New Version of Gmail Being Tested

Keith writes "Gmail was launched on April 1, 2004, and has revolutionized the way many of us use email. The interface has remained largely untouched since it launched, but get ready, it's soon to undergo a change in what they describe as a 'New Version'. Only a select few people have access to use the new interface — mainly employees and trusted people outside the company called 'Trusted Testers'. From the ZDNet blog entry: 'Google lets every-day users who are fluent in both English and another language translate small snippets of English text into the language of their choice. This is how they can offer services in several languages without spending a dime on professional translators. Unfortunately, exposing sensitive information in this manner makes it hard to keep a secret. One of my readers, who wishes to remain anonymous, stumbled across an interesting snippet of text (which I confirmed exists) spilling the beans on a new version of Gmail that is either currently being tested, or about to be released to testing in short order.'"

The feature everybody wants!

Oooh! Oooh! Let's hope it has Flash ads!

-Stephen

Re:The feature everybody wants!

According to a friend of mine, who knows someone who knows a person who is a compulsive liar, we might end up seeing Silverlight ads instead.

Note to mods..

Whoosh!

Warning! Humor Process Failure. (A)bort (R)etry

Dr. Dre would be proud

The interface has remained largely untouched since it launched, but get ready, it's soon to undergo a change in what they describe as a 'New Version'.

Does that mean they're going to rename the existing version "O.G. Mail?"

Bit speculative

So, on the basis of 2 words in a translation request, there is a whole new version of Gmail coming out ?

How the hell did this get to be news ?

Re:Bit speculative

Did you happen to notice what those two words were translated to? Pig latin. Is there really a pig latin version of google?

Re:Bit speculative

Actually, Google has some funky languages to choose from, including Pig Latin, Esperanto, and "bork bork bork" (swedish chef). They're on the preferences page, and I believe apply to all Google services

Re:Bit speculative

$ echo "...and there's someone that they pay to translate phrases into Pig Latin? (a) couldn't that be done by computer, (b) how the heck do you get that job? Document your extensive travel and work experience in Pig Latin America?" | pig
...andway erethay'say omeonesay atthay eythay aypay otay anslatetray asesphray intoway Igpay Atinlay? (away) ouldncay'tay atthay ebay oneday ybay omputercay, (bay) owhay ethay eckhay oday youay etgay atthay objay? Ocumentday youray extensiveway aveltray andway orkway experienceway inway Igpay Atinlay Americaway?

Re:Bit speculative

RTFA. The "Phrase in English" is "Newer Version" - and in the "Translation Help" section, it reads "Link that users can click on if they are part of the trusted testers program to go to the newer UI." On the basis of being asked to translate a link to the new UI, there's a whole new UI coming out.

Make that 9 words

Here comes 7 more words for ya. [zdnet.com] At least it has a possible new feature, this time. (Breaking news! Now with 350% more proof!)

Re:Bit speculative

How the hell did this get to be news?

Posted by Zonk on Sunday September 23, @05:13PM

That's how.

Re:Bit speculative

And Apple the new Microsoft, and Microsoft the new IBM. Was there reality before IBM? and what will succeed Google? What if IBM succeeds Google? Would this be proof of reincarnation?

Make it simple

I don't get it. Why do most places feel they need to change the way something looks or feels? Microsoft did this with Hotmail. You use a new style that is confusing to the users that want things to just stay the same. I am all for it but I wish they would have the option to go back to the old version when it is released. Some people just don't like change.

Au contraire: Gmail has an awesome UI

In the case of gmail it might be because the current UI is shitty.

Except that it's the best mail UI ever devised. I have actually switched from my "real" mail client to using gmail exclusively. I love the "keep everything in one folder, tag it and search" approach. Much better than dozens of folders with filters. I love how threaded mails are displayed; I always know what people are replying to. Oh, and search is fast.

