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October, 2007

It's been a long time coming

Posted by Mohammed Abdoolcarim and Brian Shih, Google Gadgets TeamWelcome to the new Google Gadgets API blog! Nearly two years after we first launched Google Gadgets on iGoogle, things have certainly changed. And because we have a lot of cool stuff to tell you about, we were inspired to launch this blog. Here are some highlights of what we've unveiled so far:Thanks in part to Google Gadgets for Your Webpage, there are billions of gadget pageviews per week. You can also build gadgets for a number of other Google products including Desktop, Calendar and Maps. More recently, we've opened up access to the Finance API, where you can retrieve and display stock information within your gadget. For those of you who want to advertise with rich media, we also have Gadget Ads.In addition to these, we've also redesigned the Gadgets website and hope you find our new homepage more useful and easier to navigate. And to keep up with the latest in what is going on with the gadgets family, we've created an API Overview page.The gadgets world is growing faster than ever, so to keep in touch with the ever-changing landscape, check this blog frequently (or subscribe to the feed) for new features, news about more sites where you can distribute your gadget and other related updates. In the meantime, put on your gadget hat and go write some great apps!

Simplified Guide to Importing All Your Archive Email Into Gmail or Apps using IMAP

by G-Apps | Wed, 10/24/2007 - 09:43

Any tips on making Google Apps easier are always very welcome, Zoli Erdos reports:
 

This is now so simple, it shouldn’t even require any guidance… but first things first.

Why would you want to import all your old email to Gmail? Because it gives you an All-In-One, searchable archive. I know there is real demand for this: my blog visitor log tells me, since my old post on the subject, How to Import All Your Archive Email Into Gmail still receives a good 5-600 readers every single day. That means:

  • people do want to migrate to web-based software (Gmail)
  • they don’t want to lose their historical “baggage”
  • so far it has been rather complicated

Now that Gmail supports the IMAP protocol, everything’s changed. My most-popular-ever post is all of a sudden obsolete. Forget all the “Gmail-loader” tools on the Net, most of them did not work anyway, forget even my multi-step process… I’ll show you all you have to do now. I’ve tested these steps with Outlook, but they should work with Thunderbird or whatever your favorite desktop email software is.

  • Enable IMAP in your Gmail account
  • Setup the Gmail account in your client software, based on these instructions
  • This will create a folder structure matching your Gmail labels
  • Open your old archive.pst files, if any
  • Drag-and drop all your old email into the Inbox folder in your new IMAP account.
    • You can do this across accounts, or even archive files.
    • If you don’t want to “move” old email out of the archives, use “copy” instead.
    • Instead of Inbox, you can drop old email into any other Folder (create new ones if you like), to match the Gmail labels
  • Drag-and drop all your old “Sent mail” into the “Sent Mail” folder in your new IMAP account.
  • Wait patiently - with thousands of emails (my archive goes back to 1996) your upload bandwidth may be the bottleneck.

Voila! Your email is now up in Gmail, all labeled, searchable, with original sender info and dates intact (this was a problem with previous methods).

 

>>Original article

Subscriber Stats, Summed Up

There's been a lot of discussion this weekend about the subscriber counts that have recently appeared in Reader's search results. Leaderboards have been drawn up, numbers are being compared and in some cases there's confusion as to how these numbers compare with other subscriber metrics. Additionally, we've made changes (some as recently as today) as to how counts are being calculated. This is probably going to be pretty boring unless you're a feed publisher, but we thought it would be best to explain things a bit. Here are the various numbers you may come across, and what they all mean:

Google subscriber counts: These numbers include subscribers across
all Google services, including Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. You can
see them in Reader's feed search results (pictured below) and the Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, our crawler
reports them to the publisher each time we fetch the feed. Reader's feed search was recently showing stale and incomplete data, but as of today (October 15) the numbers should be the same everywhere.

FeedBurner numbers: If you use FeedBurner to manage and track your feed, you will see a subscriber count there that is attributed to "Google Feedfetcher." This number is a sum of all the feeds that you have redirecting to your FeedBurner feed URL. So if http://www.example.com/atom.xml has 3 subscribers, http://www.example.com/rss.xml has 7 subscribers and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Example (where you redirect the other two feeds now) has 12 subscribers, then you will see 3 + 7 + 12 = 22 subscribers reported in the FeedBurner interface.

What this all means if you're a feed publisher is that if you're interested in getting the most comprehensive overview of your subscribers, you should be using a service like FeedBurner or Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand, if you're a Reader user, we hope you take advantage of the numbers that we now show next to search results, so that you can pick the most appropriate feed to subscribe to.