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Google Businesses The Internet News

Gmail Gets RSS 153

Posted by Zonk from the i'm-waiting-for-the-fryalator-feature dept.
Everyone with a UID and Paul Stamatiou writes "Google's Gmail email service now sports a new feature for displaying RSS feeds, dubbed Web Clips. You might remember this name, as it is the same name Google Desktop refers to RSS feeds. Web Clips for Gmail were announced a long time ago sometime during the summer but they were finally stable enough to release to the general public. You can check out the what's new page for Gmail here. Essentially, you subscribe to a bunch of feeds and everytime you log into Gmail it loads the lastest title from each feed which you can scroll through with left/right arrows. Don't forget to check the actual post about Web Clips for Gmail on the Google Blog."
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Gmail Gets RSS More

Gmail Gets RSS

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  • Warning to old media (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:07PM (#14222618) Homepage Journal
    My various daily updated websites that use metafile data to pass a hyperlink (blog with RSS feed for you non-jerk-new-wordphobes) has been getting referrers from gmail since yesterday. I've been getting AOL webmail referrers for a week or so, now it makes sense why this is.

    RSS connectivity in the e-mail client is very powerful, maybe the most powerful feature I've seen. I've had trouble getting my audience to download a good RSS reader, but I've seen traffic pick up. Is there a reasonable javascript for "Add this blog to your RSS feeds" that will work with the webmail feed readers?

    I'm hiring a 74 year old expert to cowrite 2 blogs and his readers are generally older. Most have e-mail, and as more people flock to webmail for security and efficiency, adding these features is key to helping the new "media" grow. Even for the not retired, easy access to what you want is making generic news outdated.

    This news probably pisses off the old media who continue to lose control. If the politicians see their monkeys are powerless, be sure to see regulations on blogs next, via the illegal and unconstitutional FEC and SEC.

  • Can't say I was overly impressed this morning... (Score:3, Informative)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:08PM (#14222633)
    I saw it when I opened GMail to do my daily clean up of my GMail archive account. I disabled 99% of it and added Slashdot as the only "Webclip" available. The first (and only) story it showed was from 18 hours ago. Not exactly useful for me I guess.

    YMMV.

  • So wait... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Pichu0102 ( 916292 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:09PM (#14222643) Homepage Journal
    If Slashdot's RSS feed is a default, could Web Clips Slashdot Slashdot?

  • I h8 Gmail (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by DrunkenTerror ( 561616 )
    It takes me about 15 minutes of screwing with browser, firewall, and proxy settings every time I want to check gmail. Screw that! I've gone back to using yahoo. Anyone else had similar experiences?
    • Yes I've noticed in the past week or so that it's become almost as cumbersome to use as Hotmail. Why I loved it and lept for it was because it was very smooth, and concise - Gmail was perfect for email and it kept it simple. Now it's becoming something akin to AOL's interface. (OK I'm exhagerating a bit) but seriously what's next - popups selling me stuff and a 5 minute load up time?

    • Re:I h8 Gmail (Score:4, Insightful)

      by panthro ( 552708 ) <mavrinacNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:18PM (#14222738) Homepage

      Um... no?

      Seriously, I've used it from behind a whole whack of different firewall/proxy configurations, and I've never had a single problem. And what could you possibly need to screw with in your browser? Turn on JavaScript?

      • gmail made me switch to firefox :)
        Everything else worked fine in old IE until that came along and decided my browser config just wasn't good enough.
        I haven't looked back since, but the moral of the story is gmail isn't a standard application, and sometimes different configurations baffle it.
    • Never had a problem. if you can browse slashdot you can use gmail.

    • Re:I h8 Gmail (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're most likely having ID-10-T problems. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about it as google won't issue a fix.
    • Sounds like technical issues between the chair and the keyboard. Either that or your firewall, proxy, and browser all suck.
    • What does Hexadecimal 0x8 have anything to do with it?
    • Every now and then, my inbox page won't load after authenticating when I try to access gmail from behind our corporate firewall, works fine everywhere else.

      Don't 'h8'
      • You're right, man. I didn't mean to be hatin'. It's just so aggravatin'. I have given up on gmail for now.

