Basically, you just submit your Gmail address to the site and Find Big Email does a one time scan of your Gmail account email account. From a security POV, it doesn’t ask you for your password. I don’t know the technical way it is able to scan your Gmail account, but I have not had any issues. More details on security questions related to the service can be found here and here.

Anyway, the one time scan then creates a set of labels based on the different file sizes of your emails and it creates some custom labels (Biggest, > 2MB, > 500kb, > 100kb) using Gmail’s advanced label/search functions that then populate your label list. Go to those labels and all the emails that meet those size criteria are listed right there for you to see. From there, delete away and clear out your digital email attic. The nice thing is that if you ever start to encroach on your disc space limitation sometime in the future, just click on one of these labels (“Biggest” emails or emails over 2MB) and all of those emails will be there to pick off and delete.

Google says the algorithms have taught it valuable lessons, from obvious ones (entrepreneurs who have started successful companies are more likely to do it again) to less obvious ones (start-ups located far from the venture capitalist’s office are more likely to be successful, probably because the firm has to go out of its way to finance the start-up.)

If I were them, I’d look at ways to improve battery life, remove our dependence on wireless carriers and cable companies, and develop a legitimate flux capacitor to promote time travel (ok, one of those is a joke).

Via NYTimes.com

The reaction to his post was overwhelmingly positive, with hundreds of comments agreeing that this would be a good idea for Dell. And the idea is indeed intriguing: Some customer service needs are very similar, so having a service representative talk to a small group of customers at the same time could be more economical than the traditional one-on-one call. Using video could also humanize tech support, and group settings could even initiate self-help between customers.

I think the service that could be delivered by features like Google Hangouts is very interesting, however I’m really not sure if I’m prepared to see a video of the service rep staring at me from my desktop. I don’t mind them taking over my desktop (a la GoToMyPC) to solve the problem but video seems a little too personal in this situation/user experience.

I just love this Google doodle today.

Mr. Men is one of the most unsung comic efforts of all time.  Back in October, I had posted about caricatures of the Mad Men cast depicted as Mr. Men.

Great and very well researched infographic detailing the downfall of having a December birthday. And why do I blog this? Well, I am a December child. Birthday was yesterday – 12.12.10.

Via BuzzFeed.

The exhibition, set for October, will showcase videos from as many as 20 finalists of YouTube Play, a contest for graphic artists and users of Googles GOOG video site. A celebrity jury that includes Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky will wade through about 200 videos whittled down from thousands submitted in July.

The goal of this initiative is to try to re-position YouTube as a site/service that can cater to a more upscale, arts driven clientele and move it beyond the perception that its content is, er, lowbrow.

Its about time! Gmail finally improves its Contact area. It just got pushed to my Gmail and I have to say its far better than what they used to have there.

Posted via email from my Posterous account
via mashable.com

A decades-old insight from a study of traditional social networks illuminates one of the most important aspects of today’s online social networking. In 1973, sociologist Mark Granovetter showed how the loose acquaintances, or “weak ties”, in our social network punch far above their weight in their influence over our behavior and choices (American Journal of Sociology, vol 78, p 1360). Granovetter found that a significant percentage of people get their jobs as a result of information provided by a weak tie. Subsequent studies have revealed that weak ties benefit our health and happiness. Granovetter suggested that this is because these friends-of-friends aren’t like you, yet they are likely to be similar enough in social outlook and personal interests to have a positive influence.

The article goes on to talk about how the explosion of everyone’s “loose network” of friends and acquaintances that are connected via social networks will create profound effects on social evolution. A study cited in the article from Cornell University stated that those who more frequently shared information online were more likely to be liked and to “win people over” in real life.

The most interesting element for me is how everyone’s ever expanding social network will prompt people to go to their network first for information, references, advice, support, and referrals. This is one of the main reasons why Google is so concerned about the ever and rapid influence of Facebook as a “go to” source of information over Google’s search engine.

All these social networks are a sociologist’s wet dream!

Reality has hit Google again as they finally admitted defeat on trying to sell its Nexus One phone directly from its site and bypassing its wireless carrier partners.

