Google reportedly has a planned press conference on Tuesday to announce some new features to its online email service which will turn it into more of a social hub of communication between friends. The new “widget” that will be added to the free Gmail tool will allow users to keep up with their friends through a stream of quick updates, similar to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

This is not a surprising move for Google who is continuously trying to keep online users centered around Google’s tools, providing the company with more information as well as additional content and exposure to online ads.

Google could also potential integrate other online social media content into it’s stream from users, such as videos from YouTube or pictures from Picasa. It could even tie into external sources with open API’s such as …

Google announced today at Interop New York that Gmail will now support IMAP along with POP3 for synchronizing email across multiple mobile devices and computers. This new addition to the popular free email service allows users to download and organize emails on any one interface including online, through their mobile device or on their computer and instantly see the changes on the other interfaces.

IMAP is not a new technology but is new and a welcomed upgrade to Gmail. The IMAP support was presented by Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise who announced users could begin using IMAP immediately, however according to the Gmail site Google will be rolling this out to everyone over the next few days, so if you don’t see it right away it’s probably coming to your account soon. Google has a video that describes how to configure your Gmail account to turn enable IMAP and how to configure your iPhone with the service which is available after the jump.

This is a follow up to the previous post on the Gmail Contacts Exploit.

It appears the the problem has been partially fixed by Google. A blog on zdnet is claiming that the issue is partially fixed. They are reporting that the issue may still exist on some Google domains. Another blogger is stating that the vulnerability still exists. SlipperyBrick is researching the issue and will keep our readers informed of any developments in the case.

Update: The author has posted to the Google Group handling Gmail issues to get a response from Google. The author of this post uses Gmail as his primary email client.

The problems continue for Gmail users. A vulnerability was found in the Gmail web based email application that allowed anyone to see a Gmail user’s contacts. The vulnerability came from the fact that apparently Gmail stores the users contacts in a JavaScript file. Any clever web hacker could steal this information as long as the user was logged into their Gmail account and visited a malicious site.

Gmail has had problems in the past with this sort of issue. Jeremiah Grossman discovered the issued and reported it to Google.

Both issues revolve around using JavaScript, the scripting language used in web pages, to make requests for data. If the request is made from the HTML within a Gmail message then the cookies used to authenticate a user to Gmail may be used to get information …