PaulSpoerry.com

Gmail had a major outage early Tuesday morning: for about two and a half hours starting at 1:30 am PST while many of their users in the US were asleep, many people couldn’t access their email. Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours.

In response to its extended outage, Google has just launched the Google Apps Status Dashboard. The dashboard offers an at-a-glance look at the system health of most popular Google services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and the company’s suite of web-based document editors. Google has been pretty good about responding to down time with blog posts alerting users with status updates, but having a dedicated page seems like a much better solution (especially for users who don’t follow Google’s blogs).

As you can see above the dashboard lists most of Google popular services, a date range (you can view older date ranges as well) and an icon displaying the status for the individual service. The status icon will indicate: No issues, Service Disruption, Service Outage, and Information Available. Clicking the symbol in the table will allow you to view more detailed information. There’s also an RSS Feed icon shown on the page, however… it says “Coming Soon”. This too would be handy, unless you’re using Reader of iGoogle to fetch your feeds and one of those services is down as well.

Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven’t been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we’re launching today, there’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There’s even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers — it’s not exactly practical, but it’s great for testing out your geek cred. We’ve also done a minor facelift to Gmail’s default look to make it crisper and cleaner — you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

Note that so far this has not shown up on the Google Apps version GMail. Bummer…

Original GMail blog post here.

There’s a test version of the new Google customizable homepage (startpage), iGoogle, available to play with. When you start it up, the first thing you’ll notice are the pretty rounded corners on all your gadgets. The second thing you’ll notice are the tabs along the left side of the page, rather than across the top.

It appears to be organized this way: each of your tabs appear in the left navigation and listed under each tab are the gadgets included in that tab. When you click the link for a gadget, it appears on its own in the main portion of the window. Click the tab name and all the gadgets appear as before. The switching between gadgets and tabs is very fast, almost instantaneous, so when you open the Gmail gadget on its own, for example, it’s much faster than opening Gmail itself. Of course, you’re not getting all the Gmail features, only the ones that are part of the gadget. Google calls this feature, canvas view and you can also access it by clicking on the maximize button on the gadget itself when viewing an entire tab.

It all appears to be very much in the experimental stage. Things don’t seem to work even as Google’s Help page describes. For example, the Help page shows a screenshot of a feed in canvas view, which looks an awful lot like Google Reader.

When I try it though, I get what appears to be a single gadget on a page, with no extra functionality and a “you might also like..” list of suggested gadgets.

Finally, the new iGoogle integrates with Gmail chat, so you have access to the same IM in iGoogle as you do in Gmail.

Are you salivating yet? Dying to try it? Well sorry, it’s only open to developers. But wait, can you keep a secret? OK don’t tell anyone but if you go and sign up to play in the iGoogle sandbox, you’ll instantly have access to the new test version.

You do have to give them a few pieces of information about yourself but it’s mostly stuff Google knows about you already (email, name etc.)

Don’t want to play with it anymore? Go back to the same link and the experimental version will be turned off. (But remember, if anyone asks, you’re a developer, right?)

The full rollout of the new iGoogle is expected next month.

Announced in April, the new version of iGoogle that brings social applications is tested in a small number of randomly selected Google accounts.

The new iGoogle places the tabs on the left-hand side of the page and you can expand the tabs to see the list of gadgets and status information, like the number of unread Gmail messages. There’s a new chat feature borrowed from Gmail that lets you chat with your contacts while visiting iGoogle – that means iGoogle gets a sense of presence because you’ll know when your contacts are online. Since the chat feature will be enabled by default, it’s obvious that Google will be able to add options for sharing items and discussing posts with the contacts that are online.

iGoogle also adds a list of updates from your contacts similar to Facebook’s newsfeed: you can see stories shared by your contacts in Google Reader, recent photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums, Google Talk status messages, shared iGoogle themes and gadgets.

Another change is that gadgets have an expanded interface, called canvas view. Gadgets authors will take advantage of this to display more information and make their gadgets more interactive, while your feeds can be read in a Google Reader-like interface. In the future, iGoogle will support OpenSocial applications and the transformation to a social site will be complete.

Google announced that the canvas view will be rolled out to a small percentage of users this month and to more users in July, while the OpenSocial applications “will not work in production until later this summer”.

Google introduced a set of themes for your personalized homepage (or iGoogle) a few months back. But if you’re looking for a few more customization options, check out this new Google gadget. Once you install the gadget on your homepage, you can choose from a variety of custom skins, create your own, or submit themes for other users to install. It currently provides 10 new skins.

 The gadget features three main tabs; a skins directory which mimics the built-in iGoogle theme selector, a tab with details of how to create and upload skins and a skins submission form. Unlike many other gadgets, this one does rely on a server side component to retrieve a list of available skins from the database in JSON format and also to validate and insert new skins submissions. This little gadget will also permit a different skin per tab – and thankfully no more reloading the page when switching skins. Works in IE and FF.

   Custom iGoogle Skins

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