I am really, really liking Gmail. I am a very late adopter, due to a dark secret. Yes, I am the last American who doesn't have a cellphone. I know that sounds completely inconsistent with my technophilia, but I just don't want to be that reachable. Anyway, the absence of a cellphone means that I could not tinker with Gmail when they required that you receive a text message from them in order to activate your account.
That's been done away with, however, and so I set up an account. What do I like about it? A few things:
- I can use my UPS email account with no trouble, with my email replies coming from Gmail showing my UPS address.
- I can switch back and forth between my Gmail email address and my UPS email address, meaning I can send email unrelated to school on a separate address and still have it all arrive to and be archived in a single place.
- I can integrate Gmail into my customized Google homepage, so that I have a small window showing my outbox.
- I can search my emails rather easily using the built in Google search tools.
- I can tag emails rather than putting them in cumbersome folders, then search by tag if I want to find something (this also works really well in Google Docs).
- Emails that are part of a longer chain of communication are "tabbed" together in the inbox so that I can see all of the related correspondence on a single line.
- The spam filter appears to work better than the one we have on campus; so far I've had only a couple of pieces of spam reach my inbox in the week or so I've been using it.
- I was able to import my old email without much trouble.
The other thing I'm interested in is Zotero. This is something I and one of my students both came across in the last few days. I tinkered with it a bit, but was unhappy with it until the student pointed out that I was not using it correctly (thanks, Liz!). Zotero is an extension to Firefox that allows you to easily gather up research on the web or in databases and drop it into various folders or tag it. It's more complex than that, and also much simpler than many other options. A great resource for anyone who does research. Check it out--it's free!
And what about TokBox? Is video email and video chatting finally here, and if so, do we want it?
