Common Paradox Tech Blog

Google’s new social network, Google Buzz, is getting some additional refinement, based on user feedback. Today’s news: The search giant is testing new features that will give you control over the flood of Buzz e-mail notifications.

Google Buzz has the benefit of being integrated directly into Gmail. Not only does it have a prominent tab in millions of inboxes, but it also sends e-mail notifications of recent buzz activity to your inbox. If you’re like us, the e-mail flood can get pretty overwhelming pretty quickly. Plus, anytime someone comments on a buzz thread, the e-mail pops right back up.

Google’s heard you loud and clear. In a buzz post, the Buzz team revealed that it is testing two changes to e-mail notifications to help you better manage your inbox. While these changes are not live yet, they should be up in the next few days.

The first change is something we’ve been seeking for some time: The ability to choose which items get sent to your inbox. If you just want an e-mail when someone comments on your post, it will soon be possible. If you want just posts where you are @replied, that’s possible as well. The second feature is a “Mute” link on individual buzz posts, which will stop a buzz post from reappearing in your inbox every time someone comments.

Both changes are necessary if Buzz is to be usable as a product. Still, Google hasn’t addressed our number-one request: collapsible comment threads.

[via CNET]

Reviews: Gmail, Google, Google Buzz

Tags: email, gmail, Google, google buzz, social media

Mozilla this week made available the first beta of Thunderbird 3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Codenamed "Lanikai," the latest release introduces a few changes to the open-source email client, many of which take place under the hood.

Built on top of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform (the same engine powering Firefox 3.6), Mozilla says you can expect improvements in stability and memory, fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2, fixes for auto complete, tabs, and activity manager, and several design improvements and corrections to the interface.

As with any beta software, you should expect a few bugs, and there are a handful of known issues in Thunderbird 3. Kaspersky’s Anti-Spam extension is disabled, for instance, and you may run into some SMTP issues.

If you still want to give it a try, you can download a copy right here.

Release Notes
Changelog

After 18 months of Gmail Labs being in operation, Google’s killing off some unpopular features, but also promoting the oft-used ones to permanent functions. Say hello to the forgotten attachment detector, YouTube previews and custom label colors.

While the muzzle, fixed width font, email addict, location in signature and random signature functions have been buried by Google due to either a lack of interest or the feature made redundant by something better that’s waltzed on in, at least the good man won, with my trusty forgotten attachment detector graduating to a standard feature.

It detects phrases in your email, such as the word “attachment,” and before sending the email reminds you of the forgotten attachment. Definitely saves redface, especially when applying for a new job.

Search autocomplete and the go to label function will suggest words when searching in the Gmail box for a particular email. YouTube Previews is fairly self explanatory, opening a little preview which will avoid being Rickrolled for the umpteenth time.

Over 4,000 colors are now available for labels—handy if you have a green fetish—and the last graduating feature is vacation dates, which will turn on your out of office autoreply based on what dates you’re on holiday. [Gmail Blog]

Microsoft Outlook has just become a lot more social through new partnerships with Facebook and MySpace and an existing one with LinkedIn.

You might remember back in November that Microsoft announced Outlook Social Connector, a new Office 2010 feature that hooks up social feeds into the Outlook inbox. The initial partner for the program was LinkedIn, whose business connections, alerts, and messages would integrate directly with Outlook.

Now that integration has gone live. Outlook users can now download LinkedIn for Outlook and transform their desktop inboxes into their hub for all things LinkedIn.

Overshadowing its release though is Microsoft’s announcement of two big partners for the Outlook Social Connector, MySpace and Facebook. Sometime in the next few months, users will be able to check up on their MySpace friends, update their Facebook status, and browse through photos.

While it’s unclear just how deep this integration will go, it’s clearly a win for Outlook and Microsoft. While Google’s Gmail service now boasts Google Buzz, Microsoft can counter that with LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook, all of which are more widely used than Buzz.

Do you think Outlook Social Connector will be enough keep people hooked to Microsoft’s desktop software? Is it enough of a reason to switch? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: email, facebook, linkedin, microsoft, microsoft outlook, myspace, Outlook, Outlook Social Connector

If there’s anything cooler than patches, it’s patching patches with patches (say that five times fast). One of the most popular patches for webOS is Enable LED Notifications, which merely uncomments (activates, if you will) a bit of code to allow the user to enable pulsing LED notifications on their phone. There’s just one problem: the LED flashes for any notification. For people like this blogger, the LED notifications are great, with the exception that I always get emails and don’t need constant and persistent notification of that. What I do need notifications for are things like missed calls, text messages, and other things that are not email.

Luckily, I’m not the only person with that problem (if you’ve listened to the PalmCast, you’d know that Dieter tends to rail on this oversight every other week). Developer Franz Rühmland put together a patch for the patch that allows the user to have the LED flash for notifications other than new emails. Huzzah!

Additionally, another patch by hape and jhoff80 has adapted the Enable LED Notifications patch for use on German webOS devices (Enable LED Notifications German). The more the merrier, eh? If you’re feeling like getting in on the action, go fire up your preferred patch installer and get to work!

Thanks to Yasasvi for the tip!

Email signatures are so easy to do well, that it’s really a shame how often they’re done poorly. Many people want their signature to reflect their personality, provide pertinent information and more, but they can easily go overboard. Why are email signatures important? They may be boring and the last item on your list of things to get right, but they affect the tone of every email you write.

Email signatures contain alternative contact details, pertinent job titles and company names, which help the recipient get in touch when emails are not responded to. Sometimes, they give the recipient an idea of who wrote the email in case it has been a while since they have been in touch. They are also professional: like a letterhead, they show that you run a business (in some countries, you’re required to do so). Here are some tips on how to create a tasteful signature that works.

