The Gmail team over at Google has been busy lately. Today they have added two pieces of functionality: (There might be more additions but I haven't seen them yet)
1) Improved contact management
2) Atom feed for your email
The Atom feed is what has me VERY intrigued. While many will look at this little feed as just a feature for ubber geeks, I view it as a major signal of Google products to come. Follow my logic for a second:
Gmail is a great application but it has a major drawback... you can only access it if you are online. This means that you can't make Google your primary mail application because if you find yourself without an internet connection, you can't email... Well inserting an Atom feed is a first step in fixing the connection problem. Using this feed Gmail users can now pull down their Gmail to a local client application. The feed today contains only summary information, (like subject, who the message is from, etc.) but there is no reason this can't be expanded to contain the full text of a message.
So, now that we know you can pull down part of your Gmail messages into a client application should we assume that Google will stop there and let random applications handle the user experience or do we believe that Google will want to have an application that controls that user experience? They will want to control the user experience, that is for certain.
So now I believe that Google will want a client application to help manage email that can be brought to that client in the form of an Atom Feed. Well, lets see... recently there was a high profile application that launched with the ability to pull such a feed... it is called FireFox.
Therefore I believe it is just a matter of days or weeks before Google announces their own browser based on FireFox that has built in support for Gmail. I am sure that any Google Browser will have additional functionality than just Gmail integration, but this is a big first step.
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