Image: Screen grab of Gmail by Jason Bean

I’ve been waiting patiently today as I’ve been hearing everything talk about the cool, new themes for Gmail that have now been released. It was all the buzz today on twitter but every time I opened Gmail it was just the same old look and feel.

A couple of hours ago I noticed a little bit of a change to the look and feel and thought that maybe things were in a rolling staged release for users.

I got home from work, fired up the laptop and bingo! there are the themes all there sitting and waiting on me.

The theme shown above seemed to be the popular one on twitter, and I’ll agree. It does make the Gmail interface nice and friendly. Than in itself is kind of odd in that just about all Google products pride themselves on sparse, utilitarian functionality which I normally enjoy. But this is nice. I may try a couple of different ones, there’s loads to choose form already and I’m sure they’ll keep releasing them and they’ll be expanded upon like the themes from iGoogle have been.

Which is your favorite theme? What themes are you waiting for that would be your favorite? I’m thinking pop stars and sports teams will be the first releases coming soon.

Post from: Uncover the Internet

One of the earliest e-mail addresses I had was a Yahoo! Mail address and it’s been the one I’ve used almost exclusively for friends and family to contact me and stay in touch.

You can now add a couple more free e-mail domains to those that you can manage from the familiar Yahoo! Mail interface:  @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com

If you’re interested in adding another e-mail address to your contact information and still use the Yahoo! e-mail interface then just go sign-up for one of these new addresses now.

What I’m wanting them to do is let me manage multiple Yahoo! e-mail addresses from one login. Someone let me know when you’re able to do that.

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A quick Google search with the name of the song and the person singing we did know and it immediately returned the results we were looking for initially. If you’re wondering, the song was Bryan Adams’ “All For One”, you’ll have to click the link above to get the answer to our conundrum.

Getting back to the point of this post though, you can pretty much find anything you want on the Internet today. Or can you? Are you getting everything you’d like from the world wide web?

Here’s an example I’ve been thinking of over the past couple of days. I’m in desperate need of a pair of new tennis shoes. My preferred brand is Nike, I’m looking for running or cross-training shoes, I need them in size 13 and I’d like to pay less than $40. Luckily today I found a pair while looking on Nike’s website and Finish Line’s as well. It was nice that both sites had a clearance section, which I could select details like brand, price and size. In this case I found a pair from Finish Line and I just received confirmation that they have shipped and I should expect them in 5-7 business days. But what would have happened if I couldn’t find anything today? I’d need to keep going back to each site, looking in their clearance section and seeing if there were any updates.

What if…. I could do this…..

On each website subscribe to a custom e-mail alert, or maybe even better yet an RSS feed. I put in my requirements something like this:

• men’s
• athletic (running or cross-trainer)
• size 13
• $40 (or anything with a discount of 50% or more)
• color

Then, every time a new shoe was added into the database that fit my requirements I’d receive an e-mail or an RSS update. I could then click on the link, immediately be taken to the site to see more details and possibly order the shoe. How cool would that be?

Now that you’ve got inspiration, what would your Internet Wish List include?

Let us know in the comments below. You never know, maybe what we’re looking for already exists and we just don’t know it. Or, someone will run with one of our ideas and make it a reality (and make millions of dollars in the process.)

I’m looking forward to hearing your responses!

Post from: Uncover the Internet

One of the more interesting applications I’ve been using lately is twitter. At first I didn’t really get it. I was already using IM and blogging and e-mail of course, so the ability to blast out a short little “tweet” about what I’m doing just seemed like a waste of time.

I didn’t really catch on to the power of the application until I attended SXSW a few weeks ago in Austin and the entire b5 team used it as a sort of GPS tracking and status update mechanism for anyone in our group. We used it for quick information like:

• Where’s everyone at?
• We’re doing dinner at __________ at 6pm?
• Heading back to the ranch, who needs a ride.
• and of course @wasoverheard

Since coming back to the “real world” away from Austin and SXSW, I’ve been using twitter to stay in touch with everyone I met and what they’re up to.

Just today though Darren Rowse, the Problogger, alerted me, via twitter of course, that he was enjoying twittervision.

Twittervision let’s you see various tweet’s coming in from all over the world. People who I don’t know of at all, but it’s interesting to read what people are saying thousands of miles away.

Careful! It’s addictive.

If you’d like to follow me on twitter, just go here.

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I’m not sure what happened to the service from Comcast, but it just stopped being available.

GotVoice brings that same functionality back to me, and adds the same function for cell phone messages as well.

Have you ever wished you would have saved that important voicemail? Would you like to share your voicemails with family, friends or coworkers? With GotVoice, you can, for FREE!

GotVoice retrieves voice messages from your existing home and cellular phones and delivers them directly to your email inbox either automatically, using a pre-chosen schedule, or manually with a simple click of a button.

• Access your voicemail on the Internet
• Easy to sign up – only takes a few minutes
• Get all your messages in one place
• And yes, GotVoice is FREE

Never miss that important call again, or not keep that important voice-mail you wish you had now to go back and listen to in the future. Check-out GotVoice today!

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Need to send large files to someone easily. Check-out Pando.com.

Pando is currently in beta and has got Web 2.0 written all over it, but that’s okay because it seems to do a really good job of accomplishing the task it was set out to do.

They’ve got a great illustration that explains how it all works, but for just you readers out there, here’s a textual conversation of how the process flows from sender to recipient.

1. Files sent – Sender selects files and/or folders, enters recipient(s) email address(es) and clicks “send”. A copy of the files immediately starts uploading to Pando’s secure servers (supernodes).

2. Email received – At the same time, an email containing a small (~10K) .pando file is sent to the recipient(s). The .pando file contains data about the location of the files sent.

3. Files delivered – Recipient(s) click the .pando file to start a p2p swarm delivery from the sender’s machine, Pando’s supernodes and other recipients. All transfers are encrypted end-to-end.

Visit Pando – thanks for sharing.

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This little website may have just the thing for you. You can download a little app called POP Peeper and it will alert you when you’ve got new mail on any of the following types of e-mail accounts:

• POP3 of course
• SMTP
• Gmail
• Hotmail/MSN
• Yahoo! Mail
• Mail.com
• MyWay
• Excite
• Lycos
• Rediffmail

Some of the other features you may be interested in knowing about:

• Easy Setup – accounts are imported from your existing email client(s)
• Read and delete email without opening your email client
• Send Mail using SMTP or WebMail
• Password Protection
• Send, Save and Open file attachments
• Many ways to receive new mail notification: skinnable desktop alerts, audio, flashing Scroll Lock LED and more
• Specify different intervals for each account
• and more

Pretty cool eh? You can download the little bugger at www.poppeeper.com

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Do you have a large file you need to get from someone or to someone, but it’s larger than your e-mail application will allow, or maybe your application doesn’t allow certain attachment types?

You should try YouSendIt

It doesn’t get any easier than that does it?

Post from: Uncover the Internet