Changing the theme of Gmail has been possible with Greasmonkey, the popular Firefox extension, but aside for some exceptions, non-Firefox users couldn’t change the look and feel of their favorite web mail client.

The new themes look really cool and I really look forward to changing mine as soon as this option will be available on my Gmail account.

Technorati Tags: gmail, luca filigheddu, Mozilla Firefox, skin, Theme

Image via CrunchBase

For those asking themselves what’s going on at GrandCentral, the “one number for life” service acquired by Google last year, today Google announces Vocito, a desktop UI for GrandCentral and, this time, for Mac users only.

It’s basically an apple script which integrates into Address Book or the popular launcher Quicksilver. In general, any application which supports the “tel:” URLs can be used with Vocito.

I installed it and as soon as I try to make a call from my Mac Address Book, I’m requested to insert my GrandCentral userid and password.  At that point, nothing happened (and no error messages), but it’s probably because I tried to call an italian number… The behavior should be the following: it calls my GC number and the remote number and connect them together.

I’ll check it out again to see how it really works. Finally something new from GrandCentral. You can download it at this link.

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Technorati Tags: Address Book, call, Google, GrandCentral, luca filigheddu, vocito

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If you spend much time on Facebook and don’t want to switch tabs of your browser too many times, Fmail brings Gmail straight to your facebook account.

It works really well and all your folders and contacts are properly imported. Unfortunately you loose all the ajax features you are used to.

If you want to try it out, just search for Fmail on Facebook. You are also prompted to match your Gmail contacts with your Facebook friends, something I find very useful.

Check it out and leave your comments here. Do you like this approach or you prefer to use the original GMail?

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Technorati Tags: facebook, Fmail, gmail, luca filigheddu

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Google Labs just introduced a couple of interesting experimental features that you can test while performing a search on Google.

I subscribed to all of them and they look really nice.

Keyboard Navigation

Now you can easily navigate your search results as you are used to do on Google Reader. J/K lets you move to the previous/next search item then you can choose it by clicking enter.

Alternate views

This new features lets you choose different views of the search results page. Together with the standard list view, you now have the timeline view, the map view or the info view. In the first one, you will have a timeline which shows you what years are mentioned within the search results and how many results include that year; in the second one you will see a map with locations mentioned in the search results; in the info view you can see specific information related to your result, as shown in the image below.

Accessible view

This new view makes it easier to highlight, read and navigate through your search results. 

Unfortunately you can try only one of these new experiments at a time. I’m trying the alternate views, very useful (IMHO) especially for the timeline one. If you want to give it a try, just go to this page and choose the experiment you prefer. 

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Technorati Tags: Accessibility, Experiment, Google Labs, Google Reader, luca filigheddu, Search

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This is what I’ve been waiting for since the release of version 1.5 of Gmail for mobile, the previous version that was completely unusable for me, as stated in this blog many times.

According to Google, many important improvements have been introduced in this new version, such as multiple account management or offline support (that is, create drafts even while no signal is available). In addition, users will experience an overall improvement in terms of performances, new shortcut keys and the ability to configure and use more than one gmail account.

This new version is available in 35 different languages for Blackberry and J2ME-based phones. I look forward to trying it out on my Nokia N95 and to compare it with the new Nokia Email, as I did already with the previous version.

UPDATE: after trying it out, I noticed the “refresh” button disappeared and now emails are automatically updated. Your mobile phone rings too, in order to notify new emails. Cool!

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Technorati Tags: gmail, gmail 2.0, Google, luca filigheddu, Mobile, Mobile phone

This is a clear sign that something huge is happening and that there is no doubt Facebook is more and more going mainstream.  That said, I started looking at this phenomena from a different standpoint: is Facebook capable of behaving like an operating system? If you look, for example, at the new Facebook iPhone application, everything you need from an operating system is there: messaging, IM, applications, microblogging, presence, live feed, photos, videos…

In my opinion Facebook could potentially be used for 99% of your time as a central dashboard from which you perform any activity on your computer and your mobile phone, but there are five important features that are currently missing.

1) Address Book - I mean the ability to add people in your “Friend’s List” regardless of whether they are subscribed to Facebook or not.

2) Mail Client - Currently Facebook’s messaging service is rather poor and is not ready to become a fully functional mail client. What if Hotmail would be integrated into Facebook? After Live Search, another move to better integrate Facebook with Microsoft’s services.

3) Documents - If I were Facebook, I would buy a service for online documents management as Google did a couple of years ago with Writely which was the basis for Google Docs. This application, together with the powerful mail client mentioned above, would be a killer feature for me.

4) Web Browser - It would be great if I could open any web page from within Facebook itself, leveraging its powerful sharing capabilities. A wordpress/typepad/… blog editor? A Wordpress.com Facebook application is available already, but a similar app for personal wordpress installations is still missing.

5) Calendar/PIM - 30Boxes is already offering it and it seems users like it (about 24.000 monthly active users) even if it’s still a little percentage of the whole FB population.

