Posts Tagged ‘gmail labs’

Google Maps Gmail gadget enables location search from within email account

Posted in Apps, Mapping on April 8th, 2009 by Justin – Comments

ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez has put together a fantastic list of Google Gmail Gadgets that aren’t available from Gmail Labs.  Any of the gadgets listed in the article can be added to your email account by clicking on “Gadgets” in the Settings menu and adding the provided URL to the gadget box manually.

One of the handier-is that even a word?-Gmail gadgets is Google Map Search which allows you to look up addresses with Google Maps without leaving your Gmail account.  If you constantly have to look up addresses sent to you in emails this is a big time saver.  All you have to do is enter the address in the provided gadget box and press search.

Here’s the gadget URL: http://www.google.com/ig/modules/mapsearch.xml

There are a wide variety of other Gmail gadgets including Facebook and Twitter gadgets, which depending on what you use Gmail for, could either be really handy or devastating time wasters!

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New: Add your location to Gmail messages

Posted in Geospatial Technology on February 11th, 2009 by Justin – Comments

Now I just know there will be a privacy advocate out there that says something about this, but a new Gmail Labs feature allows you to add your location to your email signature.  Yep, in your Gmail account just add Location in Signature in the Labs tab under Settings, then head to your signature preference and check “Append your location to the signature.”

Underneath your signature you’ll see the city, region, and country you’re in when you send the email.  For the time being the experimental feature uses IP address to detect location so accuracy might be an issue, but if you install Google Gears, its location module can find your location from Wi-Fi access points-much more accurate.

As you can see, this is a obvious opt-in process that allows you to delete your location from any email you choose, and the location signature does not show your exact location.  Hopefully these means we don’t see any disruption from privacy groups in the blogosphere tomorrow-oh please.

I’m not exactly sure why this hasn’t been implemented into Google’s location-aware Latitude social application, but should the uptake in Gmail be encouraging I’m sure will see it implemented at some point.

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