I have been searching for an app that we could use to free up space in Gmail Inbox by letting users archive (offload) emails to their personal computers. I stumbled upon BeyondInbox. BeyondInbox let's you pull down the entire Gmail Inbox at scheduled intervals. The emails are stored on the computer in EML format with attachments encoded. The benefit of EML format is that the Windows Desktop Search can search the contents of theses files. Users will be able to quickly search the local email corpus on their computers especially if they have Windows Search Indexing enabled.

In addition to pulling down the Gmail Inbox, BeyondInbox also has a feature which lets you "Reanimate" i.e. perform an Inline Restore of the email back into the Gmail Inbox.

So here is what I am thinking: Let the users who are reaching the Gmail Inbox quota run BeyondInbox every 30 mins on their personal computers. This will bring down emails. And then the user can go and delete older emails from the Gmail Inbox to free up space. In case they ever need to look up a deleted email, they can simply search for it on their personal computer and re-animate into the Gmail Inbox if needed.

Thoughts on this process? Will this work? What are the alternatives? Please tweet me with your thoughts.

We have been waiting for this for a long time!!! 

Thanks Google!!!! :)

syntax:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/{username}/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published

example:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/weaselese/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published 

Google doesn't really want to hold your data hostage to make you stay with them. 

To this effect, a study, by Prof. Eric Gilbert of Georgia Tech has identified key phrases that can be used to predict if the email is intended for someone higher up in the hierarchy or for someone who reports to you.

Incidently this study was sponsored by Google. Makes you wonder what they are upto. Maybe a better Gmail Priority Inbox that auto-detect if the email is coming from some one higher up in the organizational hierarchy? 

Some interesting findings from the study:

We find that certain phrases are strong predictors, such as the hedge “thought you would” (an upward phrase) and the aforementioned “let’s discuss” (a lateral or downward one). Other intuitively good predictors of hierarchy, like “glad to” or “can be reached,” carry little weight. Surprisingly, and perhaps disturbingly, we also find that upward phrases do not show evidence of active thinking as often as downward or lateral ones.

[M]anagers often employ directives (as might be expected), but also wrap those directives in hedging phrases to make them more palatable to those under them (e.g., “when you have time” as a euphemism for “now”).

Bosses will often inject humor to soften the blow of their words and to build loyalty [12]. They also use collective talk (e.g., “let’s all give it a try”) to build support for themselves as leaders

“weekend” surprisingly suggests an up-ward email—perhaps used to signal how hard the employee works. “sounds good,” on the other hand, unsurprisingly predicts a upward relationship.

Many of the most predictive not-upward phrases relate to checking on a subordinate’s current status, exemplified by “have you been” and “I hope you.” “I hope you” subtly communicates expectations from a boss to a subordinate, whereas “have you been” is more direct.

[The study] reveals a surprising and somewhat concerning finding: people demonstrate active thinking more often to those below them than they do to their bosses. (Depending on your perspective, however, this isn’t surprising at all—perhaps only surprising that NLP can detect it.)

In pouring over our data, we also noticed a seemingly disproportionate number of misspellings in the not-upward emails.

Salesforce Chatter needs to provide better notifications.  I would prefer to get notified of incoming posts and replies through the push notifications on Android / iOS, that appear in the status bar. Or may be a Chrome extension that shows number of unread chatter posts in the status bar. Or something similar to what Facebook / Google+ provide. 

Gmail and Google Reader notifications in a Chrome Extension

 Google+ notifications in Gmail 

There are many to provide notifications without utilizing email.

So if any Salesforce engineer is reading this blog, I would like to request them to take a look at the aforementioned ideas and provide a better form of notifications.

Sincerely,
an avid chatter user 

We are looking for a Google API, Google Apps Script, #REST and #AJAX #ninja. Interested? Apply here: seagate.taleo.net/careersection/…

— Saqib Ali (@weaselese) January 5, 2012

BigData addresses "some" Business Intelligence (BI) problems very efficiently, but you can't throw BigData at ALL BI problems. Problems that you have traditionally solved using Relational DBs efficiently, may not be the best fit for Big Data. BigData is good for prediction, trend-analysis, and graphs.

Today users can create identities on sites like Microsoft Live, Yahoo and Google without having to validateSample postcard with code to validate the street address any of their information; therefore, those IDs are not suitable for transactions that might involve sensitive data or financial exchanges. These identities need a higher Level of Assurance — they need to be validated by a trusted 3rd party. However, the problem with the Identity Provider or Government taking on the task of validating each entity's Identity is that the process is too time-consuming, costly, not internet scalable. The crowd-sourcing method of validating the identity that Google is proposing, relieves the Identity Provider from this over-bearing task. Instead the onus is on the entity to build the assurance of their internet identity. This proposed process may sometimes involve very low-tech method, like snail-mailing a postcard to a human entity to validate their real home address. The Attribute Provider (AP) is verifying the user's address by sending a postcard to their claimed street address.  That postcard would tell them to come back to the AP's site and enter a unique code printed on the postcard.

Each of the identity attributes can be handled be different parties, referred to as Attribute Providers byAttribute Provider (AP), Identity Provider (IdP), and the Relaying Party (RP) relationshiip Google in the framework, so there is no one party doing all the work.

It is an interesting concept, and very doable, but will take the entire ecosystem of Identity Providers, Relaying Parties, and Attribute Providers to make it work.

I hope this works. This will really help in cleaning up the internet and making it a safer place.Google has a description of the framework and a nice working example here. Check it out and tweet me your thoughts.

"Due to low usage we've removed customization of web clips in Gmail. Your current setting will be maintained and you can still see your feeds below."

Requiescat in pace Google Reader. Requiescat in pace WebClips.