A most amusing post on Google's Gmail blog says: "Today, we're happy to announce the next evolution of labels: the colored label." Which is nice.
Even more interesting, there's a hint that those of us who would really prefer folders might be making some progress. There's a PS that says: "We actually kinda like folders. In fact, we're doing some work to add some folder-y-ish functionality. Stay tuned."
But the post also says: "Out of the email primordial ooze, Gmail was born with evolutionarily advantageous features like threaded conversations." This is more silly than funny. Back before most Googlers were born, we had conferencing systems like CoSy that threaded conversations with hundreds of users, and this enabled the same features in mail clients such as Ameol. (I've been on the CoSy-based Cix conferencing system since about 1987.) In comparison, the "threading" in Gmail is so crude it's pathetic.
By the way, some bug-fixes would be nice. Adding colours to labels would be fine if basic things like Gmail's email address entry actually worked properly. (Bitter? Moi?)
Update: During travels with my notebook, I note with pleasure that the bug in "new Gmail" that led to spurious entries when emailing more than one person has now been fixed. Hurray! I'll post something later on "proper threading" in conferencing systems where there are multiple users, and just creating a fake conversation between two users doesn't cut it.
