A lot of us use Gmail. It’s the email of choice these days (yes, I know that Hotmail is still the leader in user total). But some of you may not know that there are actually a lot of add-ons available for Gmail – both from third-parties and from Google themselves via their Labs feature. If you haven’t checked out Labs the click on that beaker icon at the top of your Gmail screen. Here are three apps from third-parties.
Boomerang
Boomerang allows you to schedule your email – both sending and receiving. It’s a free download and there’s also a version for Outlook in case you’re stuck in that world.
It’s compatible with both Firefox (PC and Mac) and Chrome (PC and Mac). It allows you schedule when you receive email by providing a “Receive Later” button in Gmail. You choose a time when you want to deal with said message and that that prescribes time the message will be moved back to your Inbox. That’s nice, but more importantly, it provides a “Send Later” button for email that you compose. This can be really handy, especially if you have something like a mailing lsit for announcements. It allows you to get the message drafted and ready to go, but sends it when it will be relevant.
FollowUpThen
FollowUpThen is a free service that doesn’t even require a sign-up. It allows you to add a follow-up date or time in in the CC or BCC field of an email such as 1day@followupthen.com or 2hours@followupthen.com oer Aug20@followupthen.com and it will then send a reminder if there has been no follow up. If you included the address in the CC field then the reminder will go to both you and the email recipient. If you used the BCC field then the reminder will go only to you and the recipient will never know. They will only send one reminder so you don’t need to worry about being overwhelmed. However some recipients may not be very receptive to have their email address given out to a third-party.
Backupify
Some of you may already be familiar with Backupify. It actually does a lot more than backup just Gmail. It also backs up Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google Docs, Picasa, Photobucket, Delicious, Hotmail, Friendfeed, Basecamp, Zoho, Blogger and WordPress. There’s also a business version that handles a little bit more. It’s easy to set up and once you’re done then backups are automatic. Every Friday I get an email telling me it has done a backup and the services it did. If you tried it early on after it’s launch in 2009 then you may have experienced some problems with Gmail, which initially recognized it as an attack and prompted users to change their Gmail password. But, that problem has been ironed out and it seems to be rock-steady now. I have not had to do a restore yet, but I’ve read over the process and it seems straight-forward. This may be the best, and most versatile of the three apps I just mentioned. And, as a bonus, it handles so much more than just Gmail.
Imagine a school that passes out Amazon Kindles instead of printed textbooks. No books at all, zilch, zero, nada – everything electronic. Printing costs could be completely eliminated, along with a myriad of associated problems – replacement books, textbook obsolescence, and book disposal to mention but a few. A single high-battery-life device such as a Kindle would suffice for replacing all books.
Here in the UK, we live in a strange a mix of imperial (English) and metric units. We buy fruit and veg by the kilo but ask someone their weight, it’s in stones and pounds. When it’s cold, it’s “a few degrees” (C) but when it’s hot, it’s “in the 80s” (F). You can buy pints of milk but in the supermarket, you’ll pick up 2 litres. No one gets too bothered about it, (except readers of 
I’ve had my HTC Evo for a couple of months or more at this point. When I first turned it on, there was an update waiting. The update installed. So far, so good.
In the world of blogging, podcasting and social networking, much has been said about the so-called “long tail.” The concept of the “long tail” revolves around the idea that available content living on the Internet gets a lot of extra audience over a long period of time, as opposed to traditional print and broadcast content which has a much more limited lifespan.