        Thanks to the crowd for showing me love. ;D

        Hehe, I shouldn't have to bypass my proxy to get to gmail. Every other website works fine with the Proxomitron, so why doesn't gmail? Sometimes Firefox works, sometimes I have to use IE. It's inconsistent. I'm not changing my config from session to session. I'm not running some experimental software. I'm just typing gmail in the address bar. That's all I
    • I've used it behind websense, a pix, an ssh socks4 proxy, garbage firewalls, etc., and I've never had a problem.
    • Actually I have... checking gmail (which I mainly use as a back-up mailbox for large attachments) is hit-and-miss experience. Sometimes it 'just works', but mostly it does something it shouldn't. Either it keeps on alternating between a blank page and the 'Loading...' message several times a second until I stop it, or it stays on that 'Loading...' page without any further response. This is on firefox (several versions) on Linux, with/without proxies, etc. Now given the use I make of gmail - and the price I
    • I have had issues with getting Gmail to work through my university's proxy (and no, it's not a javascript problem), but accessing gmail through the address https://mail.google.com/ [google.com] (as opposed to http://www.gmail.com/ [gmail.com] always works (through that proxy, anyway).

  • Had it for about 6 months (Score:3, Interesting)

    by turtled ( 845180 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:11PM (#14222668)
    I have had it for about 6 months. No one else I knew that had Gmail had the webclips...
    • Same here. I've had it since early summer. I'm still wondering why. PErhaps our accounts are located on one of the servers where things are tested before rolling them out to the rest of the users?
    • I've also had it for that long. I thought it was a neat feature, but I can honestly say I've never really used it for anything. I use Gmail to check my email, not to get news headlines or anything (thats what a tool bar full of links is for).

      Trev
    • Same here. Now I know why this is news.
    • I have had it for about 6 months. No one else I knew that had Gmail had the webclips...

      As have I. I had thought for a while that it was just a live feature until I realized that my wife didn't have it and asked some friends about it.

      I think they added some before they released it, I hadn't looked in months and I don't remember some of the feeds they have listed.

      My favorite is the SPAM recipes in the spam folder and recycling tips in the trash.

    • Yeah, I've had it for quite a while. I was actually pretty suprised that the first batch of posts weren't "Hey idiot editors, this is old news." Perhaps people who have had GMail longer got it first? Google figured older users are more interested and willing to test new stuff?
    • I've had it for a while too, which makes me wonder what I'm missing now.
    • I have as well... one interesting thing I noticed is that most of the new features they just added (see the sidebar links as well... embedded UPS/FedEx tracking... mmmmm....) seem designed to draw your eyes towards the advertisements.

      For that reason (and others, I dislike reading "snippets" of feeds... give me bloglines any day), I'm not using their RSS reader, since I would constantly look at the top bar to see if it was a new news item.
    • I've had Web Clips for a while, too. I finally turned them off. I'm just not an "personalized RSS feed on every page I visit" kind of guy, I guess. I prefer the least amount of fluff possible.

      Thankfully, the people at Google have made WebClips easy to turn off. They might be for you, but they're not for me.

      The other thing they have now is "View as HTML" for downloads. So I've forwarded my work mail to Gmail, set up a filter to label it. Now I can look at tomorrow's stops (as Excel files) from any comp
    • Me Eight,
      I was telling my friends about them when I first got them, but nobody else had the option. I didnt realize it wasnt official until today.
  • Seems they have difficulty deciding how to do RSS..
    • It's probably worth pointing out Google Reader [google.com]. It's not final and is still in Google Labs. I'm not sure if Slashdot has mentioned this before.
      • I actually use Google Reader as my main RSS reader...

        It has some quirks but overall works well. The main advantage for me is that after I look at something it is automatically "archived" (to use gmail terminology)... I like this because I am using several different computers all day long (laptop, tablet, home desktop, cubicle desktop, lab desktop) and often have short snippets of time to check my rss feed.... with Google Reader I can just tick a couple off when I have time and when I go back to it the stor
        • I used Google Reader for a while. I liked the same things about it that you mention: read it from anywhere, keeps track of what you've already read, and you can mark things as unread to come back to them later. The one thing that made me stop using it was that you can't separate the feeds (or couldn't when I used it). It's just one long list.

          So now I use RssFwd [rssfwd.com] to send my feeds to my Gmail account, where I have filters to give them separate labels. The interface is so much better, I love it. And since I'm a
          • Thanks for the tip... I will check it out.

            I haven't tried something like this in the past because my gmail is "mission critical" and I didn't want to make a mistake and polute my pristine gmail system (with labels and filters I have everything running perfectly right now). I might give it a try though and see how it goes.

