A few weeks ago I took control over my email.  Not only did I clean out my inboxes, but I also converted everything over to Gmail.  Why would I do this?

1. Always online and availabe to me.
2. Doesn’t take up space on my webserver.
3. The labeling system is fantastic.  I didn’t really know this until I really started using it.
4. Integrated nicely with Mail.app or other email applications like Thunderbird and Outlook.
5. I can send and receive email from multiple accounts via one Gmail account.
6. iPhone ready.
7. Email is up even if website is down.

Since I’ve made the switch from Thunderbird to Entourage 2008, one of my missing features is the ability to sync with Google calendar.

I tried using Plaxo, but they sync to your main Google calendar and not any others. This may work well if you only have one Google calendar to sync with, but that wasn’t my case.

I thought about some of the tools like Spanning Sync and gSync but Spanning says it doesn’t work right with Entourage and gSync doesn’t say anything. You’d think that since Entourage syncs with iCal, that it wouldn’t be that hard.

It shouldn’t bother me, and it really doesn’t, but I’ve been #3 in Google for Thomas McMahon for years now. I’m being beat out by a dead guy; twice.

Granted, I think that even being dead, he’s got better link love. He’s a Harvard grad that has written eighty scientific papers, two scientific books, had six inventions patented, and published three novels. Yea, well I’ve created like eight Firefox themes.

If you’d like to help me beat out Thomas McMahon (Harvard guy) in Google searches, link back to this post (or www.twistermc.com) with ‘Thomas McMahon’ as your link text. If you want to vote for the other guy, well that’s just rude.

A new version of Gmail is available. The only thing different I can see is a robust address book.

It also warns users if they have Firebug enabled. Yikes!

Have you seen any other improvements or changes?

Check your Gmail account now and you’ll know if your in the new version if in the upper right corner, after settings, there is a link that say “Old Version.” Clicking it will take you back to the old version and a “New Version” link will appear.

I’m still hunting for new more features.

The new version of GA? has been released. The Google Analytics detector now re-checks each page as you switch between tabs to ensure the status bar icon is kept up to date. This was a big enhancement for me as I’ve always got multiple tabs open.

However, with advancements comes a few more bug reports.

1. GA? doesn’t update the status bar icon when switching between windows . Actually this may be a non issue. I’m still thinking that one over.

Google Analytics is a great program, but add in Adobe AIR and it becomes even better with the Google Analytics Reporting Suite module. It’s a stand alone application that gives you direct access into your Google Analytics account with a few great features thrown in.

The first thing I love is the ability to have multiple profiles.

I have a handful of profiles and where as switching between each one isn’t to difficult in Google Analytics, it is a bit tedious. With Google Analytics Reporting Suite, I can save profiles (aka bookmarks) for each account I want to access. Then I just double click and I’m in. No more having to load the GA website, enter a password, choose a profile then a site and then getting to the stats. This is just so much simpler.

YouTube has long been the goto place to find anything you missed from TV, or just to watch things you’d never see on TV. However, lately, it just seems like it’s being spammed more and more.

In this example, I searched for Carrie Underwood and got a bit of spam instead.

Since YouTube is owned by Google, you’d think they could detect this. Tons of keywords strung together should be pretty easy to detect. Or what about noticing that a video is tagged with nude or porn but it’s not marked as adult? How hard would it be to detect that? Or what about videos that have the same title, same description, same running time and that were uploaded at the same time? Can we say duplicate content? It seems Google’s SEO rules are not in play at YouTube.

Apple’s Webkit is being built into all sort of Mac applications, however they all seem to share data and I don’t feel they should.

As an example, if you log into your Google account in Safari, Shiira is also logged in. And it doesn’t stop there. GCal, CSSEdit and Journler all use webkit too so you are automatically logged into your Google account.

This isn’t just a Google thing either. Works with Yahoo mail, Wordpress blogs and any site that has a checkbox for “remember me.”

I’m working on catching up on all my emails and feed reading since my SES San Jose trip. It was a lot of fun and educational too.

Here are some visuals:

Refreshments

Networking

Partying at the Google Dance at Google’s Offices

Inside the Googleplex looking for ranking insider tips or Matt Cutts.

Stalking Matt Cutts.

Totally BFF with Matt Cutts now.*

TopRank Blogging Team, minus the boss.

The boss getting interviewed by NBC.

Many more photos at the TopRank Flickr account and session recaps at the Online Marketing Blog.

To get the best results out of Google Analytics, you need to ensure it’s installed on each page of a website. To automatically check for you, I’ve created a Firefox extension to do all the work.

GA? will put a little icon in the status bar of your Firefox web browser. It will then check each page you load to to see if it has Google Analytics installed. If so, it’ll show a colored bar chart. If Google Analytics doesn’t appear to be installed, it’ll show a gray bar chart.