DemoGirl

A few days ago Gmail released a new feature in “Labs” called multiple inboxes.  It’s a handy way to see not only a preview of your inbox when you log into your Gmail account, but to also see a preview of certain emails that you apply labels to.

In order to use multiple inboxes, you need to go into the Labs section of your Gmail account and enable it.  Then you can change the settings to display a preview of mail that has specific labels attached to it.  So, I have a panel with my regular inbox, one with Google Alerts set for DemoGirl, and one with all emails that are labeled family.

After I set up my different panels I decided I wanted to also get a preview of mail from one of my other Gmail accounts.  This takes a little bit of tinkering around with filters, but it’s pretty easy to do.  I thought this may be useful to you, so I decided to make a screencast.

After I patted myself on the back and then thought loudly, “Damn I’m Smart! Go Molly!”  for figuring out how to do this little task, I stumbled upon an article written by Josh Lowensohn from Webware.  In his article he describes, step by step, almost exactly what I am showing you in my screencast.  I just thought I would disclose that piece of info, since Webware is probably a far more read blog than DemoGirl.  So, Josh, I guess great minds think alike!

To see Gmail multiple inboxes in action, watch the screencast below:

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OtherInbox is an email service that wants to give you control over emails that come from services you sign up for and other various accounts you may have online.

At first, I didn’t understand why a service like this would be useful.  Why not just create a new hotmail or Gmail account for singing up for various services?  Well, because that can be a pain and waste time.  OtherInbox pretty much eliminates the need to create throwaway email addresses.

When you sign up, the username that you choose will be part of your OtherInbox email address.  But, when you use your OtherInbox email address, you can customize the domain each time you use it.  For example:  If I was signing up for Twitter, I would use molly@twitter.otherinbox.com twitter@molly.otherinbox.com as my email address.  My OtherInbox domain is molly@otherinbox.com but I can use each service or account as part of my domain when singing up for things. (Update:  In the screencast I said you use your username first as your OtherInbox domain and then the name of the service.  This is incorrect.  Use the service name first (ie. Twitter) followed by @ and your username.otherinbox.com.  Make sense?)

When you sign into your OtherInbox account you’ll see that each sub-domain has its own tab which contains the emails from that particular service.  So, since I signed up for Twitter with my OtherInbox email address, and since I used twitter as my sub-domain, Twitter has its own inbox within my OtherInbox account.

If a service starts spamming you, you can block all future emails from them with one click.  That means you no longer have to click on a link to opt out of receiving emails that you don’t remember ever opting into in the first place.

OtherInbox is currently in private beta, but they’re giving invites to the first 50 people who sign up by clicking on this link.  To see OtherInbox in action, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 2m21s

Ubiquity is a new experiment from Mozilla Labs that allows you to take bits and pieces of the Web and make them work together just by typing in basic text.  It’s an Extension for Firefox that allows you, as the user, to decide what Ubiquity should do.  This happens by giving Ubiquity commands.  On the developer end, it allows you to create commands that other people can subscribe to and use.

I installed Ubiquity this morning and have, and can not, stop using it.  I also recommend checking out new commands that are being developed.  To see Ubiquity in action, watch the screencast below:

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Avakit is a service that allows you to create a profile with your your old phone numbers, email addresses, and other social networking information so that people who have lost touch with you can easily find you.

Avakit works almost like a customized search engine for your contact information.  Before any of your information will even show up in a search you need to create a free account and add the information you think people will use to search for you.  This could be an old phone number, your old college email address, or even a Facebook profile.  You can also add your current information.  After you add the search criteria, enter in what information you would like made public.  Again, you can choose as much or as little information as you please.  I decided to make my current email address and name public.

I know that you can find information on most people by doing a basic Google search, but if people really started using Avakit, it could prove to be a very useful way to reach out to old co-workers, friends, or even your old high school crush.  To learn more, watch the screencast below:

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[via MoMB]

How many times have you read an email, promised yourself you would answer it “in a couple of hours”, and then completely forgot about it?  If you’ve never done this before then you should pat yourself on the back and skip this screencast.  For everyone else, HitMeLater may help you avoid those uncomfortable “I’m still waiting for a response from my email last week” situations.  HitMeLater is a tool that will resend an email to you when you have time to actually answer it.

You don’t need to sign up for anything, invite your friends, or create a profile sharing all of your favorite movies.  Whenever you receive an email that you need to remember to come back to later, just forward it to HitMeLater.  In order to tell HitMeLater when you want to receive an email nudge, just enter in the amount of hours in front of HitMeLater, 2@hitmelater.com, and in two hours you’ll receive the email again.  If you want the email resent in 6 hours then replace the 2 with a 6.  You can also use days of the week, like Monday, and HitMeLater will send your email on the next Monday. There’s really not much to learn, but I thought a screencast was in order anyway because it’s a nice little tool that, hopefully, someone will find useful.  To see HitMeLater in action, watch the screencast below:

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[via TechCrunch]

A few months ago I noticed a new icon in my Gmail account .  Upon clicking on it, I was brought to Gmail Labs, where new Gmail features are being tested.

