When Google finally launched the official Gmail application for iOS earlier this month, the tech world sang with joy… for all of about thirty seconds. Almost immediately, reports spilled in that the app was broken, buggy, and almost entirely unusable. Google pulled the app down within a few hours.

Today, they’re taking a second swing at it.

While Google promises that they are “just getting started with the Gmail app for iOS and will be iterating rapidly to bring you more features”, today’s re-launch is mostly identical to the original — save for all the bug fixes, of course.

One notable change: images embedded in HTML e-mails are now scaled to fit your screen and can be pinch-zoomed, instead of spilling off the screen by default.

The app is a bit tough to find in the App Store right now via search, but here’s the direct link.

By now you’re probably well aware that Google released their long-awaited Gmail iOS app today, only to unceremoniously yank it from the App Store when people pointed out that it didn’t really work. Google offered a mea culpa by stating that they have removed the app while they correct the problem, and that they’re working on a new version to be released soon.

Here’s a thought: just keep it. At least for a little while.

I’m sure this must sound a bit petty, but people have seriously been waiting years for a native Gmail app, and they must have been awfully disappointed today. Even if we set the broken push notifications aside for a moment, the app itself was still… shall we say, lackluster?

Several people pointed out on Twitter that the app was just a slightly-tweaked version of the Gmail mobile web view that we’ve had access to for years now. Sure, it had some welcome additions, like improved search functionality and the ability to star emails, but it’s still essentially the same old thing.

What gives, Google? I can almost forgive the notifications issue — we all make mistakes after all — but what’s with releasing an app that offers little (if any) improvement over what was already available?

Now, I’m sure that Google will fix the problem and issue an fixed version in due time, but what they should really do is put it back in the oven, and leave it in there until it’s better than done. I realize that in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, but here are a few things I think Google should fix since they’ve pulled the app anyway:

• Fix those push notifications: I think this one goes without saying. You can set up your Gmail as a Exchange account to make push work email, but a more streamlined solution would be much appreciated.
• Fix the speed issues: One of Gmail’s biggest selling points is that you have so much storage space that you don’t really need to delete emails anymore. The Gmail app seems to have forgotten this though, because it tends to slow down when you try to scroll through your emails.
• Add support for multiple accounts: Maybe I’m in the minority on this one, but I’d wager there are a fair number of users with multiple accounts. My personal and TechCrunch email accounts both run through Gmail, so being able to use the app in multiple scenarios would be a nice touch.
• Let us save attachments from within the app: The stock Mail.app can handle this just fine, so leaving it out of the alternative doesn’t make much sense.
• Make it worth using: In short, give us a reason to use it over the web client. This is a chance to really show that Google knows apps and can develop something that’s just as good as their web options, but catered to an iOS experience.

Or not. Like I said, I’m nobody and Google is, well… Google. Here’s hoping that the next version of the Gmail app (whenever it happens to go live) manages to erase the bitter taste that this release has left in my mouth.

A video inadvertently posted to Google’s YouTube account has given a sneak peek at some of the changes that will be coming to Gmail in the very near future. It was quickly taken down, but not before a few screenshots were snagged by Google Operating System.

The new UI is obviously based on the Gmail ‘preview’ theme that it began offering back in June, which has more whitespace and options for tweaking how densely you want your conversations listed.  The biggest change seen in the video is the conversation/reply view, which looks a lot more like Facebook Messages — each person in the conversation has their photo shown, and it’s easier to read previous messages in the thread.

Another key change: Gmail will start surfacing its advanced search features as soon as you click the search box. Before now these haven’t been as easily accessible — you’d have to either click a ‘show search options’ link, or use search operators (“sent:”, “has:attachment”, etc.). Now these options will pop up immediately, and you can also create a new filter from your search query on the fly.

There are some more minor tweaks as well. Some buttons are now represented with visual icons reminiscent of those seen in Android Honeycomb/Ice Cream Sandwich. You can now manually adjust the size of the Labels and Chat windows. And there’s a new slick effect: as you resize your browser window, Gmail will dynamically adjust its layout so that everything fits.

They’re nice improvements, but, as someone who lives in Gmail all day, there are still a lot of changes I’d like to see. In particular, there are some features that Hotmail (yes, that Hotmail) recently launched that I’d love Gmail to reproduce. For instance, in Hotmail it’s now possible to automatically delete certain messages after a few days (there’s no reason to let all those expired deals clutter your inbox, after all).

Update:
Google took its video down, but here’s a mirror, again via Google Operating System:

Google is advising users in Iran to take specific steps in order to re-secure their Gmail accounts after last week’s reveal of the man-in-the-middle attacks that targeted Iranian users. The attackers used fraudulent SSL certificates issued by a compromised root certificate authority in the Netherlands, DigiNotar. These fake certificates allowed hackers to impersonate Google.com and others.

