Some Gmail users may see some changes in their email inbox today, as Google pilots a new enhancement dubbed “Priority Inbox.”

The premise is that all unread and important emails are pushed to the top, while items you have already read, and never marked as ‘important,’ are pushed to the bottom of the page.

Some emails are going to be auto-flagged as important, using Google’s famous algorithms which determine what you read, and who you correspond with the most.  If you read your mother’s emails, and reply back, (and you know you should, because she loves you) her email will end up on the top of your inbox.  If you receive a daily newsletter, and never open it, those will likely end up further down the list.

This nerd is still trying to process whether this enhancement will make my email experience better, and I am chomping at the bit for my access to this beta to try it out.

My initial thought is that with well over a decade of email use, I’m used to seeing my email in chronological order, and looking at the oldest unread items first, so as to not leave anyone waiting too long for a reply.  This might mean that I need to adjust my thought process when it comes to email.

With that said, I usually have between 300 and 500 items in my inbox alone, and have to dedicate hour-long sessions to categorizing and archiving even my weekly airline specials, since I am a digital pack-rat.  I never delete anything that can be archived, in the off-chance I want to retrieve the information later.  (That sounded really weird when I read it aloud; please don’t judge me too harshly).  This enhancement might allow me to get a better handle on which newsletters I need to unsubscribe from, or auto-filter to the archive.

Even though I know I’m a little overboard with my sense of privacy, and  I’m aware no one at Google is actually ‘reading’ my email, it already creeps me out a bit that they serve ads based on my email content.  Now the algorithms are going to rank my digital relationships, and give precedence to those I prefer to receive email from.  This is something I already do anyway, but it will be weird to see it implemented as a formal process.

So over the next week or so, be sure to look for this enhancement to your Gmail, and let us know how you like it.  Okay?

UPDATE FOR CHROME USERS:  When you first launch the new Gmail, don’t be shocked to hear rag-time piano music.  There is an embedded video on the page, and it auto-starts.  Many beta users thought it was a virus.  Other browser users should not have the video start automatically.

Google announced today that Wave, its hybrid email / IM / collaboration experiment is finally available to all.

If you’re like me, months ago you asked around of your Google friends to find out if anyone had any invites left for Wave.  Then, after playing around with it for a few minutes you got bored and haven’t so much as glanced at it since.

In theory it seems to have potential.  Once you roll email, chat, file sharing, and scalable collaboration into a single interface why not say goodbye to your old ways of communicating?  Turns out that there are a few problems:

1. With Gmail you already communicate in near real-time.  You can even start a IM conversation or video chat directly from your email dashboard.  When it comes to the whole social media slant Google Buzz steps in to steal some of Wave’s thunder as well.
2. Google is never going to take over as the collaboration engine at the enterprise level.  Blame it on productivity concerns, blame it on privacy concerns, or blame it on Microsoft, but Outlook and Microsoft Communicator are going to be hard to part with outside of small shops, start-ups, or forward thinking / open-minded employers.
3. As far as I can tell, you have to be a member of the G-World in order to take advantage of Wave to begin with.  Given that many folks are married to their Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. and aren’t going to jump to Google just to use Wave I think it will continue to suffer from a lack of adoption outside of specifically targeted project use.

I’m guessing that there are people out there that use it and love it, and I’m even pretty sure that it was well designed and works as well as any other Google application (mail, maps, picasa, etc), but I’m betting that it’s only going to continue to serve a niche market.  Chances are, Google would have been better served by either giving out more invitations initially while people were still clamoring for it because now I doubt that anyone really cares.

With that being said, is there anyone out that makes use of Wave, or would care to defend it?  I’d love to know what it’s really all about… in case I’ve really missed the point.