In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There's no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there's definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We're beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?

Over on The Next Web, blogger Alex Wilhelm thinks the increased storage space hints at Google's future plans with their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. We have to admit, the same thought occurred to us as well. After all, netbooks don't typically have the same hard disk space as their larger, less totable counterparts. However, that's not always the case these days given the new middle-of-the-road offerings like the HP Mini 311, for example, which falls somewhere between an ultra-portable netbook and full-sized notebook with its 350 GB hard drive option.

But Alex has a point: by providing this type of cloud storage solution, netbooks can remain basic machines which are smaller and cost less. That would pave the way for the Google Chrome OS line of netbooks to be even more affordable devices than what's on the market today since they wouldn't need to come equipped with large hard drives.

Obviously, an OS-integrated cloud storage system of this nature would be a natural fit for Google's cloud operating system designed specifically for netbooks. And yet, it still seems to be an incomplete offering at this time.

But Still So Limited!

As much as we want to believe that the new changes are a sign of Google's plans for Chrome OS, it's just as possible that they're nothing more than the great discounts they appear to be. There's nothing all that new being introduced here - just better rates and more available space.

Sadly, the core storage offering itself is unchanged. It's still very limited, only encompassing Gmail and Picasa photos. What about the rest of our files - like the ones stored in Google Docs? What about our music and movie collections? What about the hundred or so of home videos we can't bear to delete from our hard drives? Google has no centralized solution for any of this yet. And many are beginning to wonder if they ever will.

In the tech community, there have been rumors about an all-encompassing online storage service called GDrive for years on end now, and yet, nothing has ever come of it. According to speculation (and wishful thinking), the supposed system would allow for the upload of all types of files and would tie together all of Google's services.

In our imaginations, we envision a dashboard that links us to our online Google Docs, our photos, our Gmail, our Google Sites, and our multimedia content. The GDrive of our dreams would be accessible from any computer, keeping in sync all our user data, preferences, and settings. You can see a hint of how this sync could work with the way the Google Chrome web browser stores your favorites. Your bookmarked sites are now available in the browser no matter what PC you use while a backup copy sits in Google Docs. GDrive should do the same, but not just for web browser favorites - for everything. That would be the final step for making a cloud OS a reality.

It's almost strange at this point that Google hasn't released something of the sort yet. In fact, they've let Microsoft beat them to the punch in this instance courtesy of Microsoft's SkyDrive service which launched back in early 2008. SkyDrive offers a free 25 GB of online storage for your files and also serves as the central repository for Windows Live Photos as well as the documents created via the new Office Web Applications service, Microsoft's challenge to Google Docs. But where's Google's answer to this? When will it come? Will it ever?

Perhaps the company is waiting for the release of Google Chrome OS to dazzle us with some sort of revamped interface for a game-changing cloud computing operating system. Or perhaps the company is just doing what it does best: offering solutions that are simply good enough.

Users are required to give TrueSwitch (through a Gmail interface) the username and password for the old account, then import can take a few hours or days. I pulled in contacts from an old Hotmail account and am now waiting to have them arrive in my Gmail contacts list.

Dear Internet, please offer features like this at every website. The ability to pull in contacts and data from one service provider to another is the dream of data portability. It enables users to try new services, prevents them from being locked-in to old ones, promotes competition between service providers and generally makes the world a better place.

Not all Gmail users can see the new Import feature but over the next few weeks that will probably change.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

In yesterday's attack, the list of comprised Hotmail accounts were limited to those where the usernames started with the letter "A" or "B." However, that seemed to imply that the posted portion might actually be a part of a bigger list containing even more login/password combinations. At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company determined "this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts." Instead, claimed the spokesperson, those users whose credentials were revealed were likely to be victims of an online phishing attack where a third-party website was involved.

Phishing attacks are typically carried out via email messages where the attacker tricks the recipient into revealing their username and password by pretending to be some sort of trustworthy entity such as the user's bank, IT administrator, a popular website, or an online service. In the case of the stolen Hotmail passwords, it's possible that the attacker sent emails which claimed to be from the end user's email provider. If the user then followed the link contained within the malicious email, they would have ended up not on the actual email provider's site, but on a third-party site whose sole purpose was to capture their username and password when entered.

Beyond Hotmail: More Webmail Providers Affected

According to a story in today's BBC News, the most recent list of compromised accounts, which includes login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast users, contains some accounts that appear to be old, unused, or fake. However, many others listed are, in fact, genuine.

