Gmail has finally added a feature that has been a long time in coming, but like so many other new features, it’s in the Labs.

Most email services have had inline image embedding for ages, but Gmail, which just celebrated its 5th birthday, has been lacking this feature up until now. Just announced today, Gmail now supports image embedding, but like so many other new features as of late, you have to go and turn it on in your settings.  For those unfamiliar with the process, you need to go to “Settings” at the top of the screen, click on the “Labs” tab, and scroll down until you find “Inserting images”.  Once you have it up and running you’ll see an icon up in the tools that will let you insert images from your own hard drive, or even enter the URL of an image from a website and it will be inserted.

Why this particular feature took so long to be added is a mystery, but it is even bigger mystery why absolutely new feature that comes to Gmail has been part of Labs lately instead of just added directly to the service.  An even bigger mystery is why when they do add these features, they show up in Gmail, but not their Apps version of the service that webmasters use for quite some time.  A universal roll out of these new features would be nice, and it would also be nice to see them be situations where users don’t have to go and turn them on.  We can at least all dream of that day.

Google does love a good April Fool’s Day joke, and their latest, “Gmail Autopilot“, may be one of their best.

It may be a bit too obvious to truly be a “good” April Fool’s Day prank, but it is still funny.  The basic concept behind Gmail Autopilot is that you will no longer have to be bothered with answering your emails as Gmail can do it all for you.  They give some great examples of how you could use just such a feature.

I especially like the first one… SO helpful!

They even went so far as to show you a control panel that lets you set things like capitalization, brevity, typos and exclamations so you can be sure these auto emails sound as much like you as possible.

Course, they also address one possible snag to this system:

What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot’s responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.

Google Docs, the free office suite from Google, has added the ability to add vector drawings to your documents.

In what feels like a never-ending stream of updates to their products of late, Google Docs is now letting you add your own vector drawings to your documents. For those unfamiliar with vectors, those are images that can be maniulated for resizing without losing their proportions.

The new feature will allow you to choose from a selection of preset shapes and images that you can rotate, resize and adjust.  If you don’t find anything that fits your needs you can create a brand new image by using their drawing tools using lines, free hand scribbles and text labels.  You can also do things such as changing line widths, doing fill color and from arrowheads to font size.

At the rate Google is adding features to Docs, you really have to start wondering how long it will be before people start wondering why they really are paying for various office suite packages.  If you want to give this latest feature a try, just go to “Insert” and click on “Drawing”.

The never ending parade of new features in Gmail keeps rolling, and there are two new ones worthy of note.

First up is “undo“.  Ever sent an email and immediately realized you forgot to copy someone on it, or you forgot an attachment?  Well, with this new Labs feature, you have about a five second window after you click “Send” to click on “Undo” and correct the problems with the email before it goes out.  While it’s a great concept, it failed on my first test of it. Yes, I got to edit the email, but the test recipient also got the wrong version of the email.  If they work this out it will be fantastic, but not quite sure about it yet.

The second new feature is previews of YouTube videos in your email.  Although we aren’t quite sure why they are calling them “previews” as our test allowed us to watch the entire video from inside the email we sent.  This is highly useful for when you forward emails to friends, they will no longer need to go over to YouTube to watch as it will be automatically included in the email while they are viewing it.  As you can see from the example below, it can also handle multiple videos, so next time you are sending around a viral video, your friends will be able to save themselves a step.

As with all Labs features, you will need to click on “Settings” in the top portion of your Gmail screen, click on the “Labs” tab, and then locate them to enable them in the ever growing list of new features that Google is adding to the service.

Google’s popular, but only to those few people lucky enough to use it thus far, GrandCentral is finally ready to come out of Beta under the name Google Voice.

According to the Offical Google Blog, Google Voice is rolling out in waves across the current users of GrandCentral with users receiving instructions in their inboxes on how to start using the new version.  The first new feature that the public is hearing about is the ability to have your voice mails transcribed to text automatically, and then you can also have them emailed to you or sent via SMS text.

SiliconAngle is reporting that some of the other features that may be included are six way conference calling, free domestic calls, forwarding of voice mails and more.

The service has been free while it has been in Beta, and the official information page is still saying it will be free, but it is difficult to imagine it will remain this way forever.  We here at StarterTech have been using the service for quite some time now, and we love it, but we still worry about what the eventual cost will be once they start some sort of subscription plan.  Will it be À la carte, or will it be all or nothing?  You have to say they are taking a lesson from drug dealers here in that the first taste is free, then once you’re hooked, they hit you up for the cost later.  We’re addicted, but we still fear the future.

