More interesting, though, is the data required to drive such a service. Google Latitude is powered by the Google Gears browser plugin, which also facilitates offline access to Gmail and a variety of other web enhancements through its in-browser database component. Vaguely mentioned in passing is another, lesser-known feature of Gears: Google’s WiFi location database. Essentially, Google has wardriven major cities in the US and other countries, searching for wireless networks and plotting each wireless router it finds on the map by the geographic coordinates of the drive-by vehicle that detected the wireless signal. With a large enough database, this allows Google to pinpoint most laptop computers on the map by looking up the hardware address of the wireless router they are currently connected to and determining the approximate position on the Earth. Scarily awesome!

Unless your using Yahoo Mail span (sorry!), you can even forward your old e-mail address to your new Gmail account and to move your existing and new e-mail messages all over to Gmail. This means you don’t even need to send friends one of those annoying “I changed my address” messages; it will all be automatic. If you’re still not convinced, consider this: Gmail users are younger, richer, good in bed and have higher credit scores.

Of course, you’re not getting Chrome’s performance improvements by doing this, but it’s at least a start. Shown above is my Firefox 3 looking like the Chrome browser [running in Linux with the chrome-like GTK theme and the MurrinaChrome Emerald theme]. Here is what I did to achieve this:

• Change the appearance.
  • Install the Chromifox theme for the overall look and feel
  • Install the LocationBar² extension for address bar highlighting
  • Install the Download Statusbar extension for Chrome-like download tracking
• Unify the address and search bars.
  • Get rid of the search box. From the View menu, select Toolbars > Customize and drag the Search box off the toolbar so it disappears.
  • Change the address bar search behavior to show results: In about:config, change the value of keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&q=
  • To restore the functionality of your search plugins, create Smart Keywords for your favorite websites.
• Speed up cross-site browsing by installing the DNS Prefetch extension.

Fear not, however, because there is a simple solution to this problem! This trick works because of plus addressing, a feature in Gmail that allows you to create an unlimited number of email addresses by adding a plus symbol (+) after your username. In other words, all mail sent to you+anything@gmail.com will arrive in your inbox. You can take advantage of this when aggregating your email accounts by having your secondary accounts forward to a unique plus address. For example, set your school email to forward to you+school@gmail.com and set your spam account to forward to you+junk@gmail.com.

Now for the real key: Gmail has a secret “deliveredto:” search operator that will catch all mail arriving at the given email address — whether or not you were listed in the To: header. In other words, this will even apply to messages from mailing lists and bcc emails. To automatically label you forwarded junk mail, for example, create a new filter and type deliveredto:you+junk@gmail.com in the Has the words textbox. Congratulations, now all of your forwarded email will be automatically labeled! The deliveredto: operator expects you to enter the entire email address, but if you want to filter on just a portion of the email address, you can place it inside of double quotes (for example, deliveredto:”+junk”).

Coincidentally, an Official Gmail Blog post about plus addressing appeared about six hours after this was published. Although plus addressing is nothing new, this is the first time Google has publicly acknowledged its existence on their blog. The official blog post did not mention the real secret to making plus addressing work, though, which is the “deliveredto:” operator.