Gspace: Great New Feature March 24, 2007
Posted by theexpress in email, web 2.0.add a comment
Just about everyone I know who uses Gmail has the same comment on the amount of space available: there is too much to use. It is not necessarily a complaint, but it raises a good question. What is there to do with all of this space? Three gig isn’t too much for most things, but for an email account, it has plenty of space for even the most intrepid spammers.
Well, I was browsing digg this morning in school and came across this article, but since I was still in class, there wasn’t much I could do with ten minutes left in the period. The first and – in my opinion – best featured item in the article is the Gspace feature which completely blew my mind. It is basically a way to utilize all of your Gmail space with things other than countless emails.
I’m certain that many have felt the same as me sometime, as I have sent countless emails to myself containing papers and projects that I need to complete. Well, this kind of takes out the middle man when doing this. You basically just install the program in Firefox and set it up with your Gmail account. After this, you upload your documents, music, pictures, videos, etc. and after transfer on Gspace, an email is sent to Gmail containing the files you’ve uploaded.
I would have to say my only problem with the files being sent to Gmail is that each file gets a separate email, even if you upload a few at a time. It’s a minor inconvenience, though, considering that for the most part, needs will be limited to one file, and as long as they are all properly labeled, you can just keep them all in one place.
After my initial excitement, I began to think that, for the most part, this wasn’t going 
to save me much more time than just emailing the files from Thunderbird, but then I stumbled over what I consider its killer application. I sent a few songs through Gspace to see what I could do with them when they made it over and had a pleasant surprise. When clicking on the email with the song in it, there were two options: download or play. Well, naturally, I selected play and this player came up, conveniently playing my song quickly and without hassle, but what else would you expect from Google.
Overall, the feature has enormous potential to utilize some of that Gmail space. If anyone else has been using this, feel free to comment with some tips or tricks that I haven’t mentioned or discovered yet; I’ll be very interested to hear them.
Twitter: A Phenomenon? March 19, 2007
Posted by theexpress in rant, web 2.0.add a comment
No need to re-introduce myself. You and me both know that this blog is about as dead as they come, apart from the comletely inactive ones. WordPress has changed a lot since a year ago when I updated regularly, but besides a years extra knowledge, I am pretty much the same.
But, never the one for formalities, I’d rather get to business. Just because my posts are often months apart from one another, it does not mean that I’ve been living under a rock for all of this time. True, I have fallen out of the loops and circles that I once actively participated in a while back, but I still keep track of everything Web 2.0 (does anyone even use that phrase anymore, besides those outside of it). Because of my lack of contribution to the web and active participation in everything I could lay eyes on, I began to develop a clear head above the flurry of web activity. Don’t get me wrong, I love diggnation as much as the next guy, but my previous praises and condemnations have changed over the time.
Where, you may ask, am I going with this? Well, as I scan through my Google Reader, more and more often these days, I hear all of this buzz around Twitter. I admit, it looks kind of cool for a minute, but what is the point to it. Yeah, its cool that Tom from Baltimore just ordered a pizza 15 seconds ago…wait, no it’s not. Why would one want to know the mundane of another persons life when they have their own boring-ness to deal with. Not often does anything interesting come up on the title. Just looking at the front page now, there are two people updating their blogs, and one person eating. Not quite the jet set we have on this website.
And for those who claim it helps keep in contact with friends, I would liken that to looking your friends number up in the phonebook every time you call them, even though you have it programmed right in your cell. Your just going through a clunky middle man that serves no good. Yes, I am usually one for pointless web apps that dont serve much of a purpose (see my former praises of librarious), but this has crossed the line for me.
P.S. I am not a member of the Twitter community, so if there is some kind of killer app to it that I was too blind to see, please tell me. I wont be embarassed or upset, rather I’ll be happy that something with this much buzz is actually worth its weight.
