geekosystem

It's silly to have multiple storage locations for your various Google products, and Google seems to have finally realized that. They've combined user storage between Gmail, Drive, and Google+ to give you 15 GB of combined storage in one common place. At the very least, that's convenient for users, but if you're like me and don't use a lot of space with Gmail or Google+ then Google just upgraded your Drive account to 15 GB for free. Hooray!

We panicked along with everyone else yesterday when Gmail went down. Without email, how would we find out about all the new T-shirt designs and Kickstarter campaigns that are happening? It was maddening. Sure, the outage only lasted about 20 minutes, but it really messed up a very brief part of our day, and even included issues with Google Chrome, and we want answers. Thankfully, Google engineer Tim Steele has them.

Google is all about combining their services. Sometimes that's frustrating, but sometimes it's actually pretty convenient. Like when Google makes sending 10 GB email attachments possible by combining Gmail and Google Drive. By making their email and cloud storage services work together, Google has made send files via email useful again. Get ready to start spamming your friends with extended director's cut version of your cat videos.

If you're trying to hide an extramarital affair, and you're the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, it's probably a good idea to use a method that hasn't been publicly known for years. Another good step would be avoiding a service, like Gmail, managed by a company that's been known to hand over information to the government when pressured. Perhaps David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell thought they were above all that, or perhaps they somehow didn't care, but the trick they used to hide their emails is old enough to have been included in a 2005 PBS special.

Though it might be a surprise to some, Gmail hasn't always been the juggernaut it currently is. In fact, the email service wasn't even the largest email provider in the world until very recently. Though the search engine giant had claimed the title for itself this past summer, third-party data didn't back up the company's assertion until just now. comScore's set of email data for October shows Gmail finally toppling the reign of Hotmail. A second takeaway from this is that people still use Hotmail for some reason.

It appears that Iran has today pulled back the block it had in place on Gmail, which the country put in place a week ago. We'd originally suggested that Iran didn't truly understand the implications of their action, but it seems that they totally did: They just didn't know how to stop it. That anti-Islam clip was the intended target, but the country didn't know how to only block YouTube. To be fair, this type of digital incompetence is present universally, but it's more prevalent in countries prone to censorship.

If you're anything like we Geekosystem editors, you probably imagine the terrible lengths each and every single one of your emails must go through to get to its recipient; the little guy traveling through muddy ditches, through dark, isolated forests filled with dangerous wild beasts, killing any and all other rogue emails that cross its path. Just so you can reply to that office memo with a smiley emoticon. Google Green is here to tell us that no emails are harmed in the sending of an email, and have explained the whole process with the above cutesy animation.

A good portion of folks on Twitter, as well as Google itself, are reporting scattered Gmail outages. We aren't experiencing any problems here at Geekosystem, but it seems that many of the service's users are finding themselves temporarily separated from their inboxes. Given how widely Gmail has been adopted for not only personal but also business purposes, the outages could cause some serious problems if they persist. At the moment, Google is looking into the problem. More as the story develops.

In light of Google's new privacy policy changes, Microsoft has released a jab at Google in the form of a new Gmail Man video ironically, as I'm sure you'll note, hosted on Google-owned YouTube. Whether you agree with the Microsoft ad --because it is an ad, after all-- or not, it's hard not to appreciate the that little girl's expression when she finds out where ads come from. Personally, I think everyone is over-reacting anyways. I hardly ever say anything important over gmail anyways; I usually use GChat, or text from my Android phone. Whatever. Come over here Big Brother! Gimme a big hug!

Taking a cue from jaded high school students and most college students, it turns out the Gmail logo was designed the night before Gmail launched. According to a post on Quora, Google designer from 2003 to 2008 Kevin Fox said that Gmail logo designer Dennis Hwang was up designing the logo literally the night before the product launched.

So, I bit the bullet today: I switched my Gmail over to the new look. I figured I'll have to do it sometime, and I might as well do it now, while I'm shaking up all my old habits with fancy labs. If you remember, sharebros were not too happy about the Google Reader redesign, and even more people are likely to be miffed by the Gmail one. According to Google it's "cleaner and more modern," which apparently means "has a lot of white space where useful information used to live." For the moment, you can stick with the old look, but there's also a display mechanism built in that looks a lot more like traditional Gmail without straight-up being the old format. It'll come in handy when they kill off the old one for good.

Gmail has been a stalwart companion and workhorse for over seven years, but in that time it has remained mostly the same. However, a recent video posted to the official Gmail YouTube channel heralds the arrival of a new look for the web-based email service, and new functionality to boot.

Today marks the end of an extremely awkward chapter in the life of Google, the overlords of the Internet. Today, Google announced that they are finally killing Google Buzz. The move to end Buzz comes as Google+ enters the field as a real power and as the search giant has begun pruning off many of its side projects. When it was originally launched, Google Buzz was meant to be the search giant's first foray into social networking. Its aim was to allow users to quickly and easily share their activity, and place it prominently on the main Gmail page. However, the service was far too overreaching, leading to an uproar that ended with the service becoming a wasteland, and Google in hot water with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. For the six of you that still use the service, Google says you'll be able to pull down a copy of your data using Google Takeout.

A recent study carried out by IBM has determined that users who use a complex folder system to organize their email do not find messages faster than users who rely on search functions. The study compared the time it took to locate a specific email when using folder trees versus simply typing in a search query. They found that it took users 58 seconds to find an email without search, and 17 seconds to find it with search. Moreover, users who searched were far more likely to actually find the desired email. In other news, sky blue, water wet; film at 11. In any discussion of search in email, Gmail is the king of the hill because of its close integration of Google search. However, some other aspects of Gmail received specific praise from the study, such as conversation threading -- where back and forth email exchanges are grouped together. Strangely, the study endorsed "superthreading," where emails of a similar topic or project are organized together. Which to me, sounds like folders, but maybe I'm missing something.

Even though Gmail isn't particularly cluttered or ugly (aside from that bar on the left, maybe?), Google has decided to spruce it up a bit, making it even easier on the eyes. Currently, they've only released two new themes for the service, but it is part of a larger plan that was announced on the Official Gmail Blog quickly outlining their intent of visually upgrading Gmail through a series of interface updates.

One of the two released themes, "Preview" and "Preview (Dense)," can be seen above, sporting an easy-to-read, cleaner, minimalistic style. The Gmail team explains that there are two version of the new theme because, eventually, Gmail's interface will dynamically expand depending upon screen size and user interface preferences. Both of the new themes can be found in the theme tab within Gmail's settings.