if the list of feeds automatically included the feeds I use on http://www.google.com/ig (Google's try at my.yahoo that I've come to like), but no such luck.
You can turn off web clips easily enough in GMail's settings. Right now I find it distracting, but I'll give it a week or so.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
But...why? One of the great things about the internet is that, as a general rule, the geographical location of data is completely irrelevant. The only time geographical location starts to matter is if you want to know about a specific location, and in those cases sufficient positional information can generally be gathered from the content. For example, if the title is "Restaurants in New York," there's a solid chance that the restaurants discussed there will be located in the general geographic region of New York.
I use Google Personalized Home so I have no need for the RSS Feeder.
i feel so left out now!!!
So *that's* what that is! I noticed the new line above my inbox this morning and wondered what the heck it was. I didn't manage to divert my eyes clear to the right of the screen to see the "" and "Customize" buttons. Google needs to perhaps rethink how new features are introduced when users (well, at least one) finds out about new features through a completely different site.
Unfortunately, there's no integration with the google homepage where you also setup your news/RSS feeds. The data has to be setup twice, when it should really be from the same place.
Google has a lot of nice stuff, but they've got a lot of work to do to integrate it and bring it to the most useful.
- AMW
I have not used Gmail that much, I prefer to keep the number of email addresses I have to a minimum. That said, this may be a feature that I simply never noticed.
It would be really nice if you could get a list of your emails in RSS format... that way when a new message comes it shows up in your favorite aggregator.
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka
I wonder if anyone is confused between 'Clip' and 'Klip'.
One is for the web, the other is a way to clip content to the desktop. Looking at this in a positive way, maybe we did pick the right name for our product four years ago.
See http://www.serence.com/ and our use of Klips for the desktop.
Cheers,... Fred
Life is NP-Complete
This has been in GMail for quite some time now. The only new feature is that you can disable the bar if you don't want it. I don't know why they are saying it's new...
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
Why would I choose to login to Gmail to use this instead of bookmarks or with a Firefox extension?
There is no god but Google and GTalk is the messenger of Google.
My favorite is the spam recipe feed it shows when viewing the spam folder.
I don't understand why everyone is so negative about this feature. It's not meant to be a fully-fleged RSS reader; they already have one of those and duplicating that functionality in GMail would be horribly misguided.
It's just some extra stuff to look at when you have no new mail and some time to kill. It's a little thing but usually it's the little things that differentiate the best products from the rest.
It would be nice if it imported my feeds from Google Reader by default, but on the other hand most of those aren't appropriate as "web clips" and I'm sure the number of GMail subscribers dwarfs the number of Google Reader users, anyway.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
In case someone would like to try it out:
2 1-0e73e9698e
f 2-ae274b7bb0
e 3-de3cf269e9
http://mail.google.com/mail/a-a794f33b79-7a3acc10
http://mail.google.com/mail/a-a794f33b79-08f9c743
http://mail.google.com/mail/a-a794f33b79-5abecd38
I opened my gmail this morning and immediately clicked "delete... delete... delete... delete..." until there was no more Webclips. Can't we just keep it simple? G-Mail is fully functional the way it is, but I'm seeing a trend to "over optimization" and eventually it'll be crammed full of everything and you'll have to search to find your e-mail - now that's ironic.
Gee this feature was added to GMail at what, prolly midnight this morning? Zonk posts it at 3:05PM? Sheesh...pick up the pace. I actually waited today just to see how long it would take, I noted the change at about 11 (late morning today, hee).
But...why? One of the great things about the internet is that, as a general rule, the geographical location of data is completely irrelevant.
If you go on the georss.org website, you'll understand there's plenty of potential applications. One simple example, you may want to tie news story to a place in order to get BBC news only for stories "located in" ro tied to southeast asia.
From their website: Perhaps all earthquake-related items within 20 miles of your home--delivered to your phone, or a feed of traffic accident items along your daily commute? Once RSS feeds contain geographic location, applications like these and more will be possible.
Animoog.org
There are 76 stories about this on Digg, for a service that's been around for seven months already. see http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx= gmail&hl=en&answer=18219
Nothing to see here, move along!
You could've just unticked the box that says "Show my web clips above the Inbox", sheesh.
I've used it behind websense, a pix, an ssh socks4 proxy, garbage firewalls, etc., and I've never had a problem.
