I swear, sometimes it’s like google is reading my mind. almost every tweek or change i’ve wished for over the last year or so, has eventually come true. To think, just one year prior to that, i was joking with a few friends that Gmail was like some kind of secret cult. At the time, you could only get in by Beta Invite. Oooh. Then, once you tried it, you never went back. What’s more, you found that you couldn’t stop telling other people about it, “converting” them, so to speak.

Today, i use Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Docs, Reader, Notebook, Groups, Trends, Adsense, Analytics, Adwords, Alerts, and now Co-op.

I’ve always liked custom search engines like Wink and Rollyo. But, even though i’ve enjoyed many of the social aspects that these sites had to offer, somehow they all still seemed quite lacking. it always bothered me that Rollyo puts a limit on the number of sites you can add per topic. And Wink has a “Sync with Del.icio.us” tool which would kick ass if i could get it to work (apparently my 3 week old sync task is still queued somewhere in cyber-hell).

Google Co-op seems to satisfy at least part of the concerns that i had (regarding time wasted and revenue sharing) and so i couldn’t resist creating a couple of my own custom search engines for you all to try out and hopefully help build. I haven’t had a chance to style them yet, but there are a ton of excellent sites in each one already so the results for searchs should be pretty interesting.

I’ll be creating a more permanent place for all of these custom search engines as soon as i figure out where – more will likely come soon – so you can keep an eye out for them or just bookmark this page for later reference. the good thing is, wherever i put them, i can always manage them from one place.

in the meantime, go ahead and try one out.
Dont’ forget to let me know what you think. Enjoy!

As far as i can tell, these 4 new features where just added to Gmail:

1. favorite RSS (Web Clips) [ update: this was still pretty broken as of dec.14/05 ]
2. View as HTML (for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or .pdf attachments)
3. shortcuts on the right (maps, UPS tracking and other info)
4. Virus scanning (ingoing and outgoing emails and attachments)
5. update: Gmail Mobile (visit http://m.gmail.com)
6. update: Vacation auto-responder
7. update: Contact groups (send messages to a group)

All of which are cool but it is the 4th one: Virus scanning that is the main reason i haven’t completely moved away from Yahoo!Mail yet. That is not to say that i haven’t opened a Gmail account and set up forwarding to point to both accounts. i obviously had to see what all the fuss was about. but, i wasn’t prepared to just cancel my old email address.

i like what Yahoo has been doing over the last year or so and i would hate to abandon the trusty web-based email service that have served me so well for over 6 years now, but..

since i don’t have access to a Yahoo!Mail beta account and therefore cannot see what is going on behind the scenes with regards to the potentially awesome “new” version of their email service, i would not be surprised to find myself using Gmail exclusively at some point in the near future.

My impression is that there are just too many good applications out there (Web2.0 or otherwise), and so nobody really has time to keep two, redundant, parallel services in use on a day-to-day basis. A feature like virus scanning is important enough in today’s market to cause people to switch from one service to the next. As such, many who were holding off on using Gmail, hoping to get to use the new Yahoo!Mail already, will ultimately cave in and sign up with google.

Moreover, i’ve noticed that Gmail has more options for importing and exporting things like contacts, etc. – something that will likely encourage new-comers and make existing users feel more comfortable (export features are important to users who are concerned about getting “locked” into a specific software). Also, i think that Gmail does a better job at filtering emails with no apparent limit to the number of filter you can set up. Yahoo!Mail lets you set up a maximum of 15 filters. Two more things that have been annoying with the current Yahoo!Mail service.

You can read more about the new features that Gmail just launched by heading over to: About Gmail.