Google was only one of the domains affected in the breach. Attackers signed hundreds certificates for sites, including Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Tor, Skype, Mossad, CIA, MI6, LogMeIn, Twitter, Mozilla, AOL and WordPress. The Dutch government released a spreadsheet with a list of 531 entries of known bad certificates after the attacks. The full list is here on the Tor website.

Although Google, Mozilla and others moved quickly to remove DigiNotar as a trusted authority in their Web browsers, it was too late to protect users from the damage that had already been done.

Google tries to downplay the problem a bit in its blog post by stating that “users of the Chrome browser were protected from this threat,” but that’s not entirely accurate. They were protected after Google moved to revoke DigiNotar as a trusted authority, but there was still a period of time when users could have been compromised.

And the threat may still be present for those who have not taken action. As security research Graham Cluley explains, “even if hackers who broke into your Gmail account no longer know your password, there are still things they could have done while they had access to your email which will allow them to continue to monitor your communications.”

For that reason, Google is now suggesting that its Iranian users secure their accounts by taking the following steps:

1. Change your password. You may have already been asked to change your password when you signed in to your Google Account. If not, you can change it here.
2. Verify your account recovery options. Secondary email addresses, phone numbers, and other information can help you regain access to your account if you lose your password. Check to be sure your recovery options are correct and up to date here.
3. Check the websites and applications that are allowed to access your account, and revoke any that are unfamiliar here.
4. Check your Gmail settings for suspicious forwarding addresses or delegated accounts.
5. Pay careful attention to warnings that appear in your web browser and don’t click past them.

Those who believe their account was comprised in the attack, can begin the recovery process here.

Update:  Google PR responds that warnings issued by the Chrome browser (and others) altered the company to the issue in the first place. And Chrome users were protected from the start unless they chose to click through and ignore the “prominent certificate warnings” in their browser.

This is why Google is able to make such a claim, apparently. But the fact is if Chrome users were fully protected, there would be no need for the extra precautions, in my opinion. Chrome users were warned, yes; protected, no. Heck, just last week a less-than-technically-savvy friend of mine clicked right through one of those warnings (unrelated to this attack) and promptly got a virus.

Yes, you read the headline right, and the screenshots below weren’t doctored in any way. The Gmail feature you’ve been yearning for is here: Gmail now supports three-pane viewing, allowing you to see both your message list and an email’s content at the same time.

Of course, the feature isn’t exactly novel — this is something you’ve been able to do with email clients like Outlook for years. The iPad’s Mail client has offered a preview-pane viewing mode since it launched, and Gmail itself introduced a tablet web app with a similar interface last year. And the native Android version of Gmail offers a preview pane as well.

But even if the Gmail desktop web app is the last one to the party, it’s still the primary way many people access their inboxes, so it’s a big deal.

The feature can be activated in Gmail labs under the option for ‘Preview Pane’. Once you’ve turned it on, you’ll want to click the new button in the upper right hand corner of the Gmail interface to choose between a vertical or horizontal layout.

I’ve been toying around with the feature all morning and have mixed feelings so far. On the one hand, I’ve been wishing for a preview pane for so long I can’t help but feel excited. But between the left nav sidebar, the list of messages, the message itself, and then the right sidebar — which includes the new People Widget and ads — there’s a lot going on in my inbox. I’m finding myself wishing that the far-right pane wasn’t there at all. Which is a problem, given that I doubt Google is going to get rid of those ads any time soon.

There are also a few kinks to work out, which isn’t all that surprising given that the feature is still a Labs project. My biggest gripe so far: if you ‘check’ a message, then use keyboard commands to advance to a different message, the preview page won’t display the message you’ve now highlighted (it’ll just say ‘One conversation selected’). The feature also messed up my left sidebar — chat was allocated too much space and I had to scroll to access my Labels, though this was easily remedied by changing the size of the Chat list to ‘small’.

So it has a ways to go. But I’ll take it.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it.”

Peter Gibbons line from Office Space also served as the slug for my post from early July explaining why I was quitting email for the rest of the month. I was pretty sure I knew how I would feel once the month was up. And now that it is, guess what? That line describes exactly how I feel. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever missed anything less than email.

The past few weeks have been fantastic. Both my mornings and evenings have been decidedly less stressful due to this one little life alteration. Actually, all day, every day has just felt better, not having to worry about the constant stress of getting and (more importantly) responding to email.

When I initially said I was quitting for the month, it brought about a few common reactions: 1) “you’re my hero” 2) “you’re an idiot” 3) “it will never work”. A ton of people I’ve run into over the past month have wanted to know how it was going. Here are some thoughts after a month away.

First of all, yes, I cheated.

