kortina's tumblog

Google’s Long Term Bet on Organizing Personal Data

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information.  A subset of the world’s information particulary important to me is my information—my transcripts, documents, photos, videos, publications, files, music, etc.

So far I heavily use the following:
Gmail
Google Calendar
Google Docs
Google Talk
Google Contacts
Youtube

I’ve been so pleased with how well these perform that I’ve been considering playing with Picasa for photos and Blogger for publishing. I’d also love all of my music to somehow be stored / accessible via a Google product. I’m probably storing way too much value in my Google credentials right now, but it’s just so efficient to outsource all of my data organization to them.

What’s really interesting though, is that so far I’m gaining far more out of this deal than Google is. I don’t pay for a single one of the products above (though I would), and I have converted on a handful of ads in the entire lifetime I’ve been using these products.  What’s going on, I think, is a very long term bet by Google. If they help me efficiently organizing all facets of my personal data, they’ll have so much contextual data about my behavior and preferences that I’d trust their recommendation like that of a good (very scientific) friend.  For example, Google might recommend the half gallon of milk at the grocery store instead of the full gallon because I always end up wasting a little bit of the full gallon.

Google’s contextual knowledge of my preferences and behavior gained through their control of my personal data will make the ultimate lens for my consumption of the world’s data.  So although they’re not getting much out of the consumer services I love and use for free right now, in a few years I would bet Google could take a nice cut of almost every purchase I make because they’re be aiding nearly all of my buying decisions.

The Fastest Way to Compose Gmail Messages - gCompose Bookmarklet

I send lots of emails via Gmail, and I hate waiting for the full Gmail UI (chat list, inbox, etc) to load every time I want to send a quick note. Jenny and I riffed on this topic awhile back on Hackaddict, where we talked about a nice little bookmarklet for composing messages ( http://bit.ly/11Xgv ). This works pretty well, but still takes quite awhile to load.

This morning, I suddenly had the insight to hack around with any iGoogle Gadgets for composing Gmail gadgets to see if I could find anything faster. After a few minutes I struck gold and found this link loading in an iframe: http://bit.ly/gCompose

NOTE: if this link doesn’t work, see the UPDATE at the bottom of this post!

This loads in about 1s, doesn’t show chat or inbox, and still performs autocomplete on the recipient address fields. I am going to use this exclusively for authoring new emails now.

I’ve made the link available in a number of ways:

As a simple bookmark:
http://bit.ly/gCompose

As a bookmarklet that pops a nice little window:
gCompose

As a Mozilla Ubiquity Plugin:
http://labs.kortina.net/ubiquity-kortina.html

Here’s a quick screencasat demoing all 3 ways to use the gCompose Bookmarklet:
Watch the demo on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1woYdrO-J5k

One of the the ways I know this is going to save tons of time is by not loading inbox or chat. When I just want to fire off a quick email, inbox and chat always end up diverting me into 5 minutes of distraction from whatever I was doing. GTD! This bookmarklet is the perfect workflow for getting things done and keeping focus.

*** UPDATE: *** if the above doesn’t work, you probably have a different link for your Google Account to this compose page that depends on a special “mid” flag in the URL.

To make this work, first install the Gmail gadget for iGoogle: http://bit.ly/qWO3

Open the Compose window from the gadget on iGoogle:


Right click on this window, and choose to open the frame in a new window so you can get the location:


The important part here is to get the correct “mid”:


Now, either bookmark this page, or, substitute your “mid” for “141” in this bookmarklet and add it to your bookmarks bar:

javascript:var%20w=window,u='http://www.google.com/ig/gmailmax?hl=en&mid=141&view=comp',l=document.location;try{%20throw(0);%20}%20catch(z)%20{a%20=function(){if(!w.open(u,'gmail.kortina.bookmarklet','toolbar=0,resizable=0,status=1,width=600,height=480'))l.href=u;};if(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else%20a();}void(0)

Or, you can do the same substitution in this ubiquity command:

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({

  name: "gmail",

  preview: "Opening gmail compose window window",

  description: "opens a laser fast gmail compose window",

  author: {name: "kortina"},

  execute: function() {

      var document =  Application.activeWindow.activeTab.document;	



      var f='http://www.google.com/ig/gmailmax?hl=en&mid=141&view=comp';

        a = function() {

            if (!window.open(f, "gmail.bookmark.by.kortina", 'location=yes,links=no,scrollbars=no,toolbar=no,width=600,height=480'))

                location.href=f;

        };

        a();

  }

});

If anyone knows a way around this “mid” business, please post in the comments, but unfortunately this seems to be the only way to make the compose window load on different Gmail accounts. Sorry for the confustion, folks!