Furthermore, they don't try to create a "real" app inside the browser, instead concentrating on making an awesome "web app." Yahoo recreates a "real" application inside the browser. So you've got tons of buttons and drag and drop and folders and all that crap, all of which makes the application slow, and doesn't really help you get your stuff done. Google has the right idea: It's a browser, make it a great web app, not a shitty copy of a "real" app.

Pray tell, what is so shitty about the current gmail UI?

Coming soon to Gmail

Try the new version of Google's blended search

Seriously though, this entire article is based on the fact that someone was asked to translate "new version"? That's a terrible excuse for journalism.

Can't trust Google translate

Someone at Google has too much time on their hands. I wouldn't trust Google Translate for everything... it looks like they've fixed it now, but as recently as a week ago, when you searched for the Russian form of Ivan the Terrible's name, Google would translate it into English as "Abraham Lincoln".

I quit this website

Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)

Cheapskates

"without spending a dime on professional translators"
Why do people do stuff for Google for free? What do they get out of it?

Re:Cheapskates

Why do people do stuff for Google for free? What do they get out of it?

They get to find out about secret new products and tell the world. ;) But seriously, maybe some people do stuff like that because they want to give back; they want to see Google's ideas succeed. If spending one minute a day translating a sentence helps out, who are we to give them a hard time about it?

Re:Cheapskates

But seriously, maybe some people do stuff like that because they want to give back; they want to see Google's ideas succeed. If spending one minute a day translating a sentence helps out, who are we to give them a hard time about it?

Yup? Myself, I spend up to 15 minutes a day proofreading Microsoft documentation for free, and I'm always available for any other multibillion dollar corporations who's ideas I can help succeed at no cost to them.

Re:Cheapskates

Myself, I spend up to 15 minutes a day proofreading Microsoft documentation for free, and I'm always available for any other multibillion dollar corporations who's ideas I can help succeed at no cost to them.

You kids have low standards these days. When I was your age, I spent hours everyday proof-reading and commenting on AT&T whitepapers.

Re:Cheapskates

What do they get out of it?

First go to the following URL.
http://www.google.com/ [google.com]

Next type somthing into the box, anything, type in Hot Monkey Fecal Sex [google.com] if you want.

Finally, click the "Google Search" button.

Do you see why people do stuff for Google for "free" yet ?

Come on, there's 320,000 results for hot monkey fecal sex [google.com] for cryin out loud !

Lots of mystery...

seems to be a lot of mystery and intrigue around what is probably going to be minor cosmetic changes.
Are we all so enamored of googles many accomplishments that a site redesign becomes major news?
I don't think anyone was that concerned when yahoo and hotmail redid their sites...of course, they just made them more annoying.
Having said that, it will probably be that this rumored site redesign is when Google starts rolling out their sinister "Phase II"

Re:Lots of mystery...

If /. can support as many ipod/iphone stories as it does, surely this warrants the front page.

For what it's worth....

For what it's worth, Google is stopping to call it GMail.

All of the icons were changed over the past few days to say "Google Mail" instead of GMail with little fanfare. Not sure if this is any indication of things to come, or simply a branding effort coming from the top-down. Guess we'll have to wait and see...

Re:For what it's worth....

That could have something to do with the suit that they lost in Germany... and speaking of Germany, this 'translate tiny snippets of text' thing reminds me of how the British handled The funniest joke in the world [wikipedia.org].

Re:For what it's worth....

That's just a choice. You can use your mail address (XYZ) in following ways:
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail] (/googlemail.com)
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

Possibly more. Helps filtering stuff, and in some cases smell out the rats that sell your mail address to spammers :)

A multi-billion dollar company?

And they can't afford professional translators? If it was just random bits and pieces of no consequence then I might say fair enough - but this is content for their primary services. We aren't talking millions of dollars to translate a few hundred words here or anything - seems very odd.

Great

So this will be a beta of the new version of a service that's still in beta?

I wonder how many years more it'll take for gmail to lose the "beta" designation.

