First of all today Google released the beta version of its Google Desktop 3.0. Besides some new important features like dragging panels out of the sidebar and place them anywhere you want on the desktop or sending content from your sidebar to others, probably the most important new one is the Search across computers one.
Important from the utility point of view as well as the privacy issues debate it will launch. That because:
In order to share your indexed files between your computers, we first copy this content to Google Desktop servers located at Google. This is necessary, for example, if one of your computers is turned off or otherwise offline when new or updated items are indexed on another of your machines. We store this data temporarily on Google Desktop servers and automatically delete older flies, and your data is never accessible by anyone doing a Google search.
Basically Google Desktop gathers all manner of data on one’s computer and makes it available via another, if the user chooses to store it on Google’s servers.
More than that Google added lately new features to its free mail service, in a try to push its IM client to mainstream. As such Gtalk chats are now integrated (along with the chat hsitory) in the webmail client. In terms of gmail too, it seems that is more than that:
Their next big move will likely be GMail for domains — a powerful way for anybody who owns a domain to utilize GMail as a mail server, not just a client.
More here.