Anyone who has ever tried to use Gmail as a central hub for their Email has likely fallen prey to one of the service’s annoying flaws: there was no way to use another site’s outgoing SMTP servers to send Email. For the vast majority of people this wasn’t an issue — Gmail was happy to send your Email for you from your Gmail account, along with message indicating that it was being sent “On Behalf Of” your other account. But those three words were still there, serving as a constant thorn in our sides. And to make matters worse, it could also confuse people: they might start sending messages to your Gmail account rather than your primary Email address. Today, you can kiss those “On Behalf Of”’s goodbye, as Gmail has just started allowing users to send their messages from third party SMTP servers.

If the previous paragraph confused you, here’s an explanation: Many people like to use Gmail’s web interface for their Email but don’t have the option of using Google Apps on their mail server, especially when it’s for their work account. Fortunately there’s a work around to this: simply have your work Email account auto-forward all incoming messages to your Gmail account. The option even allows you to send messages and make them look like they’re coming from your work account, rather than you Gmail account, but with one caveat: rather than actually send these messages from your work address, Google includes a message that says the message was sent “On Behalf Of” your address, while still showing the name of the Gmail account it was actually sent from.

It’s true that most people never noticed this (in fact many mail clients don’t show the “On Behalf Of” at all under default settings), and even if they did see it they probably didn’t care in the slightest. But it’s still been a source of annoyance for many of us.

How awesome is this? All credit goes to MeetTheBoss for creating this visualization (better quality image available when you click through), but it was too good not to share it with you.

It’s a visual representation of Amazon’s acquisitions and investments from 1998 until its most recent purchase of Zappos for a reported $928 million.

The image shows the giant Internet retailer was extremely active in 1999 and 2001 and significantly scaled back investments and buy-outs after the dotcom bubble burst, but has been picking up the pace, particularly since last year.

Who will be next on the map? Let’s hope it’s Krowdbuy

Some estimated 4.000 web addicts are attending Google’s I/O conference taking place today and tomorrow in San Francisco. Besides re-emphasizing its commitment towards HTML 5, which we will cover in more depth in an article coming up this weekend, Google announced the immediate availability of Google Web Elements.

This is how Google Web Elements typically will look like:

(Note: We’ve included a screen capture here, so you cannot interact with the “widget”.)

These new Google widgets are supposed to make embedding features provided by popular Google products more simple. The Google I/O site currently has a Calendar, a Conversation widget, one for including a Custom Search, the obligatory Maps widget, one for embedding News, Presentations, Spreadsheets and YouTube News.

Almost all of these products were available for embedded use before. Google just did not do a good job in guiding users how to use them. Having all of the widgets in one place and making customization easier might help to increase the reach.

We do not agree with TechCrunch which is predicting Google Web Elements to “spread across the web like wildfire” for two primary reasons:

First: Google Web Elements still don’t come with clean CSS. This limits a web master’s ability to adjust the look and feel of the widget to the overall site theme. And often you simply don’t want that your site looks too much like Google.

Second: The extremely popular WordPress blogging engine still has difficulties when it comes to embedding content contained within iframes. However, all Google Web Elements come in form of iframed HTML code. What should have been a simple copy and paste action becomes much more cumbersome. I’m not sure how the folks at Google could have missed this one.

Did you stumble across a cool use of Google Web Elements anywhere? Let us know!

Online display ads have gotten a bad rap lately. It’s a format, according to many sources, with declining investment and waning effectiveness.

But a study from iProspect may have discovered an unexpected benefit of online display ads.

When Internet users were surveyed to find out what actions they took when viewing a display ad on an ad-supported Website, nearly one-third said they clicked on the ad.

In addition, 27% reported that they did an online search for the product, brand or company, and 21% typed the company Web address in their browser. Nine percent sought additional information using social media tools.

That means a click is only one measure of a display ad’s effectiveness.

Among respondents who saw a display ad and performed a related search at some point, the largest proportion (38%) visited the advertiser’s site through search results, 11% searched but did not click on any of the results, and 14% searched, visited the site and purchased the product advertised.

How likely ad responders were to purchase a product depended on how well-acquainted they were with the offering or company.

One-third of those who knew the product eventually purchased, compared with 14% of “first timers” who learned about the offering or the company and eventually bought something.

“Online display advertising is far from dead,” said Robert Murray of iProspect.

“In essence, search is an alternative mechanism for Internet users to respond to online display,” he added. “If marketers are going to invest in display then they should leverage search marketing to help them capture the demand that display advertising creates.”

Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos.

What does this mean for how we will come to consume information? John Borthwick from Betaworks has identified the real-time Web as a key investment opportunity (Betaworks portfolio companies include Twitter, bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Chartbeat, and Tumblr). He admits he and other investors are still feeling in the dark, but he describes the shift he is trying to capitalize on this way in a post titled “Distribution . . . now”:

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages.

In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.

In a sense, he is trying to rationalize his investment strategy. But if he is correct, the shift from pages to ever-widening eddies of information will have a dramatic downstream impact on many Web businesses, especially media businesses. This rising stream has the potential to fundamentally change the contours of media distribution on the Web. Large destination sites like Yahoo and AOL, already weakened as distribution hubs by search and social networks, now face the prospect of becoming completely bypassed. No wonder AOL is sticking the stream in every part of its service, from its homepage to Bebo to AIM. (Yahoo is grappling with the emergence of the stream as well, but so far still thinks it can hold onto its place as a central traffic and distribution hub).

The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them. Already, we are seeing Web pages adopt the stream as a new user-interface. Web pages are increasingly being designed as places to present the most relevant streams of information. And with streams of data spreading everywhere, search actually becomes more important than ever as a navigation tool. As Borthwick points out:

Traffic isn’t distributed evenly in this new world. All of a sudden crowds can show up on your site.

Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.

The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of teh notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:

This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.

So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.

(Photo credit: Flickr/Justin Lowery)