Does it have IMAP yet?

If not, not worth my time.

Pkease,,,,

Let the new interface have "unthread" and the ability to turn threading off. Please, please, please....

Re:Pkease,,,,

Or a "delete" button that goes to the next thread automatically.

This is ridiculous

Even if there is a new version coming, this is the least reliable source of information about it. I mean, for Pete's sake, pig latin? We're going to trust that Google really needs this translated into pig latin in order to make it accessible to users?

By the way there's a giant that's been unearthed in Cardiff, NY. It looks to be proof that giants once roamed the Earth and maybe still do. Check it out. It's true for sure.

Sensitive Information? Huh?

Quote: "... exposing sensitive information in this manner makes it hard to keep a secret."

Uh.... just where did you get the idea that any of your other plain text is a "secret"??? Did you even READ the terms of use notice???

Talk about a non-issue...

Pig Latin!

Also to add to all the comments of speculative nature of this article. One more. It is translation for the words "new version" "Pig Latin" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Latin [wikipedia.org] I mean Pig Latin ffs. Now if it is meant to top secret I am sure there are not hundreds of thousands of English to Pig Latin translators for Google...........

Wow, I'm a trusted tester?

What did I ever do to deserve that. I know- it was downloading all that pr0n off of USENET in 1995. Personally I don't like the new interface.
I just checked and evidently I'm no longer trusted. Thank God. Who knows what vulnerabilities might be lurking in that new version.

New version

That means.. it's going from beta to RC ? :-P

Very speculative article....

New!

GMail 2.0! Now with less Evil!!

What I Despise...

What I despise is this constant belief that newer interfaces are better and that change is always good. The best interface is the one you're most efficient in using, and that's usually the one you know best. Sad to see Google taking off after Microsoft in this race. Hope they'll let keep the "classic" interface for as long as we want it.

So What? The Old Interface wasn't that great

I have to say that during the time a year or so back when I used Gmail a lot I always found the interface kind of irritating.

Every time I wanted to add a new Label and corresponding Filter it seemed like I had to trial and error because the process was less than obvious. And I don't care for the way that threads are collapsed, making it difficult to find one message out of the ten or twelve in a conversation.

I guess it just felt like everything took two or three or four more clicks than it should have. That may be a subjective assessment, but I can't see using Gmail as my primary e-mail client.

Hopefully they fix...

Hopefully they fix broken signatures when responding to email. Now it places my signature to the very bottom of the email - below the quoted text I am responding to. I am tired of cutting and pasting my sig every time I respond to an email.

What the hell?

"revolutionized the way many of us use email"

It's just a nice webmail system - webmail has been around for years before gmail. I use gmail, I like gmail, but what exactly did it revolutionize?

Re:What the hell?

It's just a nice webmail system - webmail has been around for years before gmail. I use gmail, I like gmail, but what exactly did it revolutionize?

It didn't suck.

In the context of webmail, that was pretty darn revolutionary!

Re:What the hell?

It didn't suck.

That's very true. I hated web mail before gmail, and love it now.

Also, prior to gmail, users of free web mail had to constantly delete all their old messages so they wouldn't go over their quota. Also if you didn't log in for a month you got your account cancelled. Also you couldn't use free web mail for professional purposes because it stuck an ad on your outgoing mail. Web mail also didn't allow free forwarding, pop access, or allow you to use an address at your own domain....which basically locked you in. Gmail changed all that.

And it was the first mainstream Ajax application I know of.

I agree...it was pretty damn revolutionary. At least for those who pay attention to such things.

beta

Maybe they can finally get rid of the 'beta' in the logo :)? Overall, I think Google has a hit with their latest offerings. Google desktop for instance is a perfect addition to indexing and searching 65k+ Outlook emails (work still uses Outlook). Similar to Lookout, but doesnt crash Outlook. Google Documents has greatly improved and is perfect for sharing documents across PCs. Installing Microsoft office or OpenOffice is really optional now. While Gmail's interface isn't perfect, they have been making small updates throughout the months. I still think it beats Hotmail, Yahoo, etc...

