Google Open Sources reMail

A couple weeks ago, Google acquired reMail, a popular iPhone app, and pulled it from Apple's App Store. Now, Google has made it open source.

"After looking at a number of options to make reMail available in some form, we decided to open source the code, which is now available on Google Code as remail-iphone under the Apache 2.0 License," Google Communications tells WebProNews.

reMail was created by a Gabor Cselle, who used to work as a software engineer on Gmail. On the reMail blog, Cselle says, "As someone who is passionate about mobile email, my hope is that developers interested in making email-related apps can use reMail code as a starting point. Part of the reason email apps are hard is because you have to pay the tax of figuring out how to download email via IMAP, parse MIME messages, handle attachments, and store data. reMail has already solved these problems. If you have a great mobile email idea, I hope you will find reMail's source code helpful in your quest."

Cselle has documented the source code so developers can quickly start on any ideas they have. "If you like reMail and want to improve it, I have also listed some potential projects with implementation tips," he says. "Most of these projects are features that users have requested in the past. I encourage you to contribute improvements back to the project. I've also created the group remail-iphone on Google Groups, which is a great place to ask questions."

This page will tell you how to build using the code, let you see some project ideas, and show you how the datastore and UI work.

Google Voice Gets New Free VoIP Service

Earlier this week, reports surfaced indicating that Google had bought Gizmo5, a VoIP firm. The news came just on the heels of Google's AdMob acquisition. Google has now officially announced that it has indeed acquired Gizmo5.

"While we don't have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience," Google says. "Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number."



"We've acquired a number of small companies over the past five years, and the people and technology that have come to Google from other places have contributed in many ways, large and small, to all kinds of Google products," the company adds. "Since the GrandCentral team joined Google in 2007, they've done incredible things with Google's technology and resources to launch and improve Google Voice."

In a previous report, Doug Caverly of WebProNews noted that Gizmo5 is a good fit for Google. For one, Gizmo5 is free, and Google offers a great deal of free services as it is. It is also available in nine languages, and Google is frequently expanding its reach in this regard with most of its products.

A couple weeks ago Google announced that Google Voice users can now use their own existing mobile numbers. They no longer have to have a separate Google number. This should be a great way to attract new users. However, at this point, Google Voice is still only available on an invitation basis.
 

Have You Read This?

> Report Indicates Google Bought Gizmo5

> You Don't Need a Google Number to Use Google Voice

> AT&T Goes On The Offensive Against Google Voice

Where the Traffic Went in August

comScore Media Metrix released its top 50 web properties list for August this week, and found that educational sites and humor sites were quite popular for the month. Home sites also saw some significant gains.

"August is back-to-school season for students, and many turned to the Web to prepare for the upcoming school year," said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. "Others made use of their last days of summer pursuing leisure activities online, including visiting humor sites and tending to their homes and gardens."

Unsurprisingly, Google sites led the charge as the most visited property in August. They got 161 million visitors. This was followed by Yahoo sites with 158 million, and Microsoft with 130 million. Facebook remained at number 5, it's ranking from the previous month, with 92 million visitors. This was up 5% from July. I think Facebook can live with that considering they announced the 300 million user milestone a couple weeks ago.

As far as ad focus, AOL Advertising (renamed from Platform-A) led the August Ad focus ranking at 91% of all Americans online. Yahoo Network ranked second at 88%, and Google moved up to number 3 reaching 84%.

Here's a look at the charts:



*Ranking based on the top 250 properties in August 2009. Excludes entities whose growth was primarily due to implementation of Media Metrix 360 hybrid audience measurement.

Reach % denotes the percentage of the total Internet population that viewed a particular entity at least once in August. For instance, Yahoo! Sites was seen by 88 percent of the nearly 197 million Internet users in August. * Entity has assigned some portion of traffic to other syndicated entities. ** Denotes an advertising network.

Google to Start Crawling Google Docs Documents

Google has quietly announced that Google Docs documents that are published will soon be crawlable. This means if you have published documents as web pages, or used the publish/embed option for a document, and it has been linked to on the web, it can be indexed by Google and other search engines.

"This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people," says Google Employee "Marie F," on the Google Docs Help Forum.

The change does not apply to documents that are set to "allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)." Any concerned users, who do not wish for their published documents to be indexed can un-publish them by:

- going to the "share tab"

- For documents and spreadsheets, choosing "publish as web page". For presentations choosing "publish/embed"

- Clicking the button that says "stop publishing".

Google notes that Google Apps users may find that they're unable publish documents to the world if the admin of the domain has disallowed publishing outside the domain.

The company said they will be launching the change in a couple weeks. Keep an eye on the help forum for an update on when the change goes live.

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