Google’s new social media service Google Buzz will show up in your Gmail account this week. Here’s how to customize and use Buzz–or opt out of its inbox-cluttering updates completely.

Add Your Sites to Buzz

Once Buzz becomes available in your Gmail account, click on the Buzz link below the Inbox on Gmail’s sidebar to check it out. You’ll see a “Welcome to Buzz” message with a list of all the people Buzz has you automatically following (based on who you email the most).

Above the Buzz posting box, next to your name, click the “# connected sites” link to see and configure which of your social media streams get piped into Buzz, and add more. By default your menu of potential connected sites includes your Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader activity, Google chat status, Flickr photos, Blogspot blog, and Twitter feed.

However, some folks are seeing even more options, including Tumblr and FriendFeed. If those are in your Google Profile when you set up Buzz, you’ll see them in your list of connected sites. (Hint: when you add them to your GProfile, tick the “This is a profile page about me” checkbox.) For the more technically-minded, Google has published instructions on how to connect external sites to Google Buzz.

Post Buzz Only Certain People Can See

You can use Buzz like you would Google Reader–to just keep up with your friends’ social network streams from around the web. But you can also post status updates via Buzz, and limit who can see those updates. From the Buzz posting text area (which looks a whole lot like Twitter’s), add your text, links, photos, or videos, and from the drop-down choose Private to limit access to that post. Check off the Contacts groups who are allowed to see the update.

Get a Permalink to Specific Buzz

Every Buzz post and its ensuing comment thread is a web page in and of itself. To get a link to that page to IM, email, or link from another web page, click on the down-arrow to the right of a Buzz post and select “Link to this buzz.” Here’s a Buzz post I published this morning.

Send Buzz via @ Replies

If email is just too old-fashioned for you, send someone a Buzz update by using Twitter-style @ replies. Start a new Buzz post with the @ sign, and an auto-complete drop-down of your Contacts will appear. Choose the recipient, and that Buzz update will appear in your contact’s inbox (assuming he or she has Buzz enabled).

Post Buzz via Email

You can also post a Buzz update via email. From your Buzz-enabled Gmail account, send a message to buzz@gmail.com to post to Buzz. You can send image attachments (like via your cameraphone) to Buzz this way as well.

Silence Chatty Buzz Posts

With Buzz turned on in your Gmail account, comments on all the buzz you post or comment on automatically shows up in your Gmail inbox as new mail in an email conversation. If a particular thread gets too chatty and annoying, use Gmail’s Mute feature to silence it. From the “More Actions” menu in Gmail, choose “Mute”; if you have keyboard shortcuts enabled, you can tap the “M” key to mute an individual thread. You can mute a post from within Buzz, too: from the Comment drop-down, choose “Mute this post.”

Buzzkill: Turn off Buzz Completely

If you don’t want to get Buzz updates in your inbox or have access to the Buzz link in the Gmail sidebar, there’s a kill switch. At the bottom of your Gmail account, next to the “turn on/off chat” link, there is a “turn off buzz” link. Click it to opt out of Buzz updates and hide the Buzz link permanently.

If you want to be able to browse Buzz, but not get updates in your inbox, create a Gmail filter that makes Buzz updates skip the inbox automatically. In Gmail, click on the “Create a filter” link, and in the “Has the words:” field enter label:buzz. Click Next Step (and ignore Gmail’s warning about filtering labels), then choose “Skip the inbox” as the filter action, and save.

Buzz Mobile

Finally, you can ditch Foursquare or Gowalla on your mobile phone and go totally Google by visiting buzz.google.com on your iPhone or Android device. From the location-aware Web app, you can post updates that include where you are, and see buzz posted from nearby locations, too.

In addition to iPhone and Android users, Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 folks can get Buzz on Google Maps; visit m.google.com/maps on your mobile phone to enable the Buzz Mapslayer.

From: FastCompany

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• Tasks, onto your phone and out of Labs
• An improved mobile experience, including push Gmail and a complete redesign
• Four new themes to make Gmail sparkle
• Offline Gmail and its graduation from Labs
• Drag and drop labels
• More fast previews, including PowerPoint and TIFF
• Multi-select attachments for faster, smoother file sharing
• A way to eliminate duplicate contacts with a single button
• More storage for less moolah
• Lots of new labs experiments, including undo send, automatic message translation, and “Got the wrong bob?“

On behalf of the entire Gmail team, happy holidays! See you next year.

From: Gmail Blog

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Inbox preview

Whenever I open up my inbox at work, I’m never surprised to find several new messages waiting to be read. The same thing can’t always be said about my personal Gmail account. Sometimes I end up checking my mail only to find nothing new there.

No big deal, really. But now imagine that you access Gmail on a super slow connection from a remote place in Ethopia where it might take minutes to completely load your inbox. The disappointment is larger when you find out that there is nothing new to read and you could have saved all that time.

To ease this pain a bit, we created a new feature in Gmail Labs called Inbox Preview. While Gmail is loading, a simple, static preview of your inbox with your ten most recent messages is displayed. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and if you’re on a slow connection you’ll know from the start if it’s worth the wait.

Automatic message translation

Back in the early days of human existence, before language had fully developed, our caveman ancestors probably did a lot of grunting. Language, and thus life, were pretty simple: watch out for that saber-toothed tiger (“Blorg! AIYA!!!”); stop riding the wooly mammoth and help me pick some berries (“Argh. Zagle zorg!”); man, it’s cold in this Ice Age (“Brrrr.”).

