Gmail has a nice little feature that allows you to tack on a phrase to the end of your username without destroying the delivery of e-mail to your inbox. Here’s how it works:

• Lets say my e-mail address is super.awesome.coder.ninja@gmail.com and I want to sign up at Amazon
• All I need to do is add a phrase to my e-mail separated by a + when I sign up!
• Lets say I add the word shop…my e-mail would now look like: super.awesome.coder.ninja+shop@gmail.com
• Now any time mail is sent to super.awesome.coder.ninja+shop@gmail.com, I receive it at super.awesome.coder.ninja@gmail.com with the ability to create Gmail filters to mark as read; add a label; move to trash; etc…all based on what e-mail address the e-mail was sent to.

Very awesome.

If you’re curious, here’s what I use this feature for:

• Sending pictures, documents, etc to myself so I don’t have to carry a physical storage device. I just send it to myemail+storage@gmail.com and with filters: mark it as read and archive the e-mail.
• Sign up for online stores and gaming accounts. I sign up as myemail+shop@gmail.com.
• Sign up for multiple test accounts on systems I develop to allow me test as multiple users with the same e-mail. I sign up as myemail+[somerandomstring]@gmail.com

All told, this feature has proven great for e-mail organization and the reduction of spam (at least spam that reaches my inbox). Lets just hope spammers are slow to pick up on this…although I’m sure this blog isn’t helping in the prevention of their knowledge of this Gmail feature…ah well. Hope this helps you out :)

Its great. The interface is pretty darn snazzy…very Gmail-like with its layout; which is great to see as this just screams the at coming full integration between CL2 and Gmail. Everything is Ajax-ified as would be expected with any of Google Services and they do the whole event creation thing right. Its quick, its easy, and fairly intuitive while screwing with advanced event options. Whats really great are the options for repeating events; they have the standard weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, etc…but they also have very student friendly time slots: events that occur on Monday/Wednesday/Fridays, on Tuesday/Thursdays, and on every weekday.

Another huge win is the social aspect that is delivered at launch of CL2. You have the ability to add guests to events and calendars. Oh, and thats another thing! You can create multiple calendars and make them publicly viewable or make them private (you can restrict viewing to just yourself or open it up to certain people). A nice thing about the multiple calendar stuff is that you can view all your available calendars on a single calendar page where it combines events. Very cool stuff.

Other cool features are:

• Notifications for events can be sent via E-mail, popups, and by Cellphone!
• Discussion threads on events
• Event integration with Google Maps
• Ability to add other public calendars to your own…
• A number of country specific holiday calendars are available for adding into your list of calendars.
• Importing from csv and ical

I’m a happy camper.

I can’t see the links show up in Gmail itself yet, but if you go http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=barc you can select which links to show. And when you go to the calendar url (http://www.google.com/cl2/) it gives you the login box, but if you try to login it gives you an invalid request page.

I’ve no clue what Google CL2 has in store, but I’m hoping for something on par with Zimbra‘s integrated calendar. I speculate that it will be hand-in-hand with Gmail, it will be Ajaxified, and I can only hope it has RSS features. Just another sweet tool to be added to Google’s list of services!

Ajax stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Its an architectural methodology on the interactions between a number of different technologies in a way that provides a more seamless user experience between user-to-server communication.

There are tons of blogs and articles out there that rant and rave of its use as savvy site designers implement Ajax into their web applications, and rightly so. However, through my blog skipping and digg watching I have seen numerous complaints of “OMG, Ajax is stupid….its just a fad/buzzword/etc” or “Ajax is just overhyped, don’t know why people use it!!” I have a couple words that describe those people: cynical, ignorant and, well…squirrel handed. Wake up people. Ajax isn’t a fad, its an architectural change in the way that web applications function. A focus on application speed and uninterrupted user interaction.

What’s so great about it? Why do I pee my pants with glee every time I use a web app that makes use of the technology?

I’m a developer. I’ve been developing database driven web applications for a number of years now and have seen the clear line between a desktop application and a web application. Desktop applications are highly interactive and responsive to the user, where web apps (in the past), were fairly static locations (however dynamic the content) to provide information/entertainment to the user, where user interaction required page loads in order to store information to a database/write to a file.

Next came Flash, an excellent tool but tends to require a much more artistic flare and is much more time consuming with general maintenance than its worth.

The reason Ajax is so sexy is that it bridges the gap.

The average-Joe browser may not be aware when they stumble upon a site that makes good use of Ajax, but that average Joe can feel something right about it. To the avid browser, however, an Ajax site is more readily obvious; you can interact with elements on a page and save settings without reloading; pages are highly resposive to user input with minimal wait times.

Gmail and Google Maps were the applications that really brought Ajax into the limelight. (They weren’t the first, just the first major apps). The world saw what Google could do and followed suit. The world saw that it was good. The Ajax revolution was born. It has birthed a whole new breed and boom on the internet, bringing forward a multitude Ajax enabled sites and applications:

• MasterWish
• Flickr
• MSN Start
• Zimbra
• 24SevenOffice

And thats just the tip of the iceberg. I look forward to what will become of our expectations of web applications. You won’t see me sitting idle during this evolution. I will be innovating and participating all along the way.

