In Traction

Lode pointed me at a Tweakers.net article (Dutch) explaining that Gmail now supports access through IMAP and has more storage (4.3 Gigabytes). Downloadsquad also has an article about it.

This is great news. I have switched to using Gmail for all my mail (work and personal) for about half a year now, and never looked back. I especially like having access to my mail in the way I organize it from every computer and am an avid user of Gmail’s labels to tag my messages (e.g. Waiting, Later, etc.). Being able to use these features from within a desktop client makes the experience even better.

Thanks Greg

Now I only have to wait until it’s enabled for my account.

Update: IMAP support is now also featured on the Official Gmail Blog.

After looking into the preferences of Google Scholar, I found out that it’s possible to let it search our university’s public library (providing access to Scientific American, Springer LNCS, etc.). I just had to enter “Hasselt University”, and could add it as a library link. Another useful option is to have it provide links to BibTeX citations.

Google opened up it’s Google Talk service. This means you can talk to any other IM service from the Google Talk service using the XMPP protocol (also known as Jabber).

While Google already used the XMPP protocol for Google Talk, there was no communication possible between Google Talk users and other Jabber users. Until now.

Since millions of people have a GMail account, this means there are now also millions more Jabber users. This could really push the adoption of XMPP, and hopefully paves the way for instant messaging through open, non-proprietary and standardized protocols.