MySpace, the world’s most popular social network, today announced enhanced functionality of MySpace mail using Gears, giving users the ability to search and sort their mail in real-time. Today’s announcement, made at the Google I/O conference keynote in San Francisco, marks the largest third party implementation of Gears and the first time a search and sort mail functionality has been made available on MySpace.
MySpace is dedicated to working with the developer community to create the most leading edge and innovative products. “Gears extends the browser by taking advantage of storing data from the cloud on the user’s local machine,” said Allen Hurff, senior vice president of engineering at MySpace. “Operating at a scale with four to six million concurrent users a day, we are saving significant and expensive server-side resources by creating this feature utilizing Gears.”
With an average of 170 million mail messages sent a day from MySpace mail, Gears empowers users with large inboxes and huge numbers of friends to search and sort their mail quickly. Rather than clicking through page after page to find a specific message, users can now type in any keywords related to the message (sender name, subject, content, dates, etc.) and the results show up in real time, as the user types.
For those users with more than 5,000 mail messages, MySpace is proactively prompting the community to opt-in to the new feature by clicking to download Gears from MySpace. The download process is secure, quick and easy, and returns users to MySpace where the feature is added to the user’s mailbox. As the threshold is lowered, all users will receive a message box about the new feature in their MySpace mail messaging center. Anyone with Gears already installed will also have this feature available today.
On top of the real-time searching capability, users can further sort their messages or sort search results with a single click. Users can now sort based on the mail headers; Date, From, Status, Subject. This sorting also happens without waiting for a page to load. For example, a user that wants to view all of their unread messages can simply click the Status heading and all of their unread messages will be displayed at the top of the list. MySpace is able to offload processing to speed up the client by caching on a local machine.
“Gears adds capabilities to the browser that developers can tap into in order to make their applications feel more natural, more like native apps,” said Linus Upson, director of engineering for the Gears team at Google. “MySpace’s new mail capabilities built on Gears are a great example of how web apps can get more powerful and useful for users. We look forward to MySpace drawing upon their experience delivering web services to millions of users to contribute innovative ideas and feedback into the Gears community.”
About MySpace
MySpace, a unit of Fox Interactive Media Inc., is the premier lifestyle portal for connecting with friends, discovering popular culture, and making a positive impact on the world. MySpace has created a connected global community by integrating web profiles, blogs, instant messaging, e-mail, music streaming, music videos, photo galleries, classified listings, events, groups, college communities, and member forums. MySpace’s international network includes more than 20 localized community sites in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Latin America, Mexico, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, India, Japan, and New Zealand. Fox Interactive Media is a division of News Corp. (NYSE:NWS)(NYSE:NWS.A)(ASX:NWS)(ASX:NWSLV).