Google Code Adds Gadgets: MarkMail Helps

Google today announced new support for embeddable "gadgets" on Google Code project pages. Particularly exciting to us, they introduced MarkMail as the recommended gadget for viewing and searching Google Code project list archives.

For those who haven't encountered one in the wild, a Google Gadget is an embeddable web object that puts a bit of third-party dynamic content into the middle of a web page. Gadgets are the things you place on your iGoogle home page or your Google Desktop, but you can also add them to your own web page with one line of JavaScript, or anyone else's page if it supports the OpenSocial APIs.

We've coordinated with the Google Code team over the last several months to load about 500 GoogleGroups lists (3.8 million emails) and build a new MarkMail Gadget (launching today!) to let Google Code developers search and analyze their lists using MarkMail.

The new MarkMail gadget lets you view messages, threads, attachments, and senders, and a traffic chart (wouldn't be MarkMail without it!) for any set of messages you want to follow. The messages you choose to track with the gadget can be those from a single list, set of lists, a person, containing a term or phrase, or any combination. In fact, anything you can use in a search on MarkMail can be used as input to the gadget view. The new gadget offers two features not yet available on MarkMail.org: a daily traffic chart (MarkMail.org only does monthly traffic charts) and a view that coalesces threads.


So what does this mean for you? If you're a project leader (either on Google Code or somewhere else) it's now easier than ever to embed a MarkMail traffic chart and recent message list inside any of your project pages. If you're just a lurker, you can personalize your view on MarkMail traffic and embed that view into iGoogle or Google Desktop, or any other page.

To help you set up the right links, we created a Gadget Embedding Wizard that guides you through the process of embedding. You can also find our gadget in the Google Directory where they have additional embedding instructions.

Tim O'Reilly in describing Web 2.0 says, A platform beats an application every time. We agree. We think you should be able to access mailing list archives whenever and wherever you want, be it at MarkMail.org or on another page that's been MarkMail-enabled via a gadget. So have fun, and let us know how this works for you!

1.4% of Emails Mention Google

As Google celebrates its 10 year anniversary we thought it'd be fun to use our archive of 30 million mailing list messages to see how Google's popularity has grown over time across the list-o-sphere. Boy has it grown!

In 2008 (so far) the word "Google" appears in 1.4% of emails in our archive, up from 1.15% last year and 0.75% five years ago.

While shockingly high, that 1.4% number is actually calculated with some conservative restrictions. We're excluding all mentions that occur inside quote blocks (where someone replies to another who said the word). It'd be 2% if we didn't have that rule. We're also excluding from our calculations all the Google Groups lists we follow, where Google is often the topic of discussion. With those lists added in? It's 13%.

You can explore this yourself with our public interface. You'll want to query for "google", use the "opt:noquote" flag, and set "-list:googlegroups" to exclude those lists. Then you can add date constraints either by typing "date:2008" in the search or dragging on the chart. Track the numbers as a result of your searches, do a little division, and you get your percentages.

You'll see that so far in 2008 there were 50,826 emails saying "google" across 3,607,973 emails total. That's 1.4%. For 2003 it's 21,165 emails out of 2,770,480 total, or 0.75%.