What do you think? What should Facebook add to become a real operating system? Can we expect to see a new mobile phone “F1” sometime soon? I look forward to your comments.

Technorati Tags: facebook, Google, Google Docs, iphone, luca filigheddu, operating system, Web 2.0

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Here at Mobilize Steve Lee, Project Manager at Google and responsible for Google Maps for mobile, just revealed that when users have the ability to get their current position either by a GPS-enabled device or through the data network, the usage of the application doubles.

He said this happens especially when people search for a route to get to somewhere, since they don’t have to waste (about) 1 minute to insert their current position manually. This is an important point, since mobile applications must all be about simplicity given that when we are on the go, we are usually  rushing, in our car or, in general, with very limited time, and even one minute is very important.

Google is working hard in this space and yesterday they just announced a new version of Google Maps featuring Street View and Walking Directions, the latter being something I was always looking for. Here is a video.

Again, the main problem any application like Google Maps faces is battery life. Those apps are the future but there’s still a lot of work to be done in the field of power management and the challenge is to make batteries last at least 15 to 20 hours even with an intensive usage of the device, so that device can be recharged over night. What do you think?

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Technorati Tags: Android, Google, Google Maps, Google Street View, luca filigheddu, Mobile, Mobile phone, mobilize, Street View, Walking Directions

The browser is called CrossOver Chromium and you can download the proper version for your OS at this link.

As soon as you load it, it performs a first time initialization that takes a few minutes. After that, as others noticed, it doesn’t seem to be a native Mac application but a porting, as it is.

I don’t really know if I would recommend it, I bet it’s gonna be unstable and far from being as good as the original version. In addition, there are many reasons why me and probably you are not going to switch now, plus the fact it is not the “real” Chrome and the risk is that you get a wrong perception about that browser.

After a couple of tests, I’m giving up. Not really that fast, font rendering is terrible and it looks like a Windows application. On the other hand, if you would like to get a feeling of what the new Google browser is going to be on your Mac, it’s definitely worth a try.

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Technorati Tags: Chromium, codeweavers, CrossOver, Google Chrome, linux, luca filigheddu, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Open source, Windows

The recently announced Google Chrome made me think of how many elements contribute to make a browser sticky to an user. Chrome is not available for Mac yet, but I tried it on a Windows PC and it really rocks. Fast, clean, powerful, all that confirms Google’s ownership.

That said, would I change? I’ve been a faithful user of Safari for years, but I recently switched to Firefox 3.0, even if much slower than Safari. Why? Extensions. There are many extension that add so many new functionalities to the browser which are definitely making Firefox 3 sticky to me.

Among the others, Greasmonkey, Zemanta, Kaalga, Feedly, Ubiquity, Better Gmail. Nothing similar is available for Chrome neither for Safari and I would really miss them now. They improve my productivity and the overall user experience of the browser gets much better.

All that being said, I do believe opening up the platform to make easy to develop new extensions or plugins is fundamental for making a new browser a success. Safari can be improved through AppleScripts too, there are some useful tools which makes it better, but extensions are not officially supported within the browser.

For Chrome the story is the same. I bet Google is thinking carefully about this weakness of its browser and I bet they’ll come out with something in the following months.

In conclusion, during times where browsers are becoming the new operating system where apps run, extensions can make the difference and many people used to Firefox wouldn’t switch that easily. What do you think? Will Google come out with add-ons for Chrome? Leave your comments.

UPDATE: Google Engineer just confirmed that Chrome will support addons and Gresmonkey’s developer is working with the Google Chrome team. I look forward to trying something out soon.

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Feedly is a Firefox extension which provides you with a whole new experience to the way you consume news from Google Reader. Google Reader is great but Feedly offers so many improvements that you’ll never miss it in terms of user interface.

First of all we have to say that Feedly relies completely on Google Reader and it is synchronized with it. That said, any action you perform on Feedly is automatically translated into the correspondent in Google Reader.

Secondly, sharing news on Twitter or Friendfeed has never been easier. You can also “like” an article or post to Friendfeed/Twitter directly from within Feedly.

The other great fact about Feedly is the way it brings the news to you. There are many different views available and many filters so that you can make sure only the most relevant news are highlighted and shown to you and when you have many hundred RSS subscriptions, this feature becomes particularly useful.

Another great option is the list of the top readers of certain blogs your read. For example, when I click on any specific Google Reader tag, i can see a box on the right with the top readers of the news which are tagged that way.

Feedly also provides you with a great way to perform a “springcleaning” of your feeds, highlighting the feeds where there is less activity or that you read less….

… but it also recommends new sources you could be interested in according to what currently read.

There is much more with Feedly (like The Wall, the annotation tool, APIs… ) and I highly recommend to check it out. For eager consumers of news and people addicted to social media, Feedly is a must have.

My guess? I wouldn’t be surprised to see Feedly as part of Google very soon, too.

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Technorati Tags: facebook, feedly, friendfeed, GoogleReader, luca filigheddu, RSS, twitter