Since July, the Sign-Up button on the GMail login page has been changing. The frequency of the changes hasn’t been constant, and there have been a large variety of different styles.

Since July 28, 2007, I have been taking screenshots of the different buttons, and I’m publishing the screen grabs here. It’s kind of fun, seeing a different button every day, but the question is “why?” Why is this happening? Are there some bored employees at Google?

Here are the buttons:

This odd occurrence is still happening, and I’m still taking screenshots of the new ones.

Google has been editing a YouTube video about GMail. The cool part? Everyone gets to participate. The first half of the video is currently online on the GMail Video Page. Just print-out the GMail “M-Velope” image and film yourself. The idea is to help everyone “imagine how an email message travels around the world.” It’s an interesting idea, take a look. The deadline for your clip submission is August 13th, and all clips must be under 10 seconds.

Cool, but I hope those Google guys are actually working on GMail, not devoting all their time to this!

 From the New York Times:

“When the Google and Vista search programs are run simultaneously on a computer, their indexing programs slow the operating system considerably, Google contended. As a result, Google said that Vista violated Microsoft’s 2002 antitrust settlement, which prohibits Microsoft from designing operating systems that limit the choices of consumers.”

You can read more at this post on Compiler.

An interesting rumor surfaced today. Could Apple and Google be planning something for Apple’s .Mac email service? There was a post on Engadget suggesting so.

There are several possibilities, supposing this rumor has any validity.

• .Mac could end up being powered by GMail
• Push GMail on the iPhone
• GMail integration with the Mac OS
• All of the above

There have been mysterious quotes from Steve Jobs as well. Is something being planned? Who knows.

Google just bought Feedburner! Is that surprising? It’s not to me (well, not too much anyway). Think of it this way:

•  Feedburner = RSS “re-hosting”, feed stats, and feed ads
•  Google = Web site stats, website ads

So, you combine the two.

I believe the feed stats will eventually be integrated with Google Analytics, the ads with Adsense, and the “re-hosting” as-is. I’m guessing feedburner.com will stay as it is now, but the services will be available in other parts of Google as well.

For example, you could access your feed’s stats at either feedburner.com or through Google Analytics.

I wonder how much Google paid for Feedburner. More or less than youTube? Personally, I think Feedburner is worth more than YouTube.