I am a big fan of Google’s Gmail.  It has lots to like.  First I like that it’s in the cloud.  I have my e-mail on any device from any place.  Light weight but full of features.  Sure the call tags labels but they work the same.  Labels work like Apple’s smart mailboxes.  I can label a message and it will appear under each label, but I only have one copy of the message.  I can aggregate all of my e-mail address into one inbox and with a couple of rules every thing is labeled and filed.

The thing I like best about Gmail turns out to also be my biggest source of frustration, e-mail threading.  Gmail will thread messages and responses together to give you a conversation.  This is great, the entire conversation is collected together both messages received and sent.  Only one flaw…the subject has to remain consistent.

If you are like me and most of the people you know are still stuck in the inefficient medium of e-mail for communication then you may notice that, for some reason, subjects begin to evolve over time.  Take this image of three different subjects for the same conversation from my inbox.

I auto label based on who I receive the messages from so the get one set of labels based on who I received it from and those labels will aggregate as a conversation grows.  But notice that these three messages are really the same conversation, but for some reason the subjects take on a life of their own.

It would be nice to have some way of merging conversations together within Gmail.  As far as I can tell, this just isn’t possible.  Google, add this to your list.

While Google and Microsoft prepare quotes to purchase Digg (finally), AOL squandered their social news site Netscape .. er .. Propeller.  Yet, while AOL shows us that they have such fine acumen for anything but running an internet business, Yahoo! would rather have AOL kill them off than Microsoft absorb them.  I am no Microsoft fan, though recent internet offerings and courting of more open projects have taken the edge off, but courting a company that so lacks the ability to compete online seems just crazy.  I guess I need to get an MBA so stupid decisions will suddenly make perfect business sense to me.  Who knows, it might help me understand GM’s rebuilding strategy of producing fewer cars that no one wants to buy?

So I look up one day and find I have been so busy that a month has passed by since I posted last. Here are a couple of items that will challenge you to see what the future holds.

This first item is older but if you haven’t read it then shame on you. Ray Kurzweil, likely the most prolific inventor of our time, wrote a forward to a book I hope to soon read called The Intelligent Universe by James Garner. He has published the entire forward online at KurzweilAI.net a blog like site that if you don’t have in your river of data you should. If you come away from reading that without feeling like a kid on Christmas morning then you better check for a pulse.

The next interesting read I want to share is by Nick Carr titled Google, Apple and the Future of Personal Computing. Carr theorizes that, in the end, it is going to come down to Google in the cloud and Apple for the user interface. The reason I wedge this idea after the Kurzweil article is because Google is building Kurzweil’s ideas. What’s more is that they are doing it in a way that the end user doesn’t even realize its going on. We want access to our data every where, any where and at any time. But we also want the experience to be simple and easy. I am not sure that in the end Google and Apple are the companies to accomplish this but they are certainly in a league of their own right now.