Friday, December 09, 2005 8:51 AM
Well, months and months ago I saw a few bloggers mentioning that Web Clips were now showing up above the Inbox in Gmail. Unfortunately I didn't get it at that point. I have it now. Web Clips is just Google's term for RSS items. If you use the Google personalized home page (their portal-lite), you already have access to Web Clips as snap-ins to the page. I'm not sure how useful it will be in Gmail with the items just appearing one at a time with little control. Well, you can cycle them forward and backward, but I'm used to a list.
My problem with this, is Google already has the cool Google Reader (http://reader.google.com) for RSS feeds. This is an interested user interface, but should probably just be merged into Gmail. It would be nice to just get RSS items in your Inbox.
My other problem, is I already subscribed to a number of feeds in Google Reader. In the personalized Google home, and the new Gmail feature, you are starting over. Why can't I just click a checkbox to use the feeds to which I've already subscribed? Hopefully they'll get there, but it's annoying to me when they release a product (even in beta) and it's missing something that seems so obvious to me.
You can always stay on top of Gmail enhancements here: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_whatsnew.html