            Friedmud
  • Not the first time I post about it [slashdot.org], but I really see this as the future of RSS: GeoRSS. And you know what, if one company can push the georss standard to general use, yup, it's Google.

    What's georss [georss.org]? From slashgisrs [slashgisrs.org]: A team is working on Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds. From the overview: "GeoRSS is simple proposal for RSS feeds to also be described by location or Geotagged. We standardize the way in which "where" is encoded with enough simplicity and descriptive power to satisfy most needs to d

  • great, more ads (Score:5, Informative)

    by ryan420 ( 221788 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:16PM (#14222722)
    Another way to shove AdSense down our throats. So far, it seems like roughly 1 of every 3 clips is an advertisement.

    Does anyone else find this totally unexciting? Thank god you can turn this feature off.

  • calender (Score:5, Insightful)

    by robgue ( 829997 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:20PM (#14222751)
    really they need to add a calender. i think this would be the icing on the cake and would be essential imo for people to use gmail as they're primary interface.

  • Dear Submitter (Score:1, Interesting)

    by bighoov ( 605325 )
    1) You say that "we might remember the name" if we use Google Desktop.
    2) Google Desktop is only available for Microsoft Windows.
    3) You submitted directly to Slashdot.

    Therefore, you are implying that the majority of Slashdot readers use Windows? Might want to put on your flame-retardant PJs.
    • Therefore, you are implying that the majority of Slashdot readers use Windows? Might want to put on your flame-retardant PJs.

      Hate to break it to you, but thanks to a combination of liars and people browsing at work -- most of Slashdot's readers are using Windows. This has been a LONG known fact.

      ~Rebecca
    • You must be new here. It's long been disclosed by the site maintainers that most hits to /. come from windows machines.

      Many of the folks using windows at work have a *nix machine of some sort at home, but most /.'ers do use windows for most of their /. viewing.

  • More GMail Humor (Score:5, Informative)

    by aschran ( 895622 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:23PM (#14222783)
    Did anyone else notice that if you click on your Spam folder it displays recipes for SPAM, and if you click on the Trash it shows you recycling tips. :-)
    • Absolutely... apparently I've been one the unknowing beta testers of this feature for a month or two. I thought it was a clever tip of the hat to Hormel.

      Though I find I rarely notice the webclips, every once in a while I do, and sometimes it's something interesting. I took the 5 minutes to set it up with feeds I normally don't bother to check regularly, but are still peripherally interesting to me. It's unobtrusive enough that I have left it enabled.

    • And when you click on your Drafts folder it has ads for the Military.
    • Heh, that's neat.

      Whiel looking through some of the tips, apparently they added one in for the /. crowd...

      "You can make a lovely hat out of previously-used aluminum foil."
      http://www.uodemise.com/tinfoil.png [uodemise.com]
    • It doesn't display that here... wonder what the difference.

  • Other (more useful IMHO) features (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Amazing Fish Boy ( 863897 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:26PM (#14222805) Homepage Journal
    They also added the ability to view Office, OpenOffice, and PDF documents as HTML like their search results. Very useful if you receive documents but don't have the necessary viewers.

    Then they also added something on the sidebar to automatically link to maps and shipping trackers if addresses or shipping numbers are mentioned in the email. So if I say: "Yeah man. Party's at 123 Fake Street," presumably it links to it if the recipient has Gmail. Or if FedEx sends me an email with my shipping number, I can just click the link on the side to view it. I think that's pretty slick, and a good use of their text scanning abilities they already use for AdWords.

  • Just logged in to check it out... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gasmonso ( 929871 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:27PM (#14222811) Homepage

    I didn't even notice the RSS stuff this morning when I logged in so I checked again and it was there. Pretty cool and unintrusive. the first feed I saw on there was from Dictionary.com "voluptuary: a person devoted to luxury and the gratification of sensual appetites." Learn something new everyday I guess.

    Everyone loves Google, until of course they become evil and we all hate them.

    gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]
  • It would have been cool if the list of feeds automatically included the feeds I use on http://www.google.com/ig [google.com] (Google's try at my.yahoo that I've come to like), but no such luck.

    You can turn off web clips easily enough in GMail's settings. Right now I find it distracting, but I'll give it a week or so.

