Global News

GMail 2.0 is coming soon to your friendly local internet.

Google announced some news at its Analysts Day, which may excite some -- it will be releasing a completely rewritten, optimized and improved version of GMail. The version's goal is reportedly to raise customer satisfaction to 70 percent.

Such a high satisfaction rate, particularly for a free email service would be very impressive. Many internet services, including the internet service itself enjoy woefully low satisfaction and general customer antipathy.

GMail has been driven by aging Java-script which will now be brought up to speed. The new version dubbed "GMail 2.0" has two main goals: faster service and better contact management.

Initial testers reported the test version felt noticeably faster and more responsive, particularly in contacts management. They report a new contacts screen, as well as that the chat can now not be hidden (at least in the trial version).

Another improvements is that contact pictures can be transferred directly from Google's Picasa web albums, all server-side, to reduce bandwidth and processing expenses on the user side.

Google recently made headlines when it switched to the superior IMAP protocol, an unexpected move for a free internet service, as reported at DailyTech. IMAP support should be almost completely rolled out to GMail users by now.

Expect to see GMail 2.0 rolled out sometime this year or early next year. The update is recognizable by a "newer version" option appearing in the upper right hand links in the mail window. Be sure to comment if you received this update, as Google has not announced a hard date for the rollout.

Google currently features over 4 GB of storage per account, which makes it one of the most generous providers in terms of storage space.

Google has been breaking ground with many new initiatives, including its Google News, the Google Lunar Challenge and the Unity Project -- a trans-Atlantic cableline. It did recently get its heart broken by Facebook, when it got rejected for Microsoft. However, it is unconcerned as it has a deal with Myspace.com and several other networks, and hoards of loyal GMail users, who will soon be enjoying an improved version of their favorite email service.