Google is rolling out a handful of changes to the way it handles labels in Gmail. First, labels are moving into the top left-side navigation area, right by your shortcuts for inbox, sent, starred, and other items. You can also choose to hide some labels while showing others.

Probably one of the biggest changes is that users will now be able to drag and drop messages into labels. In other words, you can sort your messages much the same way that you would add them to folders in almost any other webmail system.

Google is also removing the "right-side labels" feature from Gmail labs. The company says the new labels behavior makes it unnecessary. But try telling that to users who have gotten used to their labels hanging out in a sidebar on the right side of their screens.

The new features aren't showing up in my inbox yet, but Google has a way of rolling these kinds of changes out gradually to some groups of users before others. Have you noticed any changes to your Gmail interface? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Tag clouds are a great way to visualize content. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us as well as a little blog called Download Squad use clouds. The larger the word, the more popular it is compared to the rest.

Now what if you wanted a cloud of your very own? One way to go about this is to enlist the help of Wordle. Put in a bunch of words or enter your del.icio.us user name and based on the information you've provided Wordle will generate a cloud for you.

The clouds generated by Wordle are for display purposes only. You won't be able to click on a word and have it go to a particular site. It's just mainly for fun. And you got to admit, a bunch of words all mashed together looks rather interesting.

So you want to start your own blog. One of the first things you'll have to do is decide which blogging application you want to use. There are a ton of options, ranging from the incredibly simple (LiveJournal), to the infinitely customizable (WordPress). But one of the easiest blogging clients around is Google's Blogger.

Blogger is not as easy to customize as WordPress, but Blogger's simplicity also makes the process of setting up a blog a lot less daunting. You can literally start blogging within minutes of signing up for a Blogger account. Google will also host your blog for free, which means you don't need to pay for domain registration or web hosting. WordPress does also offer free hosting, but WordPress doesn't allow free account holders to include advertising. Blogger does. So if you have dreams of quitting your day job, but don't want to pay a few bucks a month for web hosting, Blogger provides a good way to test the waters.

But while Google offers a handful of widgets for customizing your blog, if you really want to make your web site your own, you're going to have to get your hands dirty editing your blog template and adding some HTML and JavaScript code. Fortunately, you don't have to know much about HTML or CSS to implement the tweaks in this guide. As long as you're handy with the copy and paste keys, you should be all set. So let's get started.

Radar Networks has expanded its private beta of Twine, a social networking, bookmarking, and discussion site built with semantic web technologies. If that sounds a bit confusing, let's break it down a bit. Twine lets users create "twines," or web pages around a particular item, whether it be a web page, a generic topic, an idea, or a person. You can create a twine for yourself, your blog, or a concept like "web 2.0."

Other Twine members can join public twines or any twine they've been invited to share. Once you're a part of a twine you can add comments, add links or share items with another twine.

So where does the semantic web part come in? While you can add tags to items you submit, Twine uses some intelligent features to locate people, places, types of items, and other tags that pop up in your twines. Over time, it develops a sense of the items you're interested in and will start recommending new twines that you might want to join.

For more info on Twine, check out our interview with Radar Networks' Nova Spivack. Twine is still in an invite-only private beta, with a public beta launch scheduled for later this year.

Google has added support for labels to Google Notebook. The move isn't surprising. You can use labels to organize Gmail, Google Documents, RSS feeds in Google Reader, and the list goes on. What is a bit surprising is that it's taken so long to roll out support for labels in Google Notebook.

Labels are automatically imported from your Google Bookmarks settings, if you use Google Bookmarks. You can then sort or filter your notes by label using either the Google Notebook web page or the Google Notebook browser plugin.

[via Google Operating System]

If you write a blog, post pictures to Flickr, or do pretty much anything else online these days, odds are you've typed a few tags to go along with your picture, video, or blog entry. Tags make it easy for people, search engines, and advertisers to find stuff online.

But coming up with accurate and useful tags can be a lot of work. And there's a science to finding tags that will help increase your search engine traffic or advertiser revenue. Good luck if you don't have a degree in this particular science.

Jiglu is a new service that takes all the hard work out of tagging. Just enter your blog URL, sign up for an account, and Jiglu will spit out a bit of code that you can embed on your webpage. Jiglu integrates nicely with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and other popular blogging services.

Next, Jiglu goes to work analyzing all the text on your site and generates a list of relevant tags divided up into topics, people, events, and links. Jiglu shows up as a widget on your page. Scroll over it and a list of tags appears. You can click on a tag to bring up a list of matching stories. Or you can click on the Tag Map button for Jiglu's version of a tag cloud. Tags with larger fonts represent items that show up on your website more often than tags with smaller fonts.

