Making Gmail Your Gateway to the Web

Photo Credit: Adapted from Gateway Arch by docdevore

For the past five years my browser home page has been set to either Google.com or iGoogle. (I briefly flirted with the New York Times as my default but have integrated their feeds everywhere else.) This week I switched it to Gmail. With all of the features they have been adding lately, particularly through their Labs, Gmail is unquestionably my virtual Swiss Army Knife. It is not only my communications hub. It is my knowledge base and to some degree my feed reader. Some say it is becoming an enterprise dashboard - it is. It is my gateway to the web. (Note they added themes today!)

In this post I outline some recent ways I have tweaked my Gmail Personal Nerve Center by connecting Gmail with other web services. (Other posts on Gmail are here.)

Search the Web from Gmail

Gmail's search capabilities are top-notch. It's a big reason why I store tons of articles, factoids and even documents there. However, it's easy to miss the little button that says "Search the Web." These days I begin most of my web queries from Gmail. I even get a head start using their advanced keywords. (For example I type in new york weather when I want to know what the temperature is.) This will become even more useful once Gmail adds its SMS features later this month. Once that's back up you should be able to use it with Google SMS and get back search results via IM.

Update and Track Your Social Networks via IM

I am slowly in the process of trying to shift more of my communications out of email towards social software and IM. (More on this topic soon.) Still, I want an easily accessible record of all of these streams. So I am using Gmail much of the time to post to these services and also receive updates.

If you set up Ping.fm you can update all the major social networks via Gmail Chat. I post to Twitter via Ping.fm. I receive back replies by subscribing to a Twitter search feed for @steverubel via IM via notify.me. In addition, I receive Facebook alerts also by running my feed through notify.me. You can find your Facebook feed here. (You can also IM Friendfeed and Yammer directly and receive updates back from them too, which I do.)

Subscribe to High Priority Feeds and Alerts

I love Google Reader but I also like to be able to subscribe to some of my feeds via Gmail so that they are archived in a single place online and offline (via IMAP). However, I want to make this easily managed. So, I put all of my high priority feeds in Google Reader into a folder, make this folder public and then subscribe to the feed in Newsgator Online. Newsgator offers POP delivery so I have Gmail automatically fetch this account, scoop up the feeds, filter/archive them and tag them with the label "Feeds."

Track the Day's News with Gmail Clips

I am a news junkie and like to stay in the know. Gmail makes this a snap with Gmail Web Clips. I have pretty much standardized on the New York Times as my source of choice. In addition, I like to be able to track Techmeme too as well as all the news on the Presidential transition. So I have added a bunch of feeds to Clips including one from the awesome Times Topics site that stream into Gmail via a nice handy little news ticker.

Use Gmail as a Writing Tool

Sometimes writing can be intimidating, but it doesn't need to be. I like to start my writing in Gmail and then move it into other services where I can do more. For example, I wrote this blog post in Gmail and then sent it directly to TypePad. I also start documents here and then email them into Google Docs for additional tweaking (eg word counts, etc.). Finally I have a huge swipe file of articles and ideas stored in Gmail for inspiration and reference (for more on this concept see this great post from Write to Done). LifeClever offers some more thoughts here on using email for writing. See my other Gmail posts for how to use the service for storing ideas.

Build Links in Gmail to All Your Other Services

Finally, last but not least, when I do need to access other services they are all a click away in Gmail. I have added the Google Calendar and Google Docs gadgets to my sidebar. I store my To Do List in Google Docs so it's usually the top item in the gadget. In addition, I store my bookmarks in Gmail by exporting them to HTML and sending the page to myself using Ubiquity, which I pull up using Gmail Quick Links. Also, the links at the top of the page put me a click away to secure https versions of some of Google's other big services.

I keep adding to my system as Google rolls out features, but to me Gmail is my gateway to the web and the one web site I could never be without. Gmail turns five in the spring and I amazed how they continue to make it even more awesome once you start to really tweak it to your needs.

Comments

[Dave Fleet]

Wow, that's quite the process. Nice approach Steve - I like the idea of centralizing and notify.me is a new one to me. I may give some of this a try.

Thanks for the tips.

[Robert Worstell]

Wuuf! Too much too fast - needs a week to digest this (that's an Internet week, not a standard calendar week.)

I thought I was fancy by having my Blogger blogs email directly to gmail, then filter these to have them automatically archived. That way I could search for content from all my blogs without having to search each one. And then Google Desktop search was indexing all my gmail, so I could then search everything I had stored anywhere (until my computer power supply fried that hard-drive... back-ups?) But my gmail files didn't get fried, now, did they?

I'm still back on Rubel's post of getting imaginary Friendfeed friends to aggregate my data... Kinda get this sitting-at-the-feet-of-a-master feeling. OK -- that's over. Gotta love Internet time.

[Twitter for President]

How do you integrate ping.fm with Google Chat?

[Vic DiGital]

Dude, these posts are awesome, but my brain melts halfway through.

I SO love my gmail. Not as much as you, but I want to get to that happy place. But I'm just not at that level of efficiency with it yet. I can't bring myself to go through this process yet, amazing as it is.

It's daunting.