There's no way to be sure at this point that the new list is a part of the same phishing attack as yesterday's or if it's a new and separate scam.

The website where the accounts were posted - pastebin.com - is now "down for maintenance." Visitors to the site today will receive a message that reads:

Pastebin.com is getting an unprecedented amount of traffic due to a news story in which some leaked Hotmail passwords have been pasted on this site

Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable.

Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications

Paul Dixon

Regardless of whether or not you think your account was compromised, today would be a good day to change the password on whichever webmail service you currently use. Better safe than sorry!

This new feature is not just a simple productivity enhancement or advertisement. The icons are there to indicate which messages include "enhanced content" - real-time updates within the body of the email messages, from companies sending the emails.

Apparently this feature has been in the works for some time, at least according to the timestamp on the Google Help explanation about "enhanced content," which shows its last update was in July of this year. The explanation reads:

If you're subscribed to receive email from certain senders, the messages you receive from them will be enhanced with an interactive gadget that has up-to-date content from their website (you'll also see an icon in your inbox identifying these messages).

For example, if you receive a Pregnancy Bulletin newsletter from Babycenter, you'll be able to view up-to-date content, including the baby name of the day, and browse though the current top 100 baby names within the message. Aside from the convenience of being able to interact with certain websites from inside Gmail, the branded content will help identify that your messages are legitimate and not spoofed (we'll only show branded content when the sender authenticates their mail). We're currently testing this with a small number of senders and will decide whether to make it widely available based on user and partner feedback.

A Marketer's Dream

Real-time content updates within Gmail messages sound like a great idea as long as it doesn't slow down the loading of the message, replying, forwarding and the like. Just imagine the possibilities! In the enhanced Netflix emails, for example, you not only view your recent recommendations - you can actually add them to your queue right from within the message itself.

This sort of interactivity is sure to be an email marketer's dream as it allows for whole new levels of user engagement with the brand. Instead of simply dismissing the email with a click of the "delete" button, recipients might find themselves actually taking the time to read through what were once thought of as "throwaway" messages. In this information-overloaded era where out-of-control inboxes have many email users declaring email bankruptcy, doing mass deletes, and filtering all non-personal email to other folders, any extra incentive to not delete or ignore an email is a feature which marketers are sure to take notice of.

But a little in-email interactivity may only be scratching the surface of what this enhanced content makes possible. What could come next? Perhaps you'll soon be able to make purchases without ever leaving the confines of your inbox? As McGee writes in his post - wait until Amazon gets on board with that idea - our wallets are sure to take a beating!

Google, of course, already offered this feature for Android users and Blackberry devices. For iPhone users - and especially for business users - this is a big deal, however, as it finally allows Google to offer a feature that Yahoo Mail users were able to enjoy from the day the iPhone launched. It's also worth noting that other services like Nuevasync have offered iPhone users a way to route around this problem for a while already.

It's important to note that the iPhone only offers support for a single Exchange account, so you can't use this new feature to push mail from both a personal and a business account at the same time, for example.

Close-up screenshot showing a bit more detail of ad placement.

Note: When I re-entered the email thread, the ad above no longer displayed inside the thread. So I've not been able to re-create this scenario.

Google has reportedly sent a letter to a high-profile Caribbean investigative website called The TCI Journal saying it will supply the IP addresses used to access the Journal's primary GMail account unless the Journal supplies a legal counter-motion within the next two weeks. A libel suit filed against the Journal in Santa Clara, California Superior Court concerns its reporting of government corruption in the Turks & Caicos Islands.

This case is just the latest to be followed closely, reported on and even participated in by the controversial public interest document-exposure organization Wikileaks, a website where a staff of journalists and lawyers vet sensitive documents submitted by anonymous independent sources. The status of the case was summarized tonight by Julian Assange, Investigations Editor at Wikileaks.

A property developer discussed at length in the Journal's documentation of corruption and in the official UK government inquiry report is now suing the journal for libel.

Google said the following in a letter to the TCI Journal last week, as posted on Wikileaks and sent to us by the Journal:

To comply with the law, unless you provide us with a copy of a motion to
quash the subpoena (or other formal objection filed in court) via email at
legal-support@google.com by 5pm Pacific Time on September 16, 2009, Google
will assume you do not have an objection to production of the requested
information and may provide responsive documents on this date.

Google has not yet responded to our inquiry asking what the company might do once the TCI Journal does send a motion to quash the subpoena, which we presume it will do. Hiring lawyers in California will likely be an onerous task for a volunteer-run website from a tiny Caribbean island. Journal editors tell us that they hope Google will decide to help them fight the case on 1st amendment grounds.