As I said in my initial post, I had a number of pending things that I had to follow-up on that were already in my inbox. It took me several days to get through these things. And in a few instances, it took nearly all of the entire month because of delays between the back-and-forths. This, and emergencies, meant I was still checking my email from time to time. But I did go out of my way not to respond to anything I didn’t have to respond to.

Still, there were a few times I had to send an email in response. Looking at my inbox, I did this 43 times over the course of the month. If I filter out the messages I previously said I would respond to, it was down to 11 emails I sent. What were these? Almost all of them were work-related. (And a couple others were forwarding upcoming travel arrangements.)

The fact of the matter is that when you need to send a message to a group of individual coworkers fast, there is still no better method than email. One-to-one messages are easy to do over Facebook or Twitter. But multi-person threads where I needed to know certain people would see my message in a timely manner, required email.

Still, sending only 11 or even 43 emails in response to the thousands I received over the past month warms my heart. Exactly how many did I receive? That’s hard to pinpoint for a few reasons. First, Gmail Search seems to fail when I use the date parameter — presumably because the query is too large (I only see “X of 80″ which then turns to “X of thousands”). Second, during the month, we shut off the TechCrunch Tips fire-hose account from forwarding to my email address, so it would be hard to get an exact figure anyway.

But based on a few different tricks and estimations, I would ballpark it at somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 emails received over the past month. Yes, welcome to my regular hell.

So, let’s call it 15,000 emails received, and only 40-some responded to. Do I feel like I missed anything, or couldn’t get the vast majority of my work done as a result? Not at all.

For almost all communication, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Quora, text messaging, group messaging apps, a regular old phone call, and the like (even Instagram!) were a more-than-adequate replacement for email. The tricky part was juggling all those different mediums. But all of them are more efficient time-wise than email, so i didn’t mind doing that at all. That probably doesn’t scale long-term, but it worked fine for the month.

The other day, Robert Scoble laid out why he thought I was wrong to even try to quit email. His argument boils down to the fact that email is very malleable as a universal communications tool and Google has some nice tools for filtering it in just about every way imaginable. Both of those things are true, but reading over his list of why email is so great also gave me chills.

None of the things he loves about email sound great to me at all. They all sound like power features that require a ton of work and effort to use. It reminds me of Scoble’s argument for what Twitter “needs” to add to compete with Google+. Twitter’s simplicity is the very thing I love about it. In some ways, it’s the anti-email. Scoble, as the power user extraordinaire, always seems to want features that will make him feel more in control of a service. But really, those features end up controlling him. And all of us. They steal our more precious commodity: time.

Yes, there are ways to make email work for you, and Gmail offers many of them. And I obviously recognize that email isn’t going away anytime soon — perhaps not even in my lifetime. But wouldn’t it be great if we could just dream it up again?

That’s really my big problem with email. It’s not the medium necessarily, it’s the tools built to harness that medium.

Of those tools, Gmail is the best. But it still sucks. It takes several seconds to send even the simplest message. You have to worry about subject lines. You have to worry about properly formatting your message because that’s the norm. You have to hit several buttons. Then you have to wait for a response.

Others have done a nice job putting a prettier face on email, like Sparrow and Apple’s latest Mail client, but the fundamental downsides of email remain.

The newer systems, like Twitter, Twitter DM, and Facebook Messages, are much faster. That’s true both technically and because of the removal of unnecessary formalities. The latter is why I still have a dream that Google will one day build “Gmail Lite”. For now, services like Shortmail are interesting.

So where do I go from here? I quit email for a month, but I never really got to fully walk away. One day, I hope that’s feasible. But for me, like 99 percent of the rest of you, it’s unfortunately not from a work-perspective.

At the same time, I feel like Frodo Baggins at the end of The Lord of the Rings. *Spoiler* (Can you really have spoilers for a book that’s almost 60 years old?) I’m back home, but I feel like everything has changed. Can I ever really settle in again? I don’t think so.

So my plan for now is to use my inbox as a sort of passive notification center. The vast majority of messages I won’t respond to, a few I will, and more I’ll respond to via other communication means that I prefer. You can be fairly certain that I’ll see everything.

Here’s the key takeaway that became very clear in the past month: the vast majority of emails are unnecessary. Even if you think they’re important at the time you get them, they’re usually not. Our brains are just hard-wired to respond to emails because society has taught us it’s rude not to. We think of them as letters — even the icons for apps like Gmail and Mac Mail make us think of them this way. It’s rude not to respond to a letter.

Screw that.

Such courtesy should go right out the same window that the U.S. Postal Service is heading out of. This is a new age, a different medium, and there needs to be different norms. In the past, it was likely that only your close friends and relatives would have your address to be able to send you a letter. And it would take days or even weeks to get there. Email is totally different.

