India's United Progressive Alliance government is mulling censorship of the internet à-la China, to filter out any content that speaks against members of the ruling party. India's multi-partisan democracy is increasingly making use of the web as a medium of political discourse and exchange, something that only works to make voters more informed. Union minister of IT and Telecommunications Kapil Sibal kicked off a storm this week when he announced that he is in talks with representatives of search engines and social networking websites, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Microsoft to work out a censorship model that filters content that "unfairly maligns" the government. Apart from anti-government content, the government is concerned about hateful or "blasphemous" content, which could disturb communal harmony. "Some of the content which is being carried is blasphemous. This can hurt religious sentiments and it has to be removed," Sibal said.

Google, fresh out of a censorship and GMail espionage tussle with China, stated that it will not remove any content from its search results that are legal, merely on grounds of being "controversial". "We work really hard to both follow the law and also give people as much access to information as we can. So we follow the law when it comes to illegal content. And even where content is legal but breaks our own terms and conditions we take that down too, once we've been notified about it," said Google in a statement. "When content is legal but controversial we don't remove it because people's differing views should be respected, so long as they are legal."

Google recently mistakenly disabled the Gmail accounts of some users, a mistake caused by company's attempt to stop spammers.

I understand that some of you have had a frustrating experience with your accounts being inappropriately disabled. Our team is aware of the problem, and our engineers are continuing to investigate

said a Google staffer, identified as Google Guide. People whose accounts were disabled by mistake should have regained access to them already and no data should have been lost, the Google staffer also wrote. Google spokesperson Courtney Hohne said the mistakenly disabled accounts affected "a small fraction," well below 1 percent of the tens of millions of Gmail users.

Google has integrated AOL's AIM instant-messaging service into its Gmail Web-based e-mail client, the company announced on Tuesday. Gmail has had its own chat service since February 2006, but now Gmail users will be able to connect to AIM through a drop-down menu on the Gmail Web page, Google said. Gmail users can sign into AIM through the "set status here" menu. AIM contacts and Gmail chat will appear on the same menu. Initially only English version of the AIM service will be available, with more languages to join soon.

We're always looking for new and useful ways to help our users connect with friends, family, and coworkers

Google said in a statement.

Google has announced that it is working on releasing a completely re-written and optimised version of Gmail, as it attempts to achieve a customer satisfaction rating of over 70 percent. The new version has two main goals: to be faster and feature improved contact management. The results of initial tests are that users find the updated Gmail to be noticeably quicker and more responsive, and testers have also reported that there have been GUI enhancements including a new contacts screen and the ability to hide the chat. Other changes also include the ability to transfer pictures directly from Gmail to Google's Picasa service, in an attempt to reduce bandwidth and processing expenses for the client. Gmail 2.0 is expected to be launched either this year or early next year, and will be available via a "new version" option which will appear in the upper right of the mail screen.

GMail has gained IMAP support, one of the most requested features for Google's web-based e-mail service. If you log into your GMail account and head to "settings", the tab for "Forwarding and POP" should now read "Forwarding and POP/IMAP." If it doesn't, be patient, Google will be rolling out the new IMAP features across the service over the next few days. With IMAP you can access your mail via your desktop client, read mail, make changes and have those changes mirrored by any other client accessing the account. If you access your mail from multiple machines, IMAP allows them all to stay in sync. To enable IMAP in GMail just head to the settings page and change your access from POP to IMAP.

When GMail was first unleashed in 2004, its 1GB of storage space quickly put it ahead of the competition. Now, GMail is looking to further that previous lead, by booting storage space up to 3GB. The reason behind GMail's new storage space is a simple lack of space in some GMail accounts. Google saw a problem, and quickly found a way to fix it. Google Apps will also have storage space increased to 3GB, and Premier Google Apps members will get between 10 and 25GB of storage space.