Update: A Google spokesperson sent us the following response to our inquiry.

"When Google receives legal process, such as court orders and subpoenas, where possible we promptly provide notice to users to allow them to object to those requests for information. Users may raise any and all objections they feel are relevant, including First Amendment arguments. In addition, we are still evaluating all our legal options regarding this particular request."

In some ways, this case is reminiscent of Yahoo's providing user account information in 2005 to the Chinese government for journalist Shi Tao's Yahoo Mail account. Tao allegedly summarized a government order directing media organizations in China to downplay the upcoming 15th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for "illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities."

To Get the Most Out of the App, Set Up a New Gmail Account

It is important to note that while the app is extremely easy to use, it is also somewhat limited. You can't, for example, set up filters so that only certain emails will be pushed to the phone.

To bypass this limitation, we recommend that you set up an additional Gmail account and forward all the messages you want to be pushed to the iPhone to this account. This way, you can use Gmail's own filters to manage which messages you want to be notified of. As the app itself doesn't actually take you to the email client and works completely independent of the email accounts you have set up on your phone, it really doesn't matter which email account it checks.

Limitations: Only One Account, No Quiet Time

The app also supports only one email account, making it even more of a necessity to open up a separate email account just for push notifications.

Sadly, the developers didn't include a 'quiet time' setting, so messages will be pushed to the phone at all times.

Of course, Apple should simply include these notifications in the iPhone by default. However, for the time being, GPush is the best alternative to built-in email notifications, and given that it costs only $0.99, it's hard to say no to such a useful application that will surely be updated with new features over time.

Surprisingly, despite Google's success in online and web advertising, one of the company's key ad vehicles is the billboard. The company has reserved 4 billboards in major US cities and will run a new Google App-related message each day for a month. The campaign is expected to celebrate the benefits of Gmail spam protection, filters, high storage limits, email threads, Google chat, Google Docs and of course, what the company has always done well, search.

In an effort to rally advocates, the company has set up a Google Apps "Spread the Word" site where enthusiasts download marketing collateral and promote Google Apps within the workplace. The site slogan is, "Join the movement. Spread the word. Go Google." The page is meant to help employees convince their IT administrators to switch to Google Apps, but I can't help thinking this campaign could potentially backfire.

While Google Apps and Firefox share a common enemy in Microsoft, the project targets are completely different. Firefox enthusiasts advocate on behalf of the company directly to their friends and family. Meanwhile Google Apps enthusiasts are asked to influence the very people who are already more qualified to make IT-related infrastructural decisions. In other words, if you've ever seen a non-technical employee tell an IT administrator how to do his/her job, the outcome probably wasn't pretty. Nevertheless, because Google's services are extremely user-friendly, some great enterprise and business-level endorsements might better influence a workplace service transition. One testimonial from Vivek Kundra is particularly glowing.

Currently serving as the United States Chief Information Officer, Kundra is responsible for the country's e-government and information technology. In 2008, as the CTO of the District of Columbia, he endorsed Google Apps as a cost-effective, scalable and easy-to-use collaboration platform. He deployed the service across the district's 86 agencies to help its police officers, fire fighters and public servants. Using a number of Google applications including Google Earth, maps, documents and email, Kundra has been celebrated for bringing efficiency and cloud-based infrastructure to the District of Columbia. His work earned him a spot as a key advisor on President Obama's transition committee on technology issues and from there he was appointed the federal CIO.

Gmail Labs already has a feature that allows users to view multiple inboxes at the same time, so this new feature could potentially be built on top of this, with an inbox with high-priority messages at the top and the rest of the messages at the bottom.

Is this a Useful Way to Organize Mail?

Whether this is necessarily a better way to organize mail is a different question. After all, there is also a lot of implicit information in when a message was sent. That said, though, a lot of us have hundreds or even thousands of unread messages (at least those of us that haven't become a slave to the inbox zero philosophy), so it will be interesting to see if this new feature (if indeed it is real) will be able to help us to organize our dysfunctional inboxes.

Note: we searched the Gmail code for the references to the 'Magic Inbox' ourselves and came away empty-handed. Chances are, that Google is only testing this for a small number of users right now.

As with any non-human inter-linguistic interpretations, the messages suffer in translation. But thanks to this new feature, you'll be able to get the gist of the Cyrillic text in your spam folder with just the click of a text link.

