MediaFile

When Gmail goes down, it doesn’t just make news, it makes people angry. Small businesses running their email on Google’s servers complain publicly. People even talk about suing Google.

Google’s response is usually along these lines: When companies manage email on their own servers, those servers routinely go down. People get upset, sure. But it doesn’t make news. And nobody starts looking for a class-action attorney.

Apparently, that attitude of Google’s isn’t just a defensive PR spin. It’s an actual strategy. Google is adding a feature to the cloud-security technology it obtained when it bought Postini in 2007. Google is calling it Message Continuity, and it’s designed to let companies have access to emails, even when a company’s servers go down.

It’s a cunning idea, for a couple of reasons. When corporate email does go down, Gmail (and Google Apps) will look like an attractive alternative. But also, the move is a direct jab at Microsoft. It sends a subtle but effective message that Google is more reliable email service than Microsoft.

But there’s a catch for Google – if a Microsoft Exchange system goes offline at the same time that Gmail has one of its occasional outages, it will look even worse for Google. Promising you’ll be there when the other guy isn’t makes it that much more important that you follow through.

- Michael Fertik is the CEO and Founder of ReputationDefender, the online privacy and reputation company. The views expressed are his own. -

Facebook already knows a massive amount about you.  They know your age, what you look like, what you like, what you do for fun, where you go, what you eat, whom you know, whom you know well, whom you sleep with, who your best friends and family are, and, again, how old they are, what they like, and so on.

On top of that, Facebook has a well-known history of privacy breaches or at least snafus.  Publicly they seem committed to the notion that privacy is dead.  Their CEO and Founder has said as much.

Anyone with a Facebook account knows how addictive social networking can be. But a new report by analytics firm Nielsen illustrates just how central social networking has become in the Average Joe’s day-to-day life.

Nearly a quarter of Americans’ online time is now spent on social networks, according to Nielsen. And all that time spent on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is coming at the expense of traditionally popular Web activities, particularly email.

Email accounted for 8.3 percent of Americans’ online time in June, down from 11.5 percent a year earlier.

BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion is a victim of its own success. Having dominated the market for corporate e-mail devices for years, it is being forced to seek out growth in consumer markets, where, so far, it has had trouble differentiating its products.

Going mainstream has helped vastly expand its consumer base -- which now represents half of all BlackBerry subscribers. Fully 80 percent of its new subscribers now come from outside its traditional corporate base.

But that success is coming at a growing cost to the once lofty average selling price of its phones, the latest quarterly results show. Profits for its second fiscal quarter dipped 3.5 percent, amid weak subscriber growth. Product prices appear under pressure at both ends of its business, both among corporate users and with consumers.

How many times have you smacked your forehead in frustration after sending a bawdy e-mail to your boss that had been meant for a friend?

Until now, there had been no way to retrieve the missive. Even if the person’s on vacation, it’s only a matter of time before – as the saying goes – your nether region is grass. Enter Google’s Gmail Labs and “Undo Send”. If you enable the feature, every time you hit ‘send’, a button allowing you to ‘undo’ the send will pop up along with confirmation that the e-mail has been sent. You have five seconds to decide.

Etiquette hounds coach you to leave the “to” blank while you write an e-mail (especially if it’s a subject you feel strongly about) and not forward an e-mail without permission. As author and business consultant Tim Sanders says, “you never need to send an e-mail that’s regrettable.” But it happens all the time.

Google’s at it again.

The Web search leader edged into Skype’s territory at on Tuesday with a feature that allows multitasking Gmail users to video chat, IM and email all at the same time.

Gmail and Google App subscribers can now gossip with friends or coworkers on a high-quality video screen and simultaneously instant message them in a Google Chat box.  The video screen can be popped out of the chat box and moved around a user’s computer screen.

Check out this YouTube video with Google engineer Serge Lachapelle to see how it works. A team of Googlers in Seattle, Sweden and Silicon Valley collaborated on the new app, which is available for both PC and Mac users.

“Beer goggles” can make you do things you may later deeply regret but Gmail hopes its new “Mail Goggles” will ensure that sending embarassing emails isn’t one of them.

The feature, rolled out this week by Google, requires users to solve a few timed math problems after they click the “send” button, to verify they are “in the right state of mind” to send that late-night missive.

In its default setting, Mail Goggles is active only late on weekend nights “as that is the time you’re most likely to need it,” but can be activated at other times as well, Gmail engineer Jon Perlow said in a posting on the Official Gmail Blog.