The service will be accepting new users in the next few weeks, but no word on how you will go about applying to be one of the new accounts.

Google Reader just got a lot more interesting for those people who share a lot of stories.

In an interesting move by Google, users of their Google Reader product that share stories with other people can now hold conversations about those stories via built-in commenting.  Up until now, only the person sharing the story could make a comment, but with this new additional feature, anyone who is in your sharing circle can join in on the conversation.  All one needs to do to participate is look for the “Add Comment” link at the bottom of each share story.  The discussion will then appear below the story for others to see.

According to the Official Google Reader Blog, you will also be able to use this new feature from your iPhone so you can even comment on the go.

While it is an interesting idea, I have to agree with Adam Ostrow of Mashable and Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr when they express concerns of how this may steal comments and click-thrus away from blogs. Mr. Ostrow worries about the fact you can not currently import these comments into your blog, so it is like lost conversations. Mr. Riley also has a valid point in that if something impassioned you enough to make a comment about it, why should you bother clicking through to the site now to make it when you can get just as much satisfaction from doing it right there in Reader?  There is going to have to be some way for comments to move and back and forth between your blog and Reader, or else you will see a lot of full text feeds being cut down to snippets to get people encouraged to visit the blogs again.

This is an interesting idea, but I’m just not sure if it was completely thought through on how it might impact the bloggers who create the content that is the life’s blood of Reader.

One of the most awaited updates to Gmail has finally happened: the ability to add multiple attachments to an email at once.

In what is a seemingly never ending series of updates to Gmail as of late, Google has announced that you can now attach multiple files at once to an email.  Up until now you had to select a file, click “Attach another file” and select another, doing this one file at a time.  Now you can browse your computer and select multiple files by holding down the CTRL key on Windows machines, or, if you’re on a Mac, you just hold down the Cmd key.  They also now will show you a progress bar for each file so you know that it is actually working as opposed to the old “Loading…” notice at the top of the screen which told you nothing of importance.

While we have seen lots of little tweaks to the system like choosing new colors or editing how the service looks in a tab, those have all been aesthetic changes.  This is one of the most useful changes yet, and one that has been needed for years.  Thank you, Google!

Ever wondered if your inability to reach a Google service is just on your end, or are they having problems? Now you can tell thanks to the Google Apps Status Dashboard.

In the early hours of the morning on February 24th USA time, Gmail became inaccessible.  Due to the number of people who know rely on this service, people were panicked to find out what was going on, but there was no easy way to keep up-to-date with the goings on.  Well, luckily Google has quickly stepped up to the plate by releasing the Google Apps Status Dashboard.

The new tool will show you the status of the various Google products, if everything is working as it should you will see a green checkmark.  If something has gone wrong, you will see a blue icon with an “i” on it, and when you click on it you will be taken to an information page with updates about what is happening with that service.  Seeing as how Google is quickly taking over our online lives with all of their tools, this is a very welcome addition to those of us who use them on a regular basis.

Ever wished you could control how things appear in your browser tabs?  Now you can.

Called “Title Tweaks”, Google has added a new feature in Gmail Labs that allows you to change the order the information shows up in your tabs to make it a bit more user friendly.  The old version read:

Gmail – Inbox (20) – youraddress@gmail.com

to

Inbox (20) -youraddress@gmail.com – Gmail

For those of you out there, such as myself, that have tons of tabs open, this is a lot friendlier to users.  A very welcome addition to the popular service.

Gmail and Google Talk users be warned, the service is under a phishing attack.

The image to the right (provided by Adam Ostrow of Mashable) shows the message people using Gmail and Google Talk have been receiving for the past few hours.  When you click on the link, you are taken to a site (pictured below) named ViddyHo.  The site asks for you to log in with yoru Google credentials to view the video your friend is supposedly sharing with you.  Instead, what you are doing is giving your username and password to a third-party who then spams your entire Google contact list with the same message to get more people to go to their site and do the same.

Back in January we reported on a phishing attack on Twitter that was using a similar method, and again we must warn you that you should never give your login credentials for any service to any site that is unkwown to you.  If you receive a message like the one shown here, ask the person what the video is before you click on it, and even if you should click through, never give your login credentials!  If something like this does ever happen to you, make sure to change your password immediately upon discovering it.