A small step, perhaps, if the screenshots below are to serve as evidence:

All in all, not the Labs' most impressive offering to date; nevertheless, it'll save us all a cut-and-paste to a free online translator.

Here is the context. This relates to the big battle between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.

• There are 21 million BlackBerry users in 150 countries. Many are senior business people.
• Google is signing up 3,000 business users to Google Apps every day.
• Business guys usually live either on their Blackberry or in Outlook.
• Google wants those business guys to lose that last habit and to live in Gmail.
• Once somebody lives in Gmail, it is relatively easy to gradually entice them into other Google apps.

Key Features of the Apps Connector

1. Updates: Mail is pushed to your device.
2. Reading: Messages read on your BlackBerry show up as "Read" in Gmail, and vice versa.
3. Deleting: Messages deleted on your BlackBerry are deleted in Gmail, and vice versa.
4. Contacts: Synced between your BlackBerry and Gmail.
5. Folder/Labels: Select which folders and labels to sync.
6. Calendar: This feature is a one-way sync from Google Apps to your BlackBerry device.
7. Device management: Use standard BES Server features to enforce IT policy, push applications, remote wipe devices, etc.

What's Old and What's New

What do most users who have both Gmail and BlackBerry do today? They forward Gmail to their BlackBerry. That's okay, but they end up managing two inboxes, which is why the second and third features, while simple-sounding, are actually pretty critical to adoption:

2. Reading: Messages read on your BlackBerry show up as "Read" in Gmail, and vice versa.

3. Deleting: Messages deleted on your BlackBerry are deleted in Gmail, and vice versa.

Some early adopters have found ways around this issue, but Google had better make it super-simple if it is going to get mass adoption.

After testing, we can confirm that this works as advertised.

What's Still Missing?

As with many of these kinds of announcements, when you see what is possible, you end up wanting more, and the list of requests can be endless. But here are two features we wish for that do not seem like they would be too hard for Google to deliver. So, we asked Raju Gulabani, Product Management Director of Google Apps, to comment on these two:

1. Two-way calendar sync. Today, Google allows syncing from Google Calendar to BlackBerry. This may be useful to somebody who lives at their desk and is mobile only very occasionally. But for people who live outside of the office, this does not cut it. We want to be able to input data into our BlackBerry calendars when we're talking to someone or during those "time-fillers" such as waiting at an airport or in a Starbucks line. The BlackBerry calendar thus becomes our primary calendar. So two-way sync is essential if we are to rely on Google Calendars back at the office.

Raju was willing to confirm that this was a high priority and would be available in the second half of this year.

2. Tasks. Managing task lists is another classic "time-filler." If we could manage these via a native BlackBerry interface rather than having to go to a Google website, we could be mobile and connected to colleagues on multiple projects.

Raju was only willing to confirm that Google understood this usage case, but was not able to forecast a timeline for delivery.

Digging Below the Covers

We had four questions for Google:

1. Does this require Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES)? Yes, you need BES, but not the Exchange Server.
2. Does this use IMAP? No, it uses a "native" synchronization protocol.
3. Does this use Gears? No, it uses a "native" synchronization protocol.

What does "native" synchronization protocol mean for the market? Native in this context means proprietary. Basically, it means that this synchronization is unavailable to any other webmail service provider.

When Can You Get This?

This is currently in customer beta testing and will be launching in the Google Apps Premier and Education Edition (at no additional charge) in July 2009.

A simple little search box will appear right there in your sidebar. But that's not even the awesome part. The range of tricks you can play with the search results is astounding.

When you search, the results pop up in a Google Talk-like window. If you click on the links, results open in a separate window or tab.

But then there's the REALLY cool part. You can click a drop-down menu next to the result and start to really have fun. If you're hanging out in your inbox, you only see the menu option to send the result to someone via email. If you're viewing an email, the drop-down menu offers to let you reply with the result. If you're writing a new email, you can choose to paste the URL, paste the result, or send the whole thing in an email. And if you're using Google Talk, the menu further allows you to send the result and URL via chat to any of the people with whom you may be chatting.

So, you no longer have to toggle between your favorite email and your favorite search engine. Google's made it all into one tasty info-sharing sandwich. Essentially, what you're doing here is lightning-fast social link-sharing via Gmail and Google Talk.

Can you imagine how much smarter this is going to make you look? If you can master this simple tool, you'll be the most insufferable know-it-all in your crew. I think we can safely label Gmail with added Google Search power as Tech That Will Get You Laid.

P.S. Don't make fun of my Gmail theme. Please, have a little mercy. I'm new here.