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The Gmail Sidebar.

If you are familiar with Gmail you know that every time you read a message the right sidebar gets populated with different info, typically ads. You may even be aware that Google will scrape the contents of the e-mail to display only contextually relevant ads.

However, they are not just relevant, in fact, I would call them intelligent. When I got the idea for this post I was in Gmail responding to a dynamIt CMS customer who wanted to know if they could have thumbnails in dynamIt and “have them enlarge after the mouse hovers.” I went to explain in a quick response that this would require some more advanced scripting that dynamIt is unable to do automatically (yeah, it’ll take just a wee bit of JavaScript attached to a specific HTML tag) when something in the sidebar caught my eye.

There were the following three links: JavaScript Effects, Enlarge Thumbnail Image, and Ajax Image Effect. This e-mail made no reference to JavaScript or AJAX, yet Google was able to know what it was getting at. To me this is amazing. If I were not a web developer by trade, Google would have artificially comprehended the e-mail at a deeper level than its human counterpart.

Awesome.

Did you know: there are two other things seen in the Gmail sidebar. First, if there is any street addresses in the e-mail message, they will be pulled over to the side bar with a convenient link in to Google Maps. Second, if your e-mail mentions a shipment with a package tracking number, Google magically figures our which carrier is delivering the package and posts a side bar link to track said package. Awesome.

Tags: awesomeness, Gmail, Google, Google Maps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Tech, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.