Gmail's New Features

Some people are more lucky more I! Cheah Chu Yeow found Atom feed and inline contact list and Jeff Mesnil found drafts and mail forwarding. These new features are not available to most users, so stay calm. :-)

It's nice to see these improvements. However, personally I think the Atom feed fearure is rather useless. Atom has been the site syndication format standard pushed for Blogger (owned by Google). But how useful can it be for email?

An email is different from a website: it is NOT public. Hence, authentication is needed. This mean one must either 1) sign in via Gmail's web interface or 2) sign in via a tool (usually Gmail notifier). The first method is not convenience unless one saved the login information in cookies. If one use the second method, he/she already can get notification for new Gmails, why he/she still need that Atom feed?

Maybe that's because Gmail want people to be able to use Thunderbird to read new emails (since Thunderbird can now feed RSS/Atom). Maybe Gmail want to roll out a browser (with related applications) based on Mozilla... Well... maybe... :-P