5 Things I’d like to see in the new GMail

A little while ago I read some news that Google was prepping some new features for GMail. That started the li’l rodents going in the hamster wheel that is my brain - shortly after it came out some more details emerged suggesting that Google Gears integration and account activity logs would be at least two of those features.

Now, I’ve got issues with Gears - it’s very cool and impressive and all, but as it stands now, needing to take your accounts manually on and offline makes it, IMHO, more or less useless. I don’t want to have to remember to turn things on or off, the penalty for forgetting to do so being no mail for me. Account activity logs, on the other hand, is a really interesting feature that I never even really thought of - sort of a sanity check for privacy concerns. I don’t think I’ve even heard of any other client (online or desktop) with this feature. Very interesting.

But my hamsters were going and I came up with a few of my own ideas.

1. Support IMAP (and even IMAP idle for push mail, just like Yahoo does). For heavens sake, POP is so 90’s, we’re in the 21st century now and Google, for the love of mail syncing, should know better. Lack of IMAP is the weak sauce on an otherwise great dish. I could switch over completely to GMail if they did this one standards compliant thing.

2. More attention given to contact groups. Right now you can create groups of contacts and send email to them which is wonderful, but I’d like to see groups in more places. In the left nav, it’d be great to have different boxes for groups that work like the “Quick Contacts” group. Or in calendar, when you create a new event to be able to type in a group name and have it recognized instead of having to pop open the contacts list and access it that way. I should be able to GTalk to a group. More power to the groups!

3. Some kind of integration with Reader. This is a little hazier in my mind. I don’t mean to drop a standalone reader, but it might be nice to have all these things in one place. It could be as simple as adding a “Reader” box in the left nav. It’d serve to help them unify their interfaces and give me one place to go for this stuff. But I’m not sure, maybe it’d just be extra clutter.

4. True desktop app. This I’d like to see for GMail and Reader - a native app that runs outside the browser and syncs with GMail and Reader. It wouldn’t be necessary for GMail if Google supported IMAP, but I’d kill for this to work with Reader - especially if they made a mobile version for the iPhone.

5. Smart labels. Like a filter, but one that doesn’t actually filter anything, it just applies a dynamic label and works, for all intents and purposes like a label. But instead of being manually attached it happens automatically. For example, if I could save a search for all emails received in the last day - then despite all the various filters I have moving things around and out of the inbox, I can always easily click on the “today” label and see what’s happened.

That’s more or less all I got. I like GMail a lot, but still use my own IMAP account for most daily purposes. Number 1’s the only show stopper for me, but it’d be nice to see the other three, too. What’s your take? You using GMail or something else?

Oct 12th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: google · list