Further, another thing I learned in not responding to emails is something I’ve long suspected: one of the biggest problems with email is that when you do respond, it often prompts another response in return. This is due to the very thing I just mentioned: people think it’s rude not to respond. This creates a vicious cycle of a potentially perpetual email chain. And it often happens fast and furious.

By not responding, you cut this chain off before it begins. And again, most emails are unnecessary, so an even greater percentage of responses are unnecessary. We shouldn’t feel bad not responding.

But plenty of folks have tried in the past to lead a rallying cry for email etiquette reform. I’m afraid the only thing that will actually work is for some new email frontend that forces limitations, to take off. I mean really take off — it would have to become insanely popular. Again, the Gmail Lite idea.

Until that day comes, I’m happy to be the jerk that doesn’t respond to emails.

One of the factors that led me to conclude that I could walk away from email for the month was the emergence of Google+. It’s yet another network where people can now message me if they need to get ahold of me.

Further, Google+ makes Gmail look like even more of a dog. To be clear, Gmail is still the best email service out there — but it’s also still an email service. It’s a service based around technology that is decades old. And while Google has put a better front-end on email and added the killer search functionality, compared to tools like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc, email seems a bit like watching black and white television in a world of 1080p flatscreens. I hate it. I’d like it to die.

And Google may help.

Mark Striebeck, Google’s Engineering Manager for Gmail, left a public note in Google+ yesterday letting everyone know that Google is already working on integrating Google+ into Gmail. Specifically, he cites “several Gmail / Google+ integrations” in the works. At the same time, he wants to use Google+’s new Hangouts group chat feature to get ideas and feedback on how the integration should work. Tomorrow on Google+, Striebeck’s team will hold a brainstorming session. Here are his main questions for the integration discussion:

I’m pretty sure that all of you use some email client – many probably Gmail. But regardless of the client:
- What email features would make it easier to interact with Google+?
- How could we integrate Google+ features into Gmail?
- How can we integrate social concepts in Gmail to make the email experience itself better?

Those are all key questions. It seems as if the Gmail team is not only thinking about simple, surface-level integrations with Google+, but also deeper use of the technology behind the service to fundamentally alter Gmail. I’m all for that.

But wait, wouldn’t such integration just be another Google Buzz or Google Wave? If Google handles it as poorly as they did with those services, sure. But all indications right now are that Google has no intention of handling anything about Google+ poorly. Love or hate Google+ itself, it’s pretty clear that Google is firing on all cylinders with this project. And there’s every reason to believe that this will continue into the Gmail integration.

If handled correctly, Google+ could actually be the fastest service ever to go from 0 to 100 million users, as Bill Gross predicted earlier today. But that’s still a long ways off, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here. I just want a better email experience if and when I do come back to email.

Previously, I outlined exactly what I’d like to see from Gmail — that is, Gmail Lite – that still stands. But if I can’t have that, I’ll settle for Gmail with deep Google+ integration.

Update: Due to a “crush of interest”, Striebeck has posted on a slightly altered plan for feedback tomorrow.

Google has just announced that it’s rolling out a new feature over the next week called the People Widget — a small sidebar to the right of email messages that features contextual information about the people you’re interacting with in Gmail. I don’t have the feature active yet so I’m going by the screenshots provided, but it looks like the widget includes each person’s job title, recent email exchanges you’ve had with them, photo, calendar availability, and shared Google Docs. It also includes Buzz updates (hopefully Twitter integration is coming as well).

If you only exchange a handful of messages a day then this probably isn’t a game changer for you, but if you’re constantly having to deal with a flurry of projects and hundreds of contacts, then it could be a godsend. Of course, Google actually isn’t the first company to offer contextually relevant information within Gmail (strange as that may sound). Startups like Rapportive and Xobni have created browser widgets that offer similar functionality.

Rapportive actually includes information from more sources, including LinkedIn, Skype and our own CrunchBase. But Gmail has a couple big advantages: first, it obviously doesn’t require a browser plugin, which is important from a user-acquisition standpoint. And, for those of us who are paranoid about our email, Gmail’s People Widget doesn’t require you to entrust any of your account information to a third-party. Rapportive only looks at the contacts you’re interacting with (and not your message content), but that’s still something.

While it hasn’t always been clear just how big of a bet Google was going to make on Chrome OS, after Google I/O today, it seems very clear that they’re very serious. With the launch of Chromebooks, Google is aiming to strike right at the heart of Microsoft and the Windows stronghold. But they know that one big hold up remains before a browser-based OS can be everywhere: offline access.

With that in mind, on stage today, Google’s Sundar Pichai revealed that Google has internally been using offline versions of their three most popular apps for months now: Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. And this summer, all users will be able to use these apps offline too.