Zzzz...

New Version of Gmail Being Tested

Wake me up when Gmail supports IMAP.

One request

Let me click one button and sort by sender, subject, size, etc. That's the #1 reason I don't use Gmail.

Re:One request

you can search by any of those items (and more) and you would rather sort??? What the hell good does sorting do? Surely you are looking for emails from 1 person, not a group of people with names starting with 'A', right???

Insider Secrets

I was able to get my hands on a screen shot of the new version of Gmail, known as the "New Sweetness" internally here at Google, looks pretty nice from the screen shots I've seen, with the most notable change being the preview pane, making it look a bit more like Outlook. Can't wait.

Slow news day?

Does anyone expect Google to not release a new version?

Or to not test or translate it before it does?

Even assuming this Pig Latin based intelligence gathering has merit, the information gained is only barely more sensational than that the sun will rise tomorrow.

Newer Version ...

Might as well refer to some kind of version control for messages...

What?

While it's a neat app, they didn't really revolutionize anything. They just gave you a lot more space than you need and an AJAX interface. The only thing they revolutionized is how they collect data from your emails to better target you with ads.

I prefer IMAP

Why use POP when you can use IMAP? As long as you can backup your messages on your local computers, I don't see any benefit of using POP over IMAP.

Re:I prefer IMAP

Gmail is really pointless with IMAP anyway.

I use offline IMAP here. The best of both worlds, my mail is on the server and accessible anywhere, but also cached locally so I still can see what was there even if the connection fails.

Re:I prefer IMAP

http://search.cpan.org/~krs/GMail-IMAPD-0.93/lib/GMail/IMAPD.pm [cpan.org]

I read a review of it, and I'm not sure I agree with all of the implementation choices, but supposedly it works.

I'd rather have real IMAP from google though.

Re:Nothing to see here

Someone was asked to translate "Newer version" for the Gmail UI. Big deal. This truly is the bottom of the barrel.

It's even worse than that. At no point does TFA provide evidence that the text "New Version" is related to Gmail, and not some other Google product. It could be a new version of Google Calendar or a new version of Google Scholar. (It could even be outdated text referring to a "New Version" of a product that has already been released.)

Or... it could just be one of thousands of random snippets of text that appear on various Google documents, and requires translation into other languages. There is no evidence here... only wild speculation. The author of TFA is either an idiot, holding back information, or is trying to create some kind of joke.

Nothing to see here (cause we aren't looking lol)

maybe you missed the big, bold "Translate Phrase for Gmail UI" at the top of the image?

or maybe u missed the "Link that users can click on if they are part of the trusted testers program to go to the newer UI." that is near the bottom?

+1 irony for subject title this was posted under... "nothing to see here"

:P

I'm a nerd, It's news to me, it matters.

Re:Nothing to see here

I find it interesting, knowledge that a new Gmail UI is in the works is somewhat interesting, though not very surprising. But what was more interesting (at least to me, and rather humerus) was the way it was found.

Re:let's get a grip

Too bad all that anger does nothing but alienate people. You might have friends, who would help you bleed off the anger. Loneliness is a vicious cycle.

Try hugging your email server. Maybe that'll help.

Re:POP

gmail rocks i really hope they don't screw it up, only free email that can forward and/or do POP & STMP

Re:Congratulations Keith, you win!

How much was the bet for?

A dollar!

Re:let's get a grip

gmail hasn't brought anything to the table that wasn't there before.

Apart from a little thing I like to call "User interface that doesn't irritate the living fuck out of me." And almost instant searching of all my email.

First non-Google employee account?

Which non-Google-employee had the first Gmail account? Mine dates from April 12th 2004, thanks to a Google employee on a mailing list I'm on. Can anyone beat that?