Now GMail Apps

Google has announced that it will allow oAuth to be enabled for its IMAP interface. What the complex technical jargon means is that your GMail data (i.e. emails) can be accessed directly without going through the GMail interface. This opens the possibility of external apps and mashups to be built to provide additional services to you. (You will obviously have to authorize the apps - but you will not need to provide your username/password to them; if you are logged in to your GMail, that's more than enough).

Here are some ideas of the kind of GMail mashups we may get to see:

• Search integration* - this has been on my wishlist since a long time. Whenever I search for something, my own inbox (apart from information from the web) may be a potential source of the best matches. So it would be cool to see results from my inbox side-by-side the usual search results.
• SMS alerts: Local players can build apps to send you SMS alerts for incoming mails in your inbox. They can even provide filtering rules so that only filtered mails generate SMS alerts.
• Online Back-up: Players like Mozy can launch services for online backup of your email as a Disaster Recovery measure

The good part is that Google has already begun working with other companies like Yahoo and Mozilla on a formal Internet standard for using OAuth with IMAP/SMTP. So we may soon see other players launch similar oAuth integration features - Outlook may be the most awaited.

More:http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/03/oauth-access-to-imapsmtp-in-gmail.html

*I had once tried to use the GMail search feature in HTML version of GMail to provide a simple iframe based integration of Google+GMail search. Now, with oAuth this may be a possibility.