All of this is a long time coming for Google. They’ve had options for going offline in the past with things like Gears, but it wasn’t perfect. And actually, Gears is no longer being supported by Google as Chrome gains many of the same features via HTML5.

Pichai also noted that there are already hundreds of apps in the Chrome Web Store with offline access. And that includes almost every game in the store. This, on top of the built-in 3G connectivity is all vital to ensure the vitality of Chromebooks, Pichai noted.

From this notice, it looks like changes may be afoot to this feature. From AIM’s notice, In the next few days, Google and AOL are working together to change the way you connect to AIM buddies within Gmail. After this change, Gmail and AIM users can talk directly to each other without having to log into both services (you will no longer be able to log into AIM within Gmail’s “Chat” section).

It’s unclear what technology Google and AOL are working on that will allow users to integrate both services with Gmail; but AOL says it is working on an importer to add AIM contacts to your Gmail contacts list. AOL says in the notice: You’ll be able to IM them directly from your Gmail username, but your AIM Username will not show your online status.

AOL says the change will take place in the next few days, but you can sign up to receive a notice when new importer is available.

But honestly, who uses AIM anymore?

Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL.

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — endured technical glitches and a dissection of the disruption formerly known as TV before settling into a debate about privacy. I know, sounds like the usual nonsense, but this show was high quality nonsense. I forget who brought up the famous iPhone/Android hidden recording file crisis, but things quickly got out of hand when one of us suggested that was a feature not a problem.

It turns out that not that many people are aware that when we are on the Internet, everything is recorded. For those who seem surprised by this, all those free apps are actually there to harvest our clicks, searches, and other gestures of our intent. As Doc Searls pointed out, how else does Google make money except by random clicks on Adsense adding up to billions. It’s only when we can’t figure out how to delete our wanderings that people get upset. Me — I count on being surreptitiously tracked so I can go back and figure out where I was last week.

Yesterday, I noticed my Gmail account was insanely slow for no apparent reason. Nothing new here really, so I decided to wait it out. A few hours later, same deal. So I began phase two of my normal routine these days: publicly bitching about Gmail on Twitter. Normally, this works like a charm. Google reaches out and says they’re investigating (yes, fear my TechCrunch power and all that). Within a day, I’m zooming away seemingly faster than ever before.

Except today it’s actually even worse.

Emails are taking upwards of 30 seconds to load. Archiving is taking at least 15 seconds. Search is completely unusable. All the same is true on the mobile site as well. It’s so bad there, in fact, that the app believes it’s actually offline when it’s not.

Anyway, again, none of this is new. I tend to bitch about these things every few months. Here’s me last November, for example — a problem which Google confirmed after my post and quickly fixed. But here’s the thing: why does this keep happening on a regular basis? And why does it take me bitching or a TechCrunch post to fix it? I’m sure this is affecting scores of other users without such a platform, and their complaints likely go unheard.

And before everyone jumps to the silly “it’s free” defense, know two things: 1) Gmail is not free, we’re all paying for it in advertising clicks and/or views. 2) I am actually paying for it. Yes, real money to Google for both more storage and a yearly fee for Google Apps (well, that’s TechCrunch paying, but still). We’re all “paying” customers. Google should be more on top of this.

And I’m sure right after I post this I’ll get an email (which will take 45 seconds to load) that will say the problem is only affecting 2 percent of users. That’s the PR-spin way of saying that millions of people are suffering.

So it’s time for a new deal.

Google, please set a price — any price — that you determine is necessary to keep anyone’s account running smoothly at all times. I’ll gladly pay it. I don’t care if it’s $100 a year or $1,000 a year. It would be worth it.

People often talk about the desire to pay for Twitter either for better uptime or for more features, but the situation with Gmail is much more serious. Unlike Twitter, I conduct basically all my business through Gmail. I simply need it to work for me at all times. And I’m happy to pay for that to be the case.

Currently, I’m only paying $5 a year for 20 GB of storage. Soon, I’ll have to upgrade to the next step, which is $20 a year for 80 GB. The problem is that with this price increase, there’s no guarantee of better service right now. So I’m obviously hesitant to do it. Hell, I’d consider paying the maximum $4,096 a year for the 16 TB of storage if I knew for sure it meant better service.

As for the “why don’t you just switch” argument, it’s tough. Gmail is still the best email service feature-wise and when it’s working properly, no one comes close to it. There’s also a huge lock-in factor for all the people that currently message me this way. Sure, I could forward emails, but really, shouldn’t Gmail just work? Why should I have to switch to an inferior service (from everything but the performance perspective)? I shouldn’t.

So Google, you now have this letter that I’m posting publicly because I currently can’t send it via Gmail in a reasonable amount of time. Set a price and let me know.

Or, if it will help, steal my Gmail Lite idea! Just please do something.

