In recent years, the internet has begun to expand into a more personalised space. As we see the gap between online and desktop experiences shrink, the internet is becoming more about the user and his or her experiences with its tools. Coupled with this comes the personalisation of the tools, services and platforms upon which we host our internet experiences. Blogging, tweeting (making posts in the micro-blogging platform, Twitter), life streaming and IM-ing (instant messaging) are integral elements of many online users’ lives today.
In an effort to further personalise and customise the user experience, Google have released custom themes for their popular and revolutionary e-mail service, Gmail. This allows users to choose from a variety of custom layouts and designs for their Gmail account, ranging from nature to fun to a tech-geek “Terminal” layout, mimicking an old-fashioned computer terminal in green and black.
This theming element has been used on Google’s homepage customisation service, iGoogle, for some time now, and has only recently made the cross over to Gmail.
Not only do these themes customise the colours of your e-mail, they add additional features such as “rain on your e-mail” or characters to keep you company while you read your mail.
Google is said to be releasing several more themes over time, so keep on the look-out for future designs and customisations to further personalise your online experience.
Nice post Matt!! Would be cool to allow us to design our own themes as well, and add this to Google Domains..
Thanks Craig.
I agree. The Gmail Blog states: “We’ll be rolling out themes to everyone over the next couple of days, so if you don’t see them yet, check back soon”. Hopefully this means further expansion into the Google Apps sector as well. Although, there is already a certain degree of customisation on the Google Apps platform as well…not to this extent though.