Somewhere along the line, all those grunts diverged into thousands of distinct languages, and life became both richer and more complicated. And for the last few eons or so, we’ve struggled to communicate in a multilingual world. Which brings us to today. Since the heart and soul of Gmail is about helping people communicate, I’m proud to announce the integration of Google’s automatic translation technology directly into Gmail.

Simply enable “Message Translation” from the Labs tab under Settings, and when you receive an email in a language other than your own, Gmail will help you translate it into a language you can understand. In one click.

If all parties are using Gmail, you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them. It’s not quite the universal translators we’re so fond of from science fiction, but thanks to Google Translate, it’s an exciting step in the right direction. I use this feature everyday to help me work with teammates around the globe (they think my Japanese is much better than it really is…shhhh!).

Whether you’re reading a family update from inlaws on the other side of the world, working with a multinational team, or just trying to bring about world peace, don’t worry, Gmail’s got your back.

Till next time, adiós, またね, tchau, and 再見!

Import your mail and contacts from other accounts

Gmail users can be a passionate bunch. Many of us have, at one time or another, encouraged or cajoled friends and family to join us @gmail.com. But switching email accounts can be pretty painful. It’s like getting out of a relationship. You have so much baggage — years of emails and contacts, memories of past Christmases and Valentine’s Days — so the easier your new email account can make it, the better. My wife flirted with the idea for two years before she finally took the plunge with Gmail. The reason she finally made the switch might also convince your friends that it’s a good time to adopt a shiny new Gmail address.

Gmail now migrates email and contacts from other email providers, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, and many more. It’s much easier to make the transition now that you can bring along all your old email and contacts. You can even have your messages forwarded from your old account for 30 days, giving you time to take Gmail for a test drive while you make up your mind.

This new feature is available in all newly-created Gmail accounts, and it is slowly being rolled out to all existing accounts. It’ll take longer than the few hours or days that most Gmail features take to get out to everyone. You’ll know it’s on for your account when you see the Accounts and Import tab (formerly just called Accounts) under Settings. Sorry, businesses and schools using Google Apps won’t see these new migration options.

Everyone can still use POP3 mail fetching and upload your contacts in a CSV file, but this new way is much simpler for basic imports. And we like it when you can access and move your data the way you want — it’s been easy to auto-forward all your Gmail messages to any other service, and now it’s a little easier to go the other direction too.

Extra emoticons

For a short period of time after launching emoticons for mail, we believed we had successfully captured the entirety of human expression in 19 faces (we’re still debating whether the robot face counts), important representatives of the animal kingdom such as and , emoticons for both love () and heartbreak (), and, well, a pile of .

But soon a growing feeling of dread overcame the group . How could we have included a but not a cat? What if I want wine rather than ?

And thus was born a new Labs feature: extra emoji, the colorfully animated brainchild of our team in Japan. Simply go to the Labs tab under Settings, enable “Extra Emoji,” and have that glass of you’ve been dreaming about. Ask your in-laws about the fluffiness factor of their pet . Become a meteorologist and start predicting . Dance like you mean it . Then let us know what you think.

(If you’re wondering how we had time to create another couple hundred emoticons when we’re busy doing important stuff like rewriting Gmail for mobile and making Gmail work offline, the answer is: we didn’t. All of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission. Thanks guys!)

Google Search directly into GMail

I used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I’d have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I’d have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I’d get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I’d have to go through it all again when I remembered what I’d been doing.

With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs, my problem is solved. When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you’ll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:

Type your search in, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results.

You can click on a search result and it’ll open up in another window (or another tab) so you can make sure it’s what you’re looking for. Once you’re sure it’s a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result.

What’s in the menu depends on what you’re doing in Gmail:

• If you’re reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
• If you’re writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
• If you’re chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
• You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.

If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you’re not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you’re composing (that’s ⌘ + g for Mac users).

Like all things in Gmail Labs, we’re going to be tinkering with it, so let us know what you think.

Oh, and one other thing: with all the stuff we’ve been adding to Gmail Labs lately, the left side of your account might be getting crowded. A lot of the people who’ve been playing with this new feature have found it useful to turn on “Navbar drag and drop” in Labs so they can move the web search box up to the top where it’s easy to get to.

Inserting images into your email messages

Well, it’s about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on “Inserting images” from the Labs tab under Settings, and you’ll see a new toolbar icon like this:

Make sure you’re in rich formatting mode, or it won’t show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.

Keep in mind that Gmail doesn’t show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you’re sending mail to other Gmail users, they’ll still have to click “Display images below” or “Always display images from …” to see images you embed.

Got feedback on inserting images? Send it our way.

Suggest more than one recipient

Have you ever realized you mistakenly left someone important out of an email, or just spent too much time trying to decide who from your long list of contacts to include? Well, some of us on the Gmail team feel your pain, so we wrote a new Gmail Labs feature called “Suggest more recipients.”

Once you’ve enabled it from the Labs tab under Settings, you’ll see suggested recipients while composing messages. Gmail will suggest people you might want to include based on the groups of people you email most often. So if you always email your mom, dad, and sister together, and you start composing a message to your mom and dad, Gmail will suggest adding your sister. Enter at least two recipients and any suggestions will show up like this:

Click on a suggested name, and they’ll get added to your email.

Hopefully having lots of friends and co-workers just got a bit less onerous for you. (Oh, the burden of popularity!) Enjoy, and as usual, please let us know what you think.

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