But awesome.

[Vic DiGital]

Also, I just discovered deadlineapp.com It's a simple to do list generator that focuses on sending you warnings that a deadline is approaching. Anyway, it would have been just another cool extra site that I forgot about quickly except that you can access it through your gmail chat by adding your deadline account as a friend. Then you just send a quick IM to yourself about something along with a date, and it adds it to the Deadline todo list. Plus, it stores it all in a chat message so it's always there for you to easily access from gmail if you need to search for it.

Pretty cool.

[Jac]

What ? No Google maps here ?? ;-)

[Adam W]

I'm convinced that you can use Gmail and Google Apps as a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) but I haven't figured it out yet. Maybe there's a way to connect with Linkedin?

[Josh]

Don't forget, Remember the Milk has a fantastic integration add-in if you use firefox. I haven't looked at any other to-do apps after finding that. You can use the igoogle gadget and then import that to gmail, but the integrated one is nice as long as you use firefox all the time.

[philramble]

That was a nice post. I use the labs features to show Google Docs and Google Calendar on the left sidebar, while the google chat app is docked to the right. This enables me to keep all things chat to the right and all other stuff (email, documents, etc) to the left. I use a lot of tags and filters. I use the star icons to indicate the status of a message and to indicate followup if necessary. Videochat is a nice new feature, as are the beautiful themes. I love gmail! Don't know what I'd do without it. I also blog using Google Docs - so I can basically create posts from right inside gmail, through the Google docs app. I can then publish these posts from Google docs to my Wordpress.com blog. Pretty neat!

[David]

Look at Better GMail2 for firefox. It adds Gcal and GReader to Gmail. All on one screen.

[Brian Bufalo]

@Josh remember the milk can now integrate without downloading a plugin for firefox so it works across browsers. They have a how to on their site at rememberthemilk.com.

I really love this post. I use gmail to manage everything from one central email account. I think I might try some of these out that I'm not already doing.

[Doc DeVore]

Hello, Steve. Nice article, and helpful to a dedicated GMail user. But, what really caught my eye was the photo when I jumped from Google Reader to your blog (by way of Lifehacker's RSS feed). There was my picture. And you gave me credit. THANK YOU! Made my week.

[Help]

I don't understand this. I've been trying to configure the newsgator thing to forward to my gmail forever. When I use that mail fetcher, it doesn't allow me to set the incoming mail server. So HOW am I supposed to set up Pop to allow this to go to my gmail?

[Aron]

Nice tips! I've also added Google Calendar and Reader to my GMail page via the Better GMail Firefox add on, the Remember The Milk plug-in for GMail for easy task management and To-Dos and manage three e-mail accounts by automatic filtering and archiving based on which account receives mail. But my GMail is a work in progress, as you just proved!

[Lyrics words]

Let's try it out

[Priyanka Shitole]

Would there be adds popping on left side?

[Sebastian]

As always one step ahead. i have to check out notify.me, I use zaptxt to get the most important RSS updates and twitter replies via IM. It really let's you get away from twitter and feeds much easier.

[pjb]

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/breaking-gmail-security-flaw-more-domains-get-stollen/

[Chris Herbert]

Steve,

This is very useful information and ideas. There's a lot here to try! Maybe too much but my advice is for folks to try a few of these productivity tips.

I've implemented the swipe file and created forwarding filters for specific actions such as "next action", "someday" and "maybe" tasks. I've mashed up your advice with the GTD methodology and it's making a big difference in productivity and it's kinda cool.

You are correct that the search capability in gmail is powerful. In fact I'm not really bookmarking stuff anymore. The swipefile now serves that purpose. Why? It's simple! I'm now using one integrated platform to store, retrieve and discover content I've put away for another day.

Your advice, in part, has enabled me to create an integrated communications, task and info. mgt. solution.

Thx!

[Julien]

Hey Steve, Feed free to try http://www.notifixio.us : we've got nice filtering features! and we support a lot of the main IM flavors!

[Internet Strategist]

Doesn't it ever concern you that Google already has so much of your information? Do you really want to make it so easy for them to accumulate more of it?

On another subject, does TypePad give you the option to allow comments without creating an account. Usually I just leave without commenting but I went ahead and created one so I could interact with you.

I am certain that requiring visitors to log in cuts down on comments especially if they don't use TypePad.

[Steve Rubel]

Re Google, sure that's a concern. But I trust them. David Carr at the Timeswrote about this recently.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/business/media/24carr.html

Re the commenting, you are right. Will look into that. Thanks!

[Steve Rubel]

I just checked. You should be able to comment without logging in.

[Internet Strategist]

Hi Steve. Thanks for the link to the NY Times article and yes, now I CAN comment without logging into TypePad.

You may be interested in the posts on privacy issues in my GrowMap blog. If you knew as much about what Google is doing with Google AdWords as I did you wouldn't trust them.

One thing that struck me years ago is that "don't be evil" mantra. It reminds me of those who "doth protest too much". http://www.goenglish.com/ProtestTooMuch.asp

I know some truly honest Mennonite people and the thought "don't be evil" would NEVER even enter their minds. Those who say "you can trust me" can rarely be trusted.