The service is free to use. But when users click on a tag, the list of items matching that tag show up in a Jiglu pop-up window which includes advertising. You do not get a cut of the revenue generated through these ads. The company also plans to launch a premium fee-based service for websites with over a million monthly page views.

[via Mashable]

Highrise, the popular web-based contact and correspondence app from 37signals, has a new dedicated Tags tab in the dashboard. This will help users filter and sift through their contacts and notes much more quickly, especially since the company built in the slick ability to select multiple tags with which to filter. Clicking one tag in the cloud begins the process, while clicking another will switch to filtering by just that tag. After clicking a tag, however, the upper right of the tag cloud (pictured) will offer a 'Multiple tags' option. Once clicked, each subsequent tag you select will add to the filter, not replace it. This is a very smart way to offer the best of both worlds for everyone, no matter how they work and use tags to sort their correspondence.

Webmail is a hot industry these days, with Gmail, Yahoo! and nearly every provider in between vying for users by adding as many features as they can dream up. Fortunately, a small provider named Litepost is taking a different approach, offering a streamlined webmail interface with just a dash of web 2.0 to help bring your email into the 21st century web. We found Litepost back in June when they announced very limited private beta testing of their product, and it seems as though they have quietly lifted the veil so the public can sign up. While there is no official announcement on the company's blog, the Litepost registration page is live and working, and we were able to sign up for an address just fine.

Litepost stands out with a number of unique features, including email tagging and rating, as well as interesting 'Who, What, When, Why' sorting methods with which, for example, you can sort by date first, then sender (or vice versa). You can also arbitrarily group messages together for any reason, solving one of the complaints of the message threading or conversation view that Gmail made popular. Another strong appeal of Litepost is the fact that it is open source, and a Litepost Webmail Server is in the works, which will allow individuals, organizations and businesses to download and install the Litepost software on their own server for domain and security goodness.

If all this has sparked your attention, take Litepost for a spin. In our testing we found its features and unique UI to be quite compelling, and its open source, portable nature will likely give it some legs with which to grow.

Thanks Alex

How often have you stumbled across a killer coupon or deal on the web, only to discover - sometimes too late - that the offer expired months or even years ago? If you're still counting, you might be happy to hear that a new meta tag from Google seems to be the first step in the right direction for combining and filtering time-sensitive information when searching.

This new meta tag, according to HighRankings, is called "unavailable_after", and it'll allow webmasters to easily instruct search engines to stop crawling pages after a specified date. This will be a simple and streamlined way for sites to ensure pages like limited-time discount offers or subscription-only content get removed from search results and caches on a pre-set date. In other words: you shouldn't have to worry about finding a 2 month old GoDaddy coupon that expired long before you even thought up the domain you're looking to purchase.

While this is a great step forward into the realm of automatically calculating the element of time in search results, we're excited to see the search companies further explore time and its effects on content and search because there's still a lot of work to do. Searching for something like game console sales statistics in Google and Yahoo! still returns popular links from 2003/04, even if the query is altered to "game console sales 2007."

We understand, however, that significant changes to our search tools and the ways we think about them take time (ba-dum-ching!), so we'll just have to sit back and watch how this all plays out.

[via search engine land]

I've been a user of Gmail since late 2005 and have loved just about every minute of it. The revolutionary webmail interface, the vast popularity among power users and plethora of scripts, add-ons and doodads - but the one thing that always bothered me was the loss of integration with the rest of my computing. Sure, there are some great tricks and bookmarklets we found for our Top 10 Gmail tips and hacks post, but I've missed real integration with Mac OS X apps like iSale that can show me emails related to an auction I created with it, iPhoto that can compress copies of 20 images and attach them to a new message and even simply double-clicking a .VCF I've downloaded to quickly add it to Address Book and keep on working. Heck, toss in a dash of Automator and I really find myself longing for a desktop email client and the synchronized wonders of IMAP.