Well before the end of 2009, it was clear that geolocation would be one of the biggest web trends in 2010. From social services like Foursquare to location-specific trends in Twitter, location is one of the hottest new features for users, businesses and especially advertisers. While we expect the biggest push in geolocation will continue to be its integration with social services, even e-mail marketers like MailChimp are catching the geolocation bug.

Advertising has the most chance of succeeding if it is targeted, not just by demographic and interests, but location. Thanks to GPS, skyrocketing smartphone adoption and more and more geo-aware services, it’s easier than ever to get information about where someone is at any specific moment.

The real-time nature of geolocation is giving advertisers exciting new opportunities — think about the potential of letting nearby users know that you’re having a sale or the ability to offer Facebook fans offers that are specific to their location. Location has interesting potential for other forms of communication as well.

MailChimp’s goal is to let small and large businesses easily send e-mail to customers or potential clients. That’s great because it lets businesses reach lots of people at once when announcing a new product or promotion. Unless unless you specifically collate the data yourself, that database of e-mail addresses still lacks context.

If you’re a business that has a local location but also ships worldwide, you don’t want to sent a campaign about a sale in your brick and mortar store to someone who lives 3000 miles away, but segmenting users by location hasn’t been an easy task unless you ask customers for an address when they sign up for a newsletter.

Now MailChimp is introducing location-based targeting for its users that will determine location based on IP address, negating the need for address or location fields.

How it Works

In MailChimps’s case, they are tracking location based on IP address. When a customer (who has double-opted in to a subscription) clicks on a link in a newsletter sent by MailChimp, MailChimp can grab their IP address and then determine its location. IP addresses aren’t 100% accurate, but they are usually indicative of about 150 miles or so.

MailChimp will keep a database of locations that a customer uses when interacting with your mail and will average that to give you a general location idea.

MailChimp customers can then enter in an address or zip code and compare it against a subscriber list within a radius of 50, 100 or 150 miles. The limitations on specificity are important to note if you are wanting to send a truly localized campaign.

Indicative of the Future

While MailChimp’s implementation, by the nature of how it works, isn’t going to be as specific or accurate as relatime data that marketers could grab from Facebook or Foursquare, it does open up other avenues for effective targeted campaigns.

Geolocation, whether it’s in a mobile app or an e-mail service, is becoming a bigger and for effective part of how advertisers reach consumers.

What do you think about how location is changing advertising? Would you use this type of information in your campaigns? Let us know in the comments!

Tags: email, geolocation, lbs, location, mailchimp

Google has a cool little surprise in store for heavy e-mail users (and Mac owners): Google E-mail Uploader for Mac. It’s a free app that can archive your old e-mails from Apple Mail, Eudora and Thunderbird on your Google Apps e-mail account.

It’s actually a great idea; chances are that in the pre-cloud era, you’ve had tons of e-mail stored somewhere in your desktop e-mail client. Now, you can move everything to the cloud in one easy step.

If you’re a Windows user, check out the previously available Google E-mail Uploader for Windows. Unfortunately, you can only upload your e-mails to Google Apps e-mail accounts, not your gmail.com or googlemail.com accounts.

[Beautiful Google hard disk illustration courtesy of Joy of Tech]

Reviews: Windows

Tags: email, gmail, google apps

Email encryption is a task that’s often misunderstood and frequently confusing. In fact, I can’t think of anyone on my list of friends right now–geek or otherwise–who actually encrypts their email. That’s not because email encryption is a bad thing. In fact, there are some pretty compelling benefits to being able to conceal the contents of a message. Suppose you have to quickly email a friend or loved one access to your online banking account for some reason. You aren’t going to want to just send that information straight into the digital ether. An unhappy coworker or an industrious packet sniffer can pick out the contents of your message and compromise your security in a short amount of time.

You usually have to walk through a ton of hoops to get your hands on powerful email encryption. It’s a hodgepodge of certificates, authentications, digital signatures, strings of text exchanged as keys, et cetera. Or, at least, it was. A helpful piece of freeware called Comodo SecureEmail is attempting to simultaneously reduce the headache and maximize the benefit of email encryption. I’m proud to report that it’s super-easy to use so long as you know how to work your way around a typical configuration screen. More importantly, it’s a great way to set up the encryption handshake between you and new email contacts without rendering you lifeless from all the different options and authentications.

Comodo’s options are as numerous as they are detailed–going into all of them right now would double the size of this mini-review. Here’s the gist: You create an encryption certificate and start sending your contacts unencrypted and encrypted emails depending on your preferences. When a contact receives an encrypted email for the first time, he or she has one or two options: download Comodo to view the contents of the message or, if you’ve allowed it, use a one-time-only, secure Web form to view the message. The first option will automatically add said contact’s digital certificate to your library, completing the handshake.

It’s as easy as that–you don’t have to fuss with a prearranged sharing of keys or any of that mess. Just send the email and let Comodo take care of the rest: Simple, secure, speedy.

Each week, Maximum PC picks a new free or shareware download as its favorite of… the week. Have a nifty application that you can’t live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.

Both Verizon and AT&T have recently dropped the price of their unlimited voice plans from $100 to $70 a month. While we (we being the tech media) generally assumed that the price cuts were an attempt to lure more customers. We tend to forget a few days after their conference calls that the #1 and #2 US cellular networks are having no trouble picking up and retaining new customers, even with their rates considerably higher than #3 Sprint and #4 T-Mobile (T-Mobile is at least still gaining subscribers, unlike Sprint). So why the price cuts?

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