Jamie Clark’s Posterous

I think this officially makes me a geek, just in case there was any doubt previously.

I'd submitted a "Top 5 Gmail Labs" list to Chris Pirillo which he very kindly read out on his live show. Chris is an avid blogger and continues to run Lockergnome, a blogging network which he created. He'd previously presented the TechTV program Call For Help. Chris can now be found at his personal blog (chris.pirillo.com) or at live.pirillo.com, which showcases his live video-stream from his home 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Update: Chris has posted the list complete with my reasons for choosing them on his blog. Naturally he had cut things out for the video. If you'd like to read it, it can be found here.

I stumbled across this on YouTube and immediately emailed it to a friend - she's going to Canada in a couple of days.

It's from the same YouTuber who gave us the Talking Cats Translation.

I like Gmail. I like the filter options, spam protection, labels, interface, speed and labs features. But there's always been one area where it lets itself down, and it's not what you'd expect.

The Gmail message search function SUCKS! Whilst it can do some useful stuff, for example I can use the "in:" operator to specify which label I want to search within, it still fails when given some basic search terms.

First of all, you can't do partial searches. Go to Google.com, and search for "face". Facebook.com is the first result. How come when I search for "face" in Gmail none of my Facebook messages are returned? OK sure, if I was looking for messages about Facebook, I wouldn't search for "face", but what if I was searching for messages about podcasts? Searching "podcast" won't bring back any messages featuring "podcasts".

Now, in any decent search engine you could just use a wildcard! Yay! Except "podcast*" returns the same results as "podcast". Gmail search doesn't have a wildcard feature.

What's most surprising about all of this is that Gmail IS Google! Y'know, only the biggest search engine - by a huge margin! How can it be this bad? I've searched the web (using Google - of course) and I can't find any substitue for using an asterisk for a wildcard - making partial searches a complete no-no.

And one other thing - why do Google feel the need to have a seperate box for quick contact searching? Couldn't this functionality just be moved the main search box?

Rant over.

I thought I'd try out Posterous' email functionality just to see if it really is as good as everyone says it is. Think of this post as a test. In fact, the website does seem like a bit of a mess of the moment. I'm finding it difficult to navigate and remember where options are. For example, I remember seeing an option to change your default blog, but I can't seem to find it again. Plus posting through the website us basic and not fun.

Anyway, we'll see how this comes out. It'll be a lot easier to slyly blog from work (on my lunch, of course!) if Posterous works well.