Google’s about to step up its use of “interest-based advertising.” The company has announced that it will change the way it uses the information that it gathers from your scanned Gmail messages. (Or did you forget that Gmail scans every single one of your messages in order to show relevant advertising?) The big change is this: rather than scanning your email on a per-message basis, Google will now begin building a profile about you based on all of your emails. It’s this profile that will then be used to deliver advertising to you.

It’s not hard to understand. Say you email your buddy a lot during the NFL season about how great the Giants are. “The Giants are so great,” you might say to your friend. “Totally,” he might reply. You have several weeks worth of these emails, so Google will have built up a profile that says, “This user loves the Giants, and football more generally. Let’s serve him ads about Giants tickets packages, or Giants memorabilia.” You won’t see ads about the Jets because, well, you clearly have established, in the eyes of the Google bot, you’re only a Giants fan; no point trying to sell you Joe Namath analog clocks.

(Google itself uses a photography example. If you read and write a lot about photography, you might see ads about local photography shops.)

It’s different from the existing system in that ads aren’t served based on a one-off scan, but instead are based on your long-term profile that’s been built. This could well upset privacy advocates, since it’s one thing to accept a one-off, limited scan of an individual email, but it’s another thing to cultivate a profile based on your entire Gmail existence. How much do you trust Google to do the right thing, as it were?

Google says that while this notification will be rolling out to users gradually over the coming days, the personalized ads won’t actually go live for around a month. In the mean time, users can opt-out of the new system through Gmail’s settings panel (the default is that you’re opted-in).

Google says that the system uses signals similar to those utilized by Priority Inbox, the automated system launched last August that attempts to highlight which of your incoming email is most important. These signals include things like who sent the message, whether or not you read it, and keywords that appear in the message.

For example, if you frequently email with your friends about cooking (and you actually read those messages), Gmail might start showing more ads related to cooking classes or a local merchant that specializes in cookware. Google says that by improving its existing ads its reduced the number it shows to users by a third, and it hopes to continue that trend with this new system.

Gmail’s ads have used an automated system similar to AdSense for years — it looks for keywords in your message content and then attempts to place a relevant ad in the sidebar. But now, as Gmail learns your habits, you’ll start seeing ads that aren’t directly related to the email you’re reading (but are hopefully related to your interests).

Of course, this is probably going to spark some privacy concerns. Google is explicitly stating that, just as with the original ad product, this is an automated system, and if you’re really concerned about privacy you can just turn it off. And the interest profile established by Gmail will not be used by any other Google advertising products. It seems like a long time ago now, but Gmail raised waves of privacy issues years ago when it first rolled out its ads in 2004 — and people obviously got over it.

One other interesting thing to note: in the help article about the new feature, Google specifically mentions “Offers and coupons for your local area” as possible ads. A Google spokesperson says that this is part of the company’s local efforts that have yet to roll out, but it sounds like it could be quite powerful — imagine getting Groupon-style offers not just in your inbox, but alongside your other email messages.

First and foremost, Sparrow now has general IMAP support. This means that on top of Gmail, you can use the client for all of your email. This means Yahoo, AOL, Mobile Me, anything. It even supports custom IMAP from services like Rackspace, Fastmail, Zimbra and others.

Second, Gmail’s Priority Inbox has been added as a view option. This option is in a drop-down menu in the inbox itself. (There is also is an “Unread” filter in this drop-down.) These priority messages are marked in Sparrow by the familiar yellow indicator that Google uses.

The coolest addition is the multi-touch gestures. You can now pinch two fingers to both open and close messages. Three-finger swipes left and right will now show and hide a message in the panel. And three-finger swipes up and down will navigate through messages. All of these require a trackpad (though two-finger swipe on the Magic Mouse opens the panel), so if you’re using Sparrow on a desktop Mac, you’ll need the Magic Trackpad. Still, very cool.

A few other new features include a formatting bar, contact groups, the ability to have different signatures for different accounts, and minimal mode (a way to quickly browse message without snippets). And there are a ton of bug fixes.

Of course, my biggest issue with Sparrow has always been speed. Because it relies on IMAP, it’s not as fast as receiving messages as Gmail on the web is. And while things have definitely improved in this regard, there’s still a lot of loading if you get a lot of email.

Another issue was how CPU intensive Sparrow was. But with 1.1, things have definitely improved. “On the backend, Sparrow integrates a new mail database making the application less CPU intensive and snappier,” co-founder Dom Leca writes.

Overall, this is a great update to a wonderfully simple and great-looking Mac mail client. And since it’s now sold through the Mac App Store, the 1.1 update is a simple update available for free to current owner. New users will get this version for the standard $9.99 price (though there is a trial lite version as well).