I opened it up and was like wha?? but then i noticed it was RSS feeds! It was cool, yes, except that it had automatically been filled up with like two dozen subscriptions I didn't need. I removed almost all except obviously Slashdot =P I think I will like having maybe three or four subscriptions in there, but definately not as many as I have in my separate RSS reader program.
...damn those tabs and that HUGE add at the bottom...I'm usually the one to point out hey...you can turn those tabs off! But they're already so used to them being there, that they don't want them off!
I think it's a neat new tool and I support it =)
But maybe by-default it should be turned off? I know a lot of people who will probably never even look twice at it. Just because they're so used to the extra stuff that's packed onto things like msn messenger
This is starting to sound too much like a blog entry so I'm stopping.
On a side note, some accounts still don't have it. I've had it for about 5 days now.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
You can't enter your rss feed address you have to search for it, great use that is.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I think I'll use one of http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/08/174925 8&tid=133these and print the spam RSS feed on it!
I've been using it for some months now and have rather enjoyed it. For sure it has bugs, and it has rather unfortunate default feeds, but it's nice. But it's OLD NEWS!
Now how do I turn the fucking thing off?
I hate it. It displays more ads than feeds.
Question everything
I use YM (primarily) and Gmail. Even if it is true that Gmail seems to be experiencing some problems, it is not less true for YM which has been almost down for two days in November.
With how bad of a Slashdotting could Web Clips Slashdot Slashdot if Web Clips could Slashdot Slashdot?
(Or take the question seriously if you're so inclined. ^_^)
What I can't understand is why they haven't yet implemented contact groups. The single major stumbling block that most people I try to convert to Gmail has is that is is missing the (I would think relatively simple) ability to define a group of two or more contacts to which you can easily send a message. Heck, they could even make this Google-y and allow you to define terms with which to build a list, or label contacts as "Personal" and "Business" and then make a group from that. But the base functionality is so stinkin' simple, I just don't know why they haven't done it yet, and it's getting annoying to hear people I've referred to Gmail come up and say "I really like that new Gmail thing, but how do I send a message to a list of people?"
But, Google, how about working on something really useful, like right-click functionality?
I think with all the new web2.0 widgets & tools the dev-shops are going crazy over, we are losing sight of basic UI design (i.e. efficiency). I mean it's Google we're talking about here, comeon guys you can do a better UI integration than web-clips!
I mean for RSS feed links, nothing's better than a topdown newpaper view (i.e. a list) than left-right, AOL style.
I'll stick with my trusty Sage plugin for FF.
The google version of my yahoo works nicely too. Not sure what integrating some feeds into gmail really does. Since gmail is a feed itself I never sign into gmail except to actually read an email.
... a stupid idea. For those who like to read their RSS feeds already I'll just ignore it and forward it with all GMail stuff to Outlook like I've been doing. Gmail is nice for the simple fact that it provides a location where I can find all my mail in one place. Other than that it's a bit too basic...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
... are great, but why the HELL am I STILL unable to search for un-labeled messages? Argh!
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
I use Konqueror 3.5 for my browser, but I have to switch to FX to use Gmail properly. First, i have to impersonate Safari or FX to get the standard interface, and even then it's broken. Considering that Konqueror 3.5 passes the Acid2 test, it seems like Konqueror would put as much effort in these areas as well.
So much for standards compliance...
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
I saw this today and got rid of it as fast as I fucking could. I use Gmail specifically becuase it _DOESN'T_ bother me with annoying fucking doodads like this. So thanks, but no thanks.
Doesn't show up if you have your language set to english - UK, only English - US.
Gmail has offered RSS support for months. Why is this article even posted now?
That must be double-plus good!
and has anyone noticed that a large chunk of /. material comes in after it's been posted on digg.com for a while?
thanks, now it works for me too :)
just had to change the language tu Enlgish US...
I really wish they had integrated Google Reader Google Reader in Gmail, ending up with somenting like Bloglines, rather than this crappy webclips that comes in the way distracting me while I try to concentrate on my emails (yes, I just disabled them)
You know, there's a little thing called IMAP.
Seems more like -1: Rambling to me.
She still only has 4 invites though, when everyone else has 50, she's not pleased about that.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Did anyone else notice the web clips offering "spam recipes" when browsing the spam folder?