Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. We’re keeping our eyes on three particular stories of interest today.
Gmail Launches Priority Inbox Feature
On Tuesday morning, Google began rolling out its new Priority Inbox feature for Gmail users. Priority Inbox uses information such as keywords, which e-mail addresses you contact the most, and other e-mail habits to highlight the most pressing e-mails in your inbox. Those e-mails are brought to the top of your Gmail and marked as important so you deal with them first. Mashable’s Jenn Van Grove has penned a guide for optimizing the new feature.
Hotmail Finally Introduces Mobile-to-Web Syncing
After introducing a slew of upgrades in May, including new filters and integration with Office Web Apps, among other things, the world’s largest e-mail provider announced on Monday that users can now get their e-mail, calendar and contacts pushed automatically to their phones using Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). Now, whatever a user makes a change to their inbox, calendar or contacts on their mobile devices, the changes will be reflected automatically on the web and vice versa.
Google Rolls Out Real-Time Stats to Blogger Users
Users of Google’s Blogger service now have access to real-time statistics about their blogs, including views, visitor demographics, top search keywords and more, accompanied by illustrative graphs. Google announced the new features in a blog post last night [via The Next Web].
Further News
- Facebook suffered prolonged downtime this morning for many users. A Facebook spokesperson wrote to Mashable at 9 a.m. ET, “We are experiencing site issues that are affecting some people. As a result, the site may be slow or time out for some users. We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
- Apple plans to extend the length of song samples from 30 seconds to one minute, according to multiple anonymous sources.
- Skype has formally announced its newest product for business users, Skype Connect, which allows businesses to integrate Skype’s calling service into their existing PBX systems.
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