Sorry, could not resist the post title.

It appears Gmail users are having a bad day.

Gmail has had mini outages before but this one is seems to have caught the big G off guard.

The Class A types soon headed over to twitter to see if their Gmail problems were isolated. However the flurry of tweets about Gmail arrived by the thousands.

Tips: Apparently Gmail’s  IMAP support is still operational and if you have an iPhone you can still access the service. Most typical users who access the service via a web browser will have to sit this one out.

Gmail has 113m users worldwide so I guess this is kind of a big problem and it is very unlike Google to be offline for this amount of time. Currently 3 hours and counting.

For updates see: http://mail.google.com/support/ or to check out the carnage in real time while it happens see: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gmail

A couple of weeks ago I was very enthusiastic about Google’s Internet browser Chrome.

You only get to know a product by using it and so far I haven’t regretted by move.

There are only some minor niggles from a user point of view.

1) Some fonts don’t render properly, not a biggie for me.

2) Doesn’t work with Pay Pal.

3) Some issues with you tube style flash video.

All of these I can live with.

The one reason I am sticking with Chrome is the ability to drag a browser tab onto another monitor. This feature alone will keep me a Chrome user.

Someone asked me the other day what I thought about Google’s new Chrome web browser and I replied I has just rebuilt my computer and installing software is how it got all crudded up in the first place.

However curiosity got the better of me so I installed it on my non work machine.

When it comes to Internet browsers I use Internet Explorer as my main browser and have Firefox installed with the Google tool bar so I can quickly check web site Google PR ratings, in all honesty I actually dislike both browsers.

So what do I think of Google Chrome?

Easily and by far a better and more fluid user experience. It feels evolved and well thought out.

I need to play with it a little more but my instinct tells me I’m going to be a Google Chrome user very shortly. I don’t care its still in beta.

A good intro into Google Chrome is this 10 features video.

Link: http://www.google.com/chrome/index.html

Google have a new search tool called Google Insight.

It allows you to compare search trends in different regions of the world.

This would be ideal for companies researching how products are searched for in different countries or regions within countries.

Say for example you had a single web site for your international company but were based in 3 international territories this tool could help you identify the popular search terms in the countries that matter to you.

I love how Google share this kind of thing.

Link: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Web Site analytics are painful to decode at the best of times. But one metric that is usually sound is the number of unique visitors that your Web Site gets.

Unless your web site is super sticky commercial companies rely on being able to be found in Internet search engines like Google.

I monitor and report on the web stats for several companies spread over many different business classifications. In July 2008 on average and collectively the number of unique visitors dropped by 7% and this was unusual based on the pattern of web traffic in the preceding months.

July should have been a big month as it had 23 working days compared to June’s 21. My clients are UK based so would not have been affected by the American July 4th Holiday.

So what happened:

There are two possible things happening here:

1) Google changed dramatically the ranking algorithm.

or

2) The doom and gloom in the economy has affected the number of unique visitors looking for products and services from commercial companies.

I actually think its bit of both 15% Google and 85% the economy.

At some level there is a link between consumer confidence and web traffic to commercial companies.