I played around with some of the features for a while but never really looked into them to see how they could really make my Gmail experience better.  Today, after I installed Firefox Extension, Better Gmail 2 (highly recommended!), I decided it would also be a good time to see what, if anything, these features could do for me.  To see what I found, watch the screencast below:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 3m46s

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the embed code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

Anyvite is a simple event invitation service that allows you to plan an event, invite your friends, and share photos and video, all without anyone but you needing to create an account.  The idea of your friends not needing to sign up for a service just to reply to an event that you’ve created, is something that services like Presdo (reviewed here) and Pingg (reviewed here) have implemented as well.

To create an event, just enter in the name and description, add the date and time, and then enter in the location.  If you’re unsure of an address you can do a search from the event page and add it that way.  Next you just need to enter in the email addresses of your friends or import addresses from an address book.  If you’ve previously added friends, Anyvite will remember them so you just need to check a box next to their name.  That’s basically it – but you can add more flare to your invite, like a custom photo or wallpaper from the Anyvite gallery.

You can also add photos and videos to your event invite and allow your guests to do the same.  Once you’ve jazzed up your invite, just send it.  You friends will receive the invite right in their inbox, and they can reply right away, without having to sign up for anything.  What’s even better, is that your guests can also add comments, watch videos, and add the event to their calendar, all without creating an account.  There’s also a “ShareSpace” where you and your guests can add photos and videos after the event.  Each ShareSpace has its own code that you need to tag your Flickr photos and YouTube videos with, and then they’ll be automatically added to your events ShareSpace for everyone to enjoy.  Here’s my screencast tour of Anyvite:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 3m43s

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via TechCrunch]

Sendible allows you to set scheduled emails, reminders, and even Twitter and Facebook updates.  It’s all done from one place, and you can keep track of all of your activity on your Sendible calendar.  You can also schedule SMS messages to be sent at any time from your Sendible account.  If you use Facebook, Sendible can even grab your friends birthdays and add them to your calendar.

Getting started seemed a bit messy, as I couldn’t find any way to add email contacts into my Sendible account without manually typing them in.  I did find that when I first signed into Sendible, it gave me the option of importing my hotmail contacts, but that option soon vanished and I was left to enter in my friends, one by one.  Once that was done though, Sendible sent out the scheduled emails right on time and even allows you to quickly group your contacts, which is great for sending out group emails or SMS messages.  There is a reminder feature which, obviously, will send you reminders via email or SMS, and you can schedule your Twitter and Facebook updates.  Unfortunately, every time I wanted to update to either service, I had to log back into the appropriate account, even if I didn’t log out of Sendible.  I think Sendible is really off to a great start but needs to clean up navigation around the site.  It took me a while to figure out exactly where to start and left me a bit frustrated when all I found in the help section was a welcome message. Here’s my screencast tour of Sendible:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 4m26s

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via ReadWriteWeb]

If you’ve been toying with the notion of starting your own blog but are afraid that it’s too hard to set up and post new content, then posterous is probably just what you’ve been looking for.  Posterous allows you to not only create your very first blog post just like you would send out an email, but keeps it that simple every time you want to share something new.  To get started, just send an email to post@posterous.com.  Type your post title in the subject line and add your post text in the body of the email.  You can attach photos, MP3 files, and documents.  Then hit “send” and you should immediately receive an email from posterous with a link to your new site where your email has magically turned into your very first blog post!

You can continue on creating blog posts by emailing post@posterous.com but to really have control over your new site, you’ll want to click the link in your email that says, “Click here to set a password for this site”.  From there, you’ll be able to create your own URL and add a password so you can edit posts and customize your site a bit more.  You can create a short profile and change the name of your site and include a tagline.  You can also subscribe to other posterous sites which have been recommended to you.  If you included an MP3 in your emailed post, posterous will automatically embed a player on your site.  Posterous also recognizes links from YouTube, Google Video, Justin.tv, Vimeo, and Omnisio and will automatically embed the video on your site if you included a link in your post.  People can also comment on your posts, which you’ll receive email notification of, and you can reply to comments directly from your email.

Sure, posterous sounds a lot like previously reviewed Tumblr, but it’s a lot less complicated so it has a good chance of getting the attention of users that didn’t jump on the Tumblr bandwagon last year.  Here’s my screencast tour of posterous:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 3m10s

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via TechCrunch]

Update: The CEO of Orgoo was nice enough to post this link, where you may find some more invites.

Orgoo is aiming to be your one stop shop for email and IM, and they’re doing a pretty good job so far. Getting started was a lot easier than I thought it would be, so right from the get go I was a happy camper. Adding your email accounts is as simple as entering in your account details from all the big name sites like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! except, as of now, you can only access Yahoo! and Hotmail email from paid Yahoo! Plus accounts and Hotmail Plus accounts. You can also add other POP or IMAP email accounts as well. After you’ve added all of your email accounts you can just as easily add all of the different IM services you use. You can also easily send video messages, create video chat rooms with friends and they don’t even need to sign up for anything in order to join in, and send SMS messages in reply to emails and IM’s. If any of your online buddies have sent you emails, you can also merge chats with those emails. How great is it that you can pull an email you’re chatting about with someone, right into a chat?

With that said, there are still a few kinks that need to be worked out. My buddies from various IM accounts only show up half the time and I’m still waiting for one of my email accounts to load mail into Orgoo. It’s still in private beta, so there’s no reason to think these issues won’t be worked out. If you want to try Orgoo out, I have 5 invites for the first five requests in the comments. Just make sure you leave a valid email address in the email line of the comment form. Here’s my screencast tour of Orgoo:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 3m39s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!