Ever since Xobni launched at the first TechCrunch 40, it’s been about Outlook and then Blackberry. But those of us who use Gmail also want to make our inboxes smarter. Today, Xobni is launching aprivate beta for Gmail, and will soon also launch iPhone and Android apps. The first 100 readers to sign up for the Gmail beta will get in (use the code XOBNI-TC100).

The Gmail app comes in the form of a browser extension for either Chrome or Firefox (Safari and IE will come later). Once you install it, a Xobni sidebar appears in your Gmail Inbox. Once you allow it to index your contacts and hook it up to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, it starts to show you all sorts of relationship data. Contact search in the Xobni box is hella fast, much faster than searching in the Gmail search box (but only for contacts, it does not index the entire text of your messages).

When you open up an email, the Xobni sidebar shows you a graph plotting your relationship history (how many messages you’ve exchanged) as well as other contacts frequently CCed on messages to or from that person. You can also tab through to a list of recent emails with that person, summary info from their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles (along with recent status updates and Tweets).

Soon, the Xobni extension will work inline in the regular Gmail search box as well, creating smart autosuggestions every time you search. Other additional features the company is working on include contact suggestions in the To: field based on related contacts in the past, phone number extraction and attachment search . It will also pull Tweets and Facebook updates from your closest email contacts in a dashboard view, whether or not you follow them on those social networks.

It’s a solid feature, but the Gmail team knows that the battle against email overload is still far from over. So today it’s launching its next weapon: Smart Labels. Activate it, and Gmail will begin to automatically tag certain inbound messages as ‘Bulk’, ‘Notifications’, or ‘Forums’ and handle them accordingly.

The labels themselves are pretty self-explanatory. Notifications include updates from Facebook, Amazon shipping confirmations and other messages that may not be from someone you know but contain important information. And Forums consist of messages from any online message board you may take part in. Messages that appear to be sent as part of a mass mail list will probably be marked as ‘Bulk’ — by default these will skip the inbox, while Forums and Notifications will be kept in the inbox by default.

You can, of course, tweak these initial settings to route each type of message where you want it. Gmail can also automatically label incoming messages as ‘Personal’ or ‘Promotions’.

For those of you who have already set up a complex array of Gmail filters, Smart Labels probably won’t be a huge deal — I’ve long since set up filters to automatically sort through my Facebook notifications and Groupon deals, for example. For everyone else, it could prove quite handy. Just remember that if you decide to start routing incoming Bulk messages or Notifications so that they skip your main inbox, you’ll have to occasionally click the label at the side of the screen to see these new messages.

To enable the new feature, you’ll have to go to Gmail’s Labs section, where it’s listed as ‘SmartLabels’. Unlike Priority Inbox, which Gmail prompted everyone to try out, Smart Labels will be tucked away under Labs for the time being.

It’s worth noting that Hotmail (yes, Hotmail) has offered a similar feature called Sweep that lets you route certain types of messages en masse. The difference is that Gmail Smart Labels will attempt to automatically detect the type of message without any user input required, while Hotmail requires the user to specify which senders they want to have ‘Swept’ away.

While the initial reports had around .29 percent of Gmail users affected by the bug (about 600,000 users), those estimates were quickly revised to .08 percent (about 150,000 users). And today, those numbers were further revised to .02 percent. This means that only around 40,000 of Gmail’s 200 million (or so) users were affected.

Now, 40,000 pissed off people is still 40,000 pissed off people. But there was even better news out of Google today: all of their data is safe and sound. But it isn’t safe and sound in some remote server attached to the cloud. Instead, it’s safe on back-up data tapes somewhere in an undisclosed location.

Yes, despite all the ‘cloud this’ and ‘cloud that’ talk, when it comes down to it, Google still backs up everything on tape.

And thank god they do.

Just imagine if this bug had affected a significant percentage of users? All of those affected plus millions more would have likely never trusted Google with their data again. Worse, it may have slowed the flow of such data to the cloud across the entire industry. That may have made Microsoft smile, but we’d all have been worse off for it.

But again, luckily, that didn’t happen. Still, it’s fairly alarming that all of those insane data redundancy policies that Google has in place fell because of what seems to be a fairly standard “storage software update”.

Google notes that it’s going to take a little bit more time to get all of the data off the tapes and back into the cloud. But at least it will get there, instead of being gone forever.

[photo: flickr/akakumo]

Surely by now you’ve heard of the problems people have been having with their Gmail accounts. E-mails have been deleted, accounts have been disabled, and while Google has been hard at work trying to make everything right, it’s just another example of why moving your entire life to the cloud may not always be the best idea.

Google says that the glitch, which first popped up at the weekend, has only affected a small percentage of the Gmail userbase. Initial estimates hovered around less than 0.29 percent of all Gmail users, but that number has since been revised down to less than 0.08 percent of all Gmail users.