Posted via email from Stephen’s Posterous

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

There is a massive steel cage death match going on in the tech world between Apple, Google, along with HP (now that it has Palm OS) and Microsoft.  Microsoft’s head is so “in the clouds” they are rapidly becoming the Sears of the technology world and on the fast track to being “Walmarted” by Google.  They won’t know what hit them until its too late (if that has not happened already).  From its very early years Apple has always been one to have tight controls over its ecosystem and we are starting to see Apple’s transformation from a PC maker to a platform developer.  They acquired Lala recently and just today, I received an email from them saying that they will be shutting their doors.  Why shut such a great service?  So Apple can seamlessly integrate it into iTunes, put all your music on the cloud, and turning a desktop app into software as a service that Apple can use to charge a monthly/annual fee.   Take this model and scale it to everything Apple does.  This is where it is going.  With all the rapid changes taking place around media, data, technology and how people consumer information, it will be very interesting to see how this all nets out.  The big wildcard in all of this?  Google and its Android/Chrome OS.

Posted via email from Stephen’s Posterous

HAPPY ST. PATRICK”S DAY!! Love the logo change over at Google!

I find it ironic that Google assails Apple for creating a “closed” platform when it comes to technology and applications via iPhone/iTunes, yet it is turning around and building just as closed, centralized a platform when it comes to online advertising.

So its been about a month in which I’ve owned my Motorola/Google/Verizon Droid phone. And I have to say that I am just loving this phone. But I don’t even think it can be called a phone, because the phone function is just one of many applications and features that the device runs. I’ve found the Android OS very easy and intuitive. The applications that I use are very well engineered and designed. There is deep and intuitive integration with social sites like Facebook and Twitter. When I first got the phone from Verizon, I didn’t have to deal with transferring information or setting up my contacts. I simply logged in with my Google Username and password and instantly, all my information was there ready to go. One of the slickest features is that whenever I see someone’s “icon”, I just long press on it and all the different ways I can connect with them slides into the screen – wether its email, IM, Facebook, or where their address is. Its pretty cool. And the Droid’s much publicized killer app is its GPS Navigation application. It is just fantastic and just as good as any TomTom, or Garmin product (Note to each of them: be afraid, be very afraid). The Navigation app is fully integrated with Google Maps and Google Street View. I’ve used it several times and I have been nothing short of impressed. Since its open source, I’m hoping some enterprising soul adds an app so you can choose different voices for the Navigation’s audio.

With all the positives, there are a few items that I’d love to see them address:

• With the Audio player, they should not allow two audio based applications to run at the same time. A few times I’ve had podcasts running and have hit music songs by accident and then had two things playing at once. If Podcasts are playing, you should not be able to play music and vice versa
• The camera could be improved a bit. And the button to take pictures is on the screen, not on the hardware itself. So if you are taking a photo and you can’t see the screen/button, its not the easiest thing in the world to do.
• Whenever I connect it to my computer, you always have to click on a button to enable it to sync with your machine. There should be a setting to just do that automatically.
• The Keyboard is just ok. It could be improved, especially with its alternate characters and numbers.

I’m not going to go out and call this an iPhone killer…yet. But the Droid does everything I need, its easy to use, and its on the Verizon Network where you can actually make phone calls. In fact, the other day I left my iPod at home by mistake and I did not miss it at all.

Three straight posts on Google, but they appear to be in product release mode these days.

Posted via email from Posterous

Check this out. I got a direct mail piece from Google, offering me $100 coupon for AdSense. The poster child for the Internet and all things online and digital is using the old fashioned, dreadfully offline, less than 1% response rate channel of Direct Mail to drum up business. Oh, the irony.

One piece of feedback: I’d advise them to actually know the recipient’s name rather than addressing it to “Adsense Customer”.

…time and time again disruptive business confuse adjacent innovation for disruptive innovation. They think they are still disrupting when they are just innovating on the same theme that they began with. As a consequence they miss the grass roots challenger — the real disruptor to their business. The company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the billion dollar franchise, its often scrappy and unpolished, it looks like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD. With the AOL story now unraveled — I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL…

Obviously, Twitter is still in search of its business model, while Google is one of the most profitable companies in business. But the idea that something like Twitter could truly disrupt Google is a fascinating concept.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.
The contentious issue has wide ramifications for the Internet as a platform for new businesses. If companies like Google succeed in negotiating preferential treatment, the Internet could become a place where wealthy companies get faster and easier access to the Web than less affluent ones, according to advocates of network neutrality. That could choke off competition, they say.

The above quote is the critical one here. Providing preferential treatment to specific companies on the Internet completely flys in the face of the principles in which the Internet was created. The internet is a series of tubes…no, sorry…was created on the principle of open standards for communications. Its the great equalizer. After all the opportunity that the Internet has created, and is still yet to create, giving preference to bigger organizations would be a monumental step backwards. Come on folks, lets not screw this up.

