Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Via Google Blogoscoped post I learned it is possible to search for messages in Gmail based on what language they are written in.  The operator is called “lang” and can be used like so:   “lang:ru“  or “lang:russian“.  The operator can be used both in regular searches and in filter conditions.   As noted in the comments, this might be useful for sorting out spam messages (label with “Spam“) written in languages that you don’t understand (Chinese, for example, - “lang:zh“).

For me personally, this comes very useful, since most of my friends and family (at least those with who I communicate via email) speak both Russian and English, and sometimes it takes too much time going through all the messages instead of picking just those in one language (for those cases when I remember the language).

Slashdot runs the “Turning E-Mail into a Social Network” post, which links to this article about Google and Yahoo approach:

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.
Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

This feels very natural. Both Google and Yahoo indeed aggregate a lot of personal data and a lot of personal relationships (who knows who, who emails who and how often, etc). It’s logical to assume that they want to expand what they have, and social networks is one of the ways to go.

So, why email?  Email has a number of advantages over other media:

• Everybody has an email account.  And everybody knows how to use one.  It’s almost as widely used as mobile telephony.
• Email is very flexible - texts, HTML, attachments, links, etc.
• Email is an open standard - there are many clients, servers, web services, plugins, etc.
• Email is easy to convert to other media - IM chats, blogs, SMS, etc.
• Email is often integrated with other tools, such as addressbooks, calendars, todo lists, reminders, etc.
• Email supports both one-on-one and group communications (mailing lists).
• Email is easy to remember (not like a phone number or ICQ UIN), lookup and share.
• Social networks are often about messaging.

I wish email was better integrated with half of the social networks that I use.  Most of them use some sort of their own messaging system.  Some don’t even provide any messaging at all.  And all of them would have to do much less work if they relied more on email.   I’m glad to see that Google and Yahoo realize this.

Finally, my prayers have been heard and my Gmail account was upgraded to the newer version.  It is as sweet as was promised.  Message pre-loading makes sorting through mail in morning extremely fast.  New contact manager is indeed much better than the old, dare I say, address book.   It still misses a few things, like fields for URLs.

Now I’m waiting for all those Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts that I use to beautify and customize Gmail to get updated and work with the new version.

As I’ve mentioned before, I hate write-your-email-in-the-subject emails. Now that LifeHacker asks the questions once again, I’m ready with an answer.

Now, the question from my side is: should we repeat and promote such discussions once in a while to let the rest of the world know what we think, or should we quietly avoid them, not to give any ideas to the wrong-doers?

Every time the year is coming to an end, I feel this urge to clean things and to throw out tonnes of garbage. I don’t know why that happens. And I don’t know why I can’t resist this feeling.

With this year stepping into the month of December, I got the regular itch. With nothing much to throw out at my hands (most of the stuff is gone since last year), I decided to clean my Inbox (the email one).

I have created an Archive folder in my mailbox, in which I created further subfolders for every year that I had any correspondence for - 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, … I then moved all closed discussions to the folder of approrpiate year. I have deleted all test messages. I have thrown out all system notification messages (cron scheduler, log rotations, spam and virus reports, etc). I went throug the same process a couple of times, tagging more stuff to move every time.

I have finished the clean-up and now I can’t believe my eyes. My Inbox now has only 13 messages! 8 out of these are connected to a discussion that I hope will end before the end of the year. They’ll be moved to archives too. The rest of the messages are those that may result in further discussions or may not. So, I’ll have to keep them in for a while.

But 13 MESSAGES!!! My Inbox hasn’t been so small since the last millenium, when I just signed up for some free webmail account and received 12 spam messages within an hour. I’m really really impressed.

P.S.: I guess I can also use my primary email address from my mobile again, without seeing phone crashes and huge GPRS bills.