It would be really handy if Gmail kept a list of my last dozen or so search terms.

Gmail Update Notice

I’ve been using the Gmail web interface quite a bit, and for the most part I’ve adjusted to how it works. There is one thing that still bothers me though. When you have an email thread open and a new email comes in on that same thread it adds a little update notice to the bottom of your browser window. In the image above that is what the orange arrow is pointing to (the little yellow box at the bottom).

That’s all fine and good, except for one alloying aspect. My mouse rarely hangs out at the bottom of the browser window. All of the menu items are at the top, along with the bookmarks on the toolbar. Even in the Gmail interface, all of the UI elements that I use the most are along the top (and on the left side). So I end up making a special trip to the bottom of the screen just for that update notice.

So here’s my request, move the update notice box from the bottom of the screen, to some place near the top. Looking around the Gmail UI it seems that right above the thick blue bar would be great, where the green arrow is pointing to above. It’s a small change that would make the update notice box more pleasant to click on.

Late last night while trying to get Michael to go to sleep I started thinking about the different ways we provide data to users. Feeds (RSS & Atom) have become really popular and are fine for what they do. Then my thoughts turned to email. I still get quite a bit of information via email. In thinking about feeds versus email, feeds are still mostly about polling for updates (or pings or pubsubhubbub). Email is potentially event driven, but in many cases you still have to poll for new emails.

That’s when in hit me. What I really want is web hooks for my Gmail account! I could filter in Gmail for certain email patterns and have those emails skip the inbox, go directly into my archive and have a copy of the email passed off to a URL of my choosing for further processing. All without having to poll for new emails, they would be pushed out to the URL automatically.

Now to be fair you could get something close to this already. If you have an email server you could have Gmail forward a copy of the email to your email server which could then pass it off to a script instead of delivering it to an inbox (did this with email aliases and procmail for years). But in my case I’m using Gmail in part because I got tired of running my own email server, I wanted to spend that time doing other things.

By why limit this to just Gmail? Why not have web hooks available for Google Reader or Google Calendar? A hook could get called anytime a change is made to my calendar, or a new item shows up from a blog with a specific tag. Then there’s Google Docs, hooks that would get called when ever someone besides me edits a document. There are any number of possibilities.

Now for the icing on the cake. Combined the power of web hooks with solid APIs for the services that call these hooks (Gmail, Google Calendar/Reader/Docs, etc.) and then you have something almost magical. The URL end points that process the hook data can turn around and update that data again, at the source. In the Google Calendar case a web hook that was called for invites, the hook could turn around and accept or decline that invite. This allows me to come up with my own means of processing, interacting with and responding to events.

Google has already started down this road with support for post commit web hooks on Google Code. Hopefully that is just the beginning.