Now I’m not terribly surprised by this move, you knew they could never make a decent dollar on user generated content. Advertisers avoid this like the plague. I do find this interesting for several reasons:

• Google has been testing out digital TV advertising and reporting via Dish Network. Obviously, this is the next extension of that
• The obvious popularity of watching video online and the digital convergence of over the air and digital TV. The fairly strong debut of Hulu, the joint venture from NBC and 20th Century Fox Studios, along with Joost is proving this out.
• The challenges they have had in finding a viable revenue stream for YouTube.

If this ends up working, then the implications of this are wide and deep. Google has been dabbling in original content partnerhsips and I am sure this may give them some leverage in dealing with the studios.

Google announced that it has indexed one trillion pages. Dr. Evil would be proud. Oh, wait…they don’t do Evil.

So, this evening I was checking my site’s traffic/stats and I noticed a decent amount of traffic to the old site. So for a goof, I did a “vanity search”…you know, searching on your own name…just to see where I ranked and to kind of get a sense of why people may be visiting my site.

Well, it appears that I am now the most popular Stephen Clark on the Internet At least, that’s what Google and Yahoo say.

Being ranked on this lofty perch brings immense responsibility and I can only hope to live up to the expectations of all those “stephen clark” searchers. It also means that there’s only one place to go, and that is down. Yeah, the next Stephen Clark will come along with his new CSS driven, standards compliant site, and knock me off my perch.

But until that happens, I’ll guess I’ll enjoy my new spot on top of the Googleplex.

But it is immensely interesting to observe the online marketplace these days and all the amazing web based products and innovation, taking dead aim at Microsoft’s cash cow desktop applications. And I know this is nothing new, as several of these apps have been out in the marketplace for a while now, and they have been written about often.

The item that motivated me to write this post is Gilffy, which is a neat browser based version of MS Visio. So in addition to this, you have Google’s Spreadsheet, Calendar and Gmail, all of Yahoo’s similar services, 30Boxes (Calendar), Writely (and all the other Web based word processing apps), Basecamp from 37 Signals, and Thumbstacks, and Eric Meyer’s S5 slideshow apps, to name a few. You are all set. No need to buy a $500 piece of software in a box full of air.

The only concern is that by using all these web based apps, all your information would be housed on someone else’s server/computer. But most to all of the aforementioned apps give you the ability to download local copies, so that should not be a big issue.

Its quite an interesting time to be a consumer and to be in Redmond. :-) I’ll be interested to see Google and Yahoo’s next steps.

Google delivered a new IM client today called Google Talk. Maybe its a good think I left AOL and the IM world. I mean, I’d definitely be up for the challenge, but Google is becoming quite a formiddable foe in the online world. There were some interesting articles in the NY Times this morning discussing how Google is becoming “very Microsoft”.

In a very interesting move, Google is now indicating if you are logged in when you are on their homepage (see red box in image above). This is a very interesting move in that it is taking them one deep step closer to “portal” land. But I think what is more interesting is how their homepage is, relatively speaking (of course), getting more cluttered now that there are several new services they are exposing on the homepage.

For the longest time, they have stayed true to their original simple design, and that has been a key factor in their growth. However, with all the new services they are launching and testing out via Google Labs for example, I think they may be challenged to keep the homepage uncluttered and focused on search while still giving equal exposure to new products such as Gmail, Google Maps and others. As the homepage stands now, I think its getting messy and looking a little amature-ish.

What is more interresting is when you look at the overall market that includes Yahoo, AOL, and now Google. Yahoo has always been the leader in the market and they have evolved from just an Web based service to one that includes several software applications that extend the Yahoo experience to the desktop. AOL started as a software application on the desktop that extended to the Internet. Now, they are going to focus more on Internet/Web based services while still offering the desktop software applications (AOL Client, AIM, etc.). And now Google is doing the same thing, with desktop applications such as Desktop Search, Gmail Notifier, etc. It seems that all of these online services are meeting at the desktop in a war to control how users access different services. And I have not even mentioned Microsoft, who still own the desktop but have been awful quiet recently.

It will be interesting to see how they evolve the homepage to bring forward the new features they are launching without detracting from their core Search product.

I have been using the new GMail product from Google recently. I was able to get a test account from our fine friends at Blogger. I have to say that it is quite an interesting concept in that they give you oodles of disc space to store all your email so you never have to delete any of it. I think it will serve me well as a place to keep and archive interesting newsletters that I may want to refer to in the future. And maybe I will begin to use it as my back up email account at some point. It has some really neat features including a good deal of shortcuts which make using the application very easy. Check it out if can get your hands on a Beta account.