Thus began my journey to figure out some sort of a hack or workaround for using Gmail over IMAP with my preferred and well-integrated desktop email client, Apple Mail. It wasn't too difficult, but the setup requires your own web host who offers IMAP email that can scale up to around 2GB or more (for example: I already pay for hosting at DreamHost which offers IMAP with every account, but some companies offer free IMAP, and other hosting companies offer flexible solutions as well) and a little bit of incoming/outgoing server trickery. Another necessity is some sort of tool or plug-in to enable one of Gmail's most well-known features: tagging, otherwise known as labels. While Thunderbird is probably the first fairly mainstream email client to do tagging out of the box, it drops the ball on my need for integration; it doesn't support Apple's built-in Address Book (which so many other apps do), and it doesn't plug into all the other handy tools that allow so many of Mac OS X's 3rd party apps move data from one to another so effortlessly. For what it's worth, I also found a plug-in for Outlook on Windows called Taglocity that should get the job done, though I can't test it because I don't own Office. That said, all my setup instructions are written using Apple Mail, but you should be able to apply them to any IMAP-capable desktop email client and tagging plug-ins you find. As a bonus, this trick will also work for mobile devices that support IMAP, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerries and, of course, your shiny new iPhone. Following is my 7-step trick for using Gmail over IMAP, leveraging the power of desktop software while bringing the innovation of Gmail's tagging and conversations along for the ride.

Boing Boing posted a link to an amusing little video called Supermarket 2.0. The acting's nothing too special, and I can't help but wonder how this supermarket stays open with just 3 customers. But the concept is pure geek comedy gold. The store is completely web 2.0 compliant.



There are tags on all the products (H20, transparent, etc for water), RSS feeds for the eggs, and user comments on the milk. You can buy your products "Pandora-style." Just start with one object at the clerk will suggest other products you might want. Everything is free, but you have to accept a chocolate chip cookie for tracking purposes.

We'd make some point about whether we would actually put up with some of these practices in real life (such as allowing customers to examine your purchasing habits and buy items for you off your wishlist), but this is just a joke. Right?

Google is full of API's, allowing users to hook up pieces of information and build their own tools and applications that access Google's services.

Google has publicly opened access to Picasa Web Albums via the Picasa Web Albums data API. What does this mean to you? Well, if you've been thinking about a way to integrate photos and tags into some kind of network or application, show photos together with comments on a website, or generating automatic tags based on a photo description, you can now access your albums, photos, comments and tags through the GData API.

A great use of the Picasa Web integration can be found at Picnik, the online photo editing tool. The team there has integrated in the new Google API so that users can load and save photos to and from a Google Picasa Web albums account, in addition to Flickr.

If you come across any other online location that has integrated Picasa into their tool, or if you have, drop us a line and let us know about it.

The last time Flickr tried this there was such a backlash that they supported both the old Flickr IDs and corporate overlord ones. But that was then, and this is now...
The Flickr News blog just announced that as of March 15th, the only access to your Flickr account will be via a Yahoo! ID. So, the last holdouts in denial of the acquisition will either have to quit the service or link to a Yahoo! ID. This official thread has been created to voice your concerns \ questions to the Flickr staff and community.

We're told that this change is in preparation for some large projects later this year (ohhh - anyone have any ideas??). We've seen this requirement already with the recent updates to Flickr Mobile and Yahoo! Go that only allow Yahoo! accounts.

The same post also mentions the addition of a couple of limits:

• Maximum number of Contacts will be 3000
• Maximum number of Tags per picture will be 75

These changes are pitched to improve system performance. Flickr has started an official thread for any comments about the limit changes.

From the Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day blog: Yahoo! Research continues working to merge several of it's social properties in interesting ways - this time with the upcoming release of Tagmaps. Tagmaps aim to integrate tags with Yahoo! Maps - with the tags overlaid on top of the map. As you Zoom/Pan the map, relevent tags get place on the display.

Yahoo! has created 3 demo apps:

• World Explorer - integrates Flickr Photos as well as tags to the map
• Night Explorer - similar to Worl Explorer, but the pictures are from nighttime
• Trip Explorer - instead of using Flickr Tags, this app pulls in from Y! Trip Planner

As well as these, you can also put the Flash component on your own page - pulling from your own data sources.

I'm a huge fan of tagging, and its great to see Yahoo! starting to pull all this together into some cool demos. Hopefully we'll see this rolled out at some time. For more information, here's the FAQ

If you have many things to remember, and don't want to clutter your desk and computer with a sticky note mess, try out Helipad. Their online hosted note application makes it easy to create notes and tag them with keywords for easy locating. With the free online application you can draft up anything that you normally would in a word processor--all you need is an internet connection. Helipad's auto save timer helps you remember to save your document in intervals you set. It also has support for mobile devices, and in true Web 2.0 fashion, you can share your documents with your friends.

Take a peek at some screenshots of the Helipad interface after the jump.