It’s fair to say that calling the glitch “widespread” probably wouldn’t be entirely accurate.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t use this episode as a “teachable moment,” a time to reflect on the wisdom of moving so much of our data to the cloud.

The cloud, Conan? Odds are you use the cloud several times per day. Do you use an e-mail service like Gmail? That’s the cloud. Ever stream music from Spotify or Rdio? That’s the cloud. Watch Netflix streams before going to bed? Yup, that’s the cloud.

Any time you’re tapping into data that’s hosted somewhere else you’re tapping into the cloud.

Contrast these examples with your giant collection of MP3s or Blu-ray discs. If, for whatever reason, Spotify’s servers go down you won’t be able to listen to “I Need A Doctor.” Good thing you have a MP3 stored locally, right? And what happens when one of Netflix’s servers keels over? Guess you can’t watch whatever. But wait! That’s why you have a collection of shiny plastic discs, either of the Blu-ray or DVD variety.

The cloud extends beyond mere entertainment. Online stores like Steam and the new Mac App Store are all on the cloud. Steam sales are great until you try to download Fallout: New Vegas during one of them. At the point it’s probably quicker to hop in the car, drive over to the only store in the county that still stocks PC games, then come home and install it the old fashioned way.

That, of course, is provided the Steam servers can stay online. Same thing with the Mac App Store. Apple can’t well “kill” the shiny plastic disc if it can’t figure out how to hand out a few download codes.

That such a small number of people have experienced glitches with their Gmail accounts doesn’t mean everybody should panic. That would be silly. But it does mean that perhaps people should think twice before they trash their Blu-ray collection in favor of something like Netflix, or before they entrust all of their personal data to a anonymous server stored in North Carolina that you have zero control over.

Be careful, is all.

If you’re a TechCrunch reader — or, really, if you live in the 21st century — you probably get more than one or two emails in the course of a day. In fact, you probably get a lot more. For some of us, emails have a way of accumulating faster than trolls in a comment section, and it can become an arduous task to keep track of which emails are top priority and which are your ex-girlfriend telling you to come and pick up your stuff.

Thanks to Taskforce, a member of Y Combinator’s latest class of startups, organizing your inbox just got a lot easier. Taskforce, simply put, is an inbox extension that integrates with Gmail to convert your emails into tasks and makes it simple to create reminders.

To begin using the plug-in, you simply download the extension, and sign in to your email account. Taskforce will pop up (it looks like a tall-ish Google toolbar) and prompt you to begin creating tasks. You can then set due dates, add collaborators, delay the date, and make comments on your tasks. It also adds buttons to the top of each of your emails, allowing you to convert the email into a new task, or add it to an existing task. (And don’t worry, Taskforce doesn’t access your inbox, all actions take place through the extension.)

When you add a collaborator to your task list, Taskforce will send that person an email, alerting them to your shared task. If you then make updates, or add pertinent emails, it will automatically alert your collaborator(s). And the coolest part? They don’t even need to be using Taskforce — nor do they have to continue ping-ing you every time they need you to do something — instead they simply check the status of the task.

I recently became a user of Taskforce and so far it’s been great. There are a few kinks here and there, and it sorely needs to add a few minimization options so that you can hide the toolbar when you’re not managing your tasks, but overall the UI is terrific, as is speed. Plus, if you’re lazy like me, you don’t have to open a new tab.

For those Google Tasks users out there, collaboration is the main feature that distinguishes the two. Both task organizers are available on mobile and essentially offer the same tools, but Taskforce kills GTasks in design and UI (aside from bugs, of course).

Founders Niccolo Pantucci and Courtland Allen told me that the idea for Taskforce came from Pantucci’s experience during last year’s catastrophic volcanic eruption in Iceland. Pantucci was one of many in Europe grounded by the enormous, resulting ash clouds. During his three-week layover, emails from friends, family, and colleagues began piling up in his inbox — too many to keep track of — and he found himself unable to reply to the majority of them. And so, in a twist of the butterfly effect, a natural disaster gave birth to an email organizer.

The startup has been in beta for the past 5 months, during which it gained tens of thousands of users, according to the founders. The older version had a few bugs, so the guys completely overhauled the extension for today’s release. And as to funding, as part of YC’s class of 2011, Taskforce was included in Yuri Milner’s no-strings-attached convertible debt investment offer. They accepted.

If you need any assurance before adding the extension, you might want to know that the founders were advised by Paul Buchheit, YC Partner and creator of Gmail, during design and launch. “[Paul] was particularly excited about the fact that he could use Taskforce to avoid extra work,” Allen said of Buccheit. “He wanted to be able to convert people’s emails into tasks and have Taskforce do all the communication, and let people know that he’s ‘on it’”. And so it was.

Taskforce is currently available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with plans to offer compatibility with other browsers and to add document management and CRM tools in the pipeline.