  • I don't have it on my Gmail (Score:3, Funny)

    by trash eighty ( 457611 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:38PM (#14222895) Homepage
    i feel so left out now!!!
    • Me neither i'm beginning to think this is a mail.google.com thing for people in the UK. Do other people not get all these new features in gmail? This is a general problem with most web applications, you don't have a sense of which version youre using nor do you get the option to upgrade or not. Its in the hands of the gods! Until we have proper versions with user choice of upgrading you cant relly too much on it.
  • So *that's* what that is! I noticed the new line above my inbox this morning and wondered what the heck it was. I didn't manage to divert my eyes clear to the right of the screen to see the "" and "Customize" buttons. Google needs to perhaps rethink how new features are introduced when users (well, at least one) finds out about new features through a completely different site.

  • No integration (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rolan ( 20257 ) * on Friday December 09, 2005 @03:43PM (#14222947) Homepage Journal

    Unfortunately, there's no integration with the google homepage where you also setup your news/RSS feeds. The data has to be setup twice, when it should really be from the same place.

    Google has a lot of nice stuff, but they've got a lot of work to do to integrate it and bring it to the most useful.

  • Why would I choose to login to Gmail to use this instead of bookmarks or with a Firefox extension?
  • My favorite is the spam recipe feed it shows when viewing the spam folder.

    I don't understand why everyone is so negative about this feature. It's not meant to be a fully-fleged RSS reader; they already have one of those and duplicating that functionality in GMail would be horribly misguided.

    It's just some extra stuff to look at when you have no new mail and some time to kill. It's a little thing but usually it's the little things that differentiate the best products from the rest.

    It would be nice if it im
  • Gee this feature was added to GMail at what, prolly midnight this morning? Zonk posts it at 3:05PM? Sheesh...pick up the pace. I actually waited today just to see how long it would take, I noted the change at about 11 (late morning today, hee).

  • Was Yahoo News one of the default RSS feeds for anyone else? I found that a little odd...

    On a side note, some accounts still don't have it. I've had it for about 5 days now.

  • You can't enter your rss feed address you have to search for it, great use that is.
  • I think I'll use one of http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/08/174925 8&tid=133 [slashdot.org]these and print the spam RSS feed on it!
  • Now how do I turn the fucking thing off?

    I hate it. It displays more ads than feeds.

    • Re:Great! (Score:3, Informative)

      by ClearlyPennsylvania ( 918245 )
      Well, I love it. And I don't see any ads. But, if you really don't like it, you can: 1) Customize what feeds you get 2) Disable it (go to settings)
      • *opens mouth, inserts foot*

        I've been plauged by the damn feeds since they started testing and there was no option to disable them until they make the damn thing public. I just hadn't bothered to check since it was relased into the wild.

  • Nice, but where are contact groups? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Yort ( 555166 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @05:39PM (#14224021)
    Not sure I'll use the new RSS feature, but it's nice to have. I was more interested in the "shortcuts" on the side, where Gmail tries to identify things in your email like addresses or tracking numbers that it can give you links to.

    What I can't understand is why they haven't yet implemented contact groups. The single major stumbling block that most people I try to convert to Gmail has is that is is missing the (I would think relatively simple) ability to define a group of two or more contacts to which you can easily send a message. Heck, they could even make this Google-y and allow you to define terms with which to build a list, or label contacts as "Personal" and "Business" and then make a group from that. But the base functionality is so stinkin' simple, I just don't know why they haven't done it yet, and it's getting annoying to hear people I've referred to Gmail come up and say "I really like that new Gmail thing, but how do I send a message to a list of people?"

  • It lasted about a minute before I found it to be very annoying and turned it off. At least we're allowed to turn it off. Have to give Google credit there.

    But, Google, how about working on something really useful, like right-click functionality?

  • Just tried it.

    I think with all the new web2.0 widgets & tools the dev-shops are going crazy over, we are losing sight of basic UI design (i.e. efficiency). I mean it's Google we're talking about here, comeon guys you can do a better UI integration than web-clips!

    I mean for RSS feed links, nothing's better than a topdown newpaper view (i.e. a list) than left-right, AOL style.

    I'll stick with my trusty Sage plugin for FF.

  • ... a stupid idea. For those who like to read their RSS feeds already I'll just ignore it and forward it with all GMail stuff to Outlook like I've been doing. Gmail is nice for the simple fact that it provides a location where I can find all my mail in one place. Other than that it's a bit too basic...

  • These new features... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by .com b4 .storm ( 581701 ) on Friday December 09, 2005 @07:42PM (#14225174)
    ... are great, but why the HELL am I STILL unable to search for un-labeled messages? Argh!
  • ... it loads the lastest title

    That must be double-plus good!


  • You know, there's a little thing called IMAP.

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