Just downloaded the new version of Gmail Mobile and so far all I can say is “wow”! Much better than the previous versions, and I’ve tried several on my Sony Ericsson P1i. There was always something wrong with them (no full screen, loads too long, blocks in the middle of work, I couldn’t just enter an email address, but had to save it in contacts first, etc).

This new version loads in a couple of seconds (with a loading indicator - neat ), and goes full screen right away. Additionally, the interface is automatically set for my language (Serbian Cyrillic) which is also nice. The menu is much better organized, and most of all, I like the fact I can now enter an email address without having to put it in my address book first, something that annoyed me very much in the previous versions. There are some other goodies as well, such as easy search through email archive, and switching between multiple Gmail accounts (!), offline email drafting and reading of recent messages. Also there are neat shortcuts for those with a QWERTY or other similar keyboards.

If you haven’t already, switch to the new version, it’s a lot better! Here are the links for download and more information:

Download from here
More info on the Google Mobile blog

Update: just realized I forgot to mention touch scrolling. Yes, finally you can now scroll through your inbox using your finger, provided you have a touch screen mobile phone. Oh, what a joyful upgrade!

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So, Live Search is availiable on Facebook. What does that mean from a search visibility perspective? Even though Live Search has a very small take on the search market, this development will bring a lot of search users their way. With over a hundred million users, Facebook represents a great resource for Live Search. Showing organic results within Facebook is certainly going to have an impact on Live Search’s overall performance.

Let’s take for example the UK user base on Facebook, which is about 8.3 million active users per month. If you’re a UK company, looking to show up in organic search results, or sponsored search results, this is a great chance to get exposure to a concentrated audience.

Let’s say the usage rate for web search stabilizes at about 10% of Facebook users, projected on UK users, that’s about 830K active search users per month. If we factor in the percentage take of particular search patterns, we’d get the number of potential visitors to our UK based site. Sounds like a small number, but when you think about it tens of thousands of potential visitors who’d be searching for targeted search patterns is a significant source of visits, and with a moderate to significant probability of conversion. If a company offers products or services globally, the numbers escalate dramatically.

Question is whether Facebook users will indeed adopt Live Search based results on FB as their primary source for search needs, at least if they spend a lot of time on Facebook. If that proves to be the case, then Microsoft may just have found a way to increase their presence on the search market, even if by just a little bit. It will be interesting to see whether organic resutls and sponsored results get higher conversion when shown on Facebook. It’s time for testing, and I have a feeling some interesting results are going to show up.

Also see these posts:
Facebook blog
Livesearch blog

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