While many people out there have used tagging in Flickr, Gmail, MasterWish and various other web 2.0 apps…there are still many out there that express their opinions on tagging as “Tagging…WTF is that?!”. Having a large web company such as Amazon with its HUGE following jump on the band wagon with tagging will help bring folksonomy to the masses.

While exciting that this is happening, Amazon is slowly rolling tags out to their users as evidenced in this excerpt of the CNet article:

The idea, apparently, is to slowly experiment with tags and to give users some power over how certain Amazon products–books, for example–are categorized.

For now [...] only about half of Amazon’s users can even see tags on the site.

Its only a matter of time before folksonomy will cease to be a buzz word and start appearing in the english dictionary. Everybody and their brother will know of tagging and the world will be a happier, easier to search place. I can only hope

Google Maps
Google Maps vs. MapQuest…Google wins hands down. Not only is this product able to generate efficient directions, but you can view maps using the standard road maps, using satellite imagery, or a hybrid of the two! This is a very sweet product that has been blogged about by many so won’t elaborate too much more on this product…but I would suggest heading over to MaisonBisson.com and NoSheep!.

Google Earth
If you think Google Maps is something sweet, Google Earth will really turn you on! Ok, fine. It isn’t a web app…its a desktop app. Google Earth is a product formerly known as Keyhole until Google bought them up (along with Keyhole’s satellite) then reworked and rebranded it as their own. This is Google Maps on steroids. When you open the app, you start in space looking at Earth. When you enter a city, state, etc in the search box and hit enter, you see the earth rotate and you zoom in on the location you entered. If the location happens to be a place that is densely populated, there is a chance that there are 3-dimensional buildings available for you to view…simply check the ‘Buildings’ box and tilt your view and viola! If you haven’t checked it out yet, I would highly recommend you get off your butt and go download it. Its bound to be a great procrastination tool!

Gmail
Google Mail has breathed life back into the e-mail web client industry. They are setting the standard and are crushing competitors with their innovative design and search-based/tagging e-mail archiving. Gmail is a whole new way of handling the taxonomy of e-mail!

In Gmail:

• There are no folders, there is labeling. WTF is that? Well, its a way of marking an e-mail as part of a specific topic…say I receive an e-mail from MasterWish about my new account and I want to save it. Rather than dropping that e-mail in a folder marked ‘MasterWish’, I apply a label to that e-mail called ‘MasterWish.’ Ok, so whats the difference between that and folders? Here’s the kicker, I can apply a second label to that e-mail called ‘Account Information’…Then I can apply a third called ‘Sweet Websites’. Basically it allows you to put an e-mail into as many categories that you want which makes searching for the e-mail a whole lot easier. Now I no longer have to sit and think “Alright…this e-mail is about MasterWish so I want to put it in the MasterWish folder…but wait. It is also an Account Information e-mail….hrm.” Now I simply label it as many times as I want and I’m done!
• Goolge Search Power! Yeah, rather than folders and moving e-mail all over gods creation, Google has a handy dandy ‘Archive’ button. If you don’t want a crap ton of e-mail that you have already read sitting in your inbox and you don’t want to delete it, Archive it! No worries, if you want to find it again simply use the google-style search box to find it again. Hugely efficient, hugely accurate, extremely easy, and faster than Outlook search :D
• View entire e-mail threads. When you get a conversation going back and forth with a friend or business…i.e. you send an e-mail, they reply, you reply, they reply, you reply, etc. Rather than cluttering up your inbox with umpteen-million e-mails, Gmail places them in one! You can see every e-mail in a given discussion and expand/hide parts that you care/don’t care to see.
• AJAX. (Asynchronous Javascript And XML). With Gmail there are few page loads. As you navigate around your Gmail account you may notice that the page usually doesn’t reload… Thats AJAX. Gmail and Google Maps have made it hugely popular. I’ll post a followup describing it later because it is its own topic in and of itself.

Google Talk
I just downloaded Google Talk today :) Google now has an IM application! If you have a Gmail account, you can get it and login without creating yet another account to remember. As my friends move towards Gmail accounts, this will become a slicker tool to use. If you have a Gmail account, I urge you to download Google Talk and give it a whirl. If there is enough end-user response to the application, I’m sure Google will be able to do great things in the IM market. Its simple. No ads. It offers one-click access to your Gmail account.

Google Desktop
Microsoft did it wrong (as usual)…Google has done it right (as usual) with Google Desktop. This tool will index all of your e-mail (Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, etc), your IM programs, visited webpages, text documents, and a crap ton of other stuff allowing you to search (using a browser) all of the above returning search results as quick as Google Search! If you have used the Microsoft search tool in Windows, you know from experience that its like watching grass grow.

Oh, and with the newest version of Google Desktop, there is a sidebar that allows you to monitor all sorts of things in addition to executing desktop searches. There is a photo rotater, a blog monitor (places newest posts on your most frequented site visits), an iTunes controller, etc.

The above is what I use and find extremely cool. Obviously there are a whole lot of additional web apps that Google is developing. I’ll be posting more as I use them ;) In the mean time, check out what Google has to offer at the Google Labs. Where are they headed? Are they slowly cornering/buying out various web markets for a ‘secret scheme’ or just trying to make right what has been horribly wrong for so long? Time will tell…we do know, however, that Google is making other companies *cough cough*Microsoft*cough cough* extremely angry as the Google competition is hard to top! If Microsoft is threatening to “Kill Google”, the company must be doing something right!