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Mobile 'muting' is on.

(Credit: CNET/Jessica Dolcourt)

Earlier this month, Google ingratiated itself with mobile users by refurbishing Gmail.com for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android devices. On Wednesday, Google followed up its initial redo with a small new feature that helps trim fat–or rather, keep it from accumulating in the in-box in the first place.

The capability to “mute” a conversation has now been added to the drop-down options under ‘More,’ the same place you find it when reading a Gmail message in the browser. Muting a message excuses you from seeing further messages in the thread, for instance, an entire guest list’s worth of comments for a party you can’t attend.

It’s a great incidental feature online, but it could become more valuable in the mobile sphere where preserving space and maintenance time is everything. However, using it is a little less convenient. Mute for mobile Gmail is only available at this time from Gmail.com, not from a native Gmail-reader, which, for now, defeats the purpose of Android’s Gmail in-box, and of the iPhone’s, if you have your mail streaming into it by default. Those who intend to use the feature regularly should affix a browser bookmark to their home screen.

Gmail mute is just one of the many features Google plans to toss over one at a time during the process that Shyam Sheth, a Google Mobile product manager, calls “The Iterative Webapp.” In some ways, an application by a thousand updates is an exciting way to witness the development process. In others, I fear readers may bludgeon me with their iPhones and G1s if new releases trickle out every day.

Excerpted from:
Gmail for iPhone, Android gets message muting

Since launching its Dictionary.com app for iPhone and iPod Touch in early April, the folks over at Dictionary.com have been plotting other iPhone applications that use the tools they’ve got: grammatical, orthographic, synonymic authority. And while they’re at it, maybe duplicate the numerical success of their reference app, which has floated among the iTunes Top 10 since its launch, and which hit more than a million downloads within the first three weeks.

The conduit of such lofty ambitions is Miss Spell’s Class, a 99-cent app that despite its name, letter-grade scoring, and nostalgic background of college-ruled paper, Dictionary.com insists is aimed at their core demographic of high school and university students, and business professionals.

(Credit: Dictionary.com)

The app is straightforward. You quickly decide which of the 20 words in the round are spelled correctly or incorrectly. Points are knocked off for inaccuracy, and added to your total time. If it takes you 40 seconds to go through the list, but you get two wrong, your score spikes up to 60 seconds, a B. So save the pokiness for reviewing your score and kicking yourself for casual errors.

The game is cute all right, and a test to the ego in the way that SATs and other standardized tests are–taunting in their simplicity, and debasing when you miss a simple word you ought to know better. At least you’re not alone–the misspellings are siphoned straight from the top 5,000 botched words entered into Dictionary.com at a rate of 2 million typos and flubs per month.

Still, there are a few light raps of the ruler we’d make. In a test game, consiencious was paired with consensus, rather than with conscientious. Apart from that, we’re not quite convinced the game will make us more intelligent, until Dictionary.com slips in definitions, and perhaps the pronunciation guide from the free app. It also grew old. Although this game is just the beginning, we’d like to see different skill levels and playing modes, like one where you actively spell a word, not just passively review it. There should be different skins to pull in the grade-school youngsters, old fogeys, and tweens who are too cool for school, and also competitions over Wi-Fi.

Some of these are admittedly coming. A future version is planned that will shade in tricky words with vocabulary content, and on Thursday, Dictionary.com is releasing its anagram game, Anagram Cracker, for the Web, which leverages its Thesaurus content.

The bottom line is, while Miss Spell’s Class is original and fun, we know Dictionary.com can do better.

P.S. In case you’re curious, here are the top-10 words most often misspelled when searched on in Dictionary.com: definitely, separate, sense, savvy, liaison, accommodate, embarrassed, occasionally, inconvenience, and dilemma.

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Dictionary.com’s iPhone game tests ur spelling

MySpace plans to integrate Google Gears with its platform, according to co-founder Chris DeWolfe. Users will be able to access their profiles offline using the Google Gears APIs, but the feature won’t be available for a few months.

DeWolfe was fielding a few questions in an interview at the TechCrunch50 event with co-host Mike Arrington, who started off the interrogation by asking DeWolfe if he was dating Paris Hilton. The gentlemanly DeWolfe declined to answer the question.

He did talk about the new music service launching this month that will partner with the major labels, offer free streaming and include some original content from its audience of 120 million members. DeWolfe said that MySpace is very focused on making the new service a success, with more than 70 people, including top MySpace management, working on the project. He was asked if Amazon was providing the downloading capabilities, but declined to answer. MySpace has a strong music foundation, and may be able to make a some inroads into the Apple/iTunes territory.

Michael Arrington talk with MySpace's Chris DeWolfe

(Credit: Dan Farber / CNET)

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MySpace to engage Google Gears

SAN DIEGO–Who needs a computer to access the many social networks people are members of these days?

While thousands, or even millions, of people regularly switch between services like Facebook, imeem, MySpace, and others, it can be cumbersome to do all that switching.

That’s what Xumii, which presented at DemoFall Monday afternoon, has set out to obviate.

The idea is that users will be able to access their various social networks through their mobile phones on a single application, rather than having to rely on computers and full browsers.

Xumii allows anyone to access friends and information from multiple social networks on their mobile phones.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

In the demonstration, the company showed how users can access a list of friends from any social network they’re part of, a list that will show each friend, the service they’re part of, and whether they’re online or not.

That’s pretty cool, and another nice feature is the ability to share photos or other files with people on that all-encompassing friends list. So, for example, a user could access their Flickr photos, select a picture, and then have it sent to any friends on their list.

Ultimately, what’s nice about Xumii is that it will allow people to take their social networks in their pocket, and not worry–as I’m sure many do–that while they’re on the go they are out of touch. This way, they can stay in touch no matter where they are, and they can continually update their friends with the latest things they’re doing, or the most recent photos they’ve taken.

Whether this is a good thing for us and our ability to detach ourselves from our computers is a question for someone else to answer.

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Xumii puts all of people’s social networks in their pockets

(Credit: Yammer)

I recently covered Socialcast, a “Friendfeed for business,” and liked it a lot. It takes emerging social interaction models that people are just now getting accustomed to and adapts them for business.

Here at TechCrunch50, the idea is also in evidence on Yammer, more of a “Twitter for business” that Socialcast, since it doesn’t seem to be able to pull in external feeds the same way.

However, users can have threaded discussions, as they can on FriendFeed. Users can also use “hashtags” for tagging topics, and users can follow just those tags. Useful if you want to follow a project, but not necessarily all the people working on it.

Yammer will launch with a desktop AIR app, as well as iPhone and Blackberry apps, and an SMS interface.

The base product is free. Enterprise versions with admin tools and security features will cost you.

I really like this concept, but my fear is that this kind of product is too easy to build (especially on workgroup scale, as compared to the consumer scale Twitter has struggled with). What I don’t see is a blocking business strategy. But I still like it.

The service is now live.

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Yammer launches; it’s ‘Twitter for the enterprise’