“Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers,” says Google software engineer Robin Schriebman. “But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?’”

Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours! Thanks to everyone using this new feature http://bit.ly/aRgNtc

Google tested the feature internally before releasing it to the public (in the U.S. so far). When users with Google Voice numbers call people, that number will display as the caller ID.

Along with the launch, the company showed off some phone booths it will be setting up in universities and airports. Danny Sullivan got to peek inside one:

The phone booths should go a long way in showing off this feature and familiarizing people with Google Voice in general, which seems to be the company’s real goal.

Clearly there is an interest in making phone calls from Gmail, as the numbers from the first day indicate.

“Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it. With the new ‘Apps Search’ lab, we just made that all a bit simpler,” writes Google software engineer Bram Moolenaar.

“You may notice that mail results show up just as fast as before while non-mail results may take a tiny bit longer. That way, if you’re just looking for an email, having this lab enabled won’t slow you down,” adds Moolenaar.

The feature also comes with “did you mean?” suggestions.

Given that the feature is a Gmail Labs experiment, it is subject to bugs, so keep this in mind if you turn it on. The feature can be turned on by going to Gmail settings, and clicking the “labs” tab. From there find “Apps Search”.

“Yahoo! Mail and Messenger are available as separate streamlined apps, however they offer common features that will give you a better mobile communications experience that’s easy to use and immediately familiar,” says Yahoo Mail Product Manager Lee Parry. “Both apps let you compose messages with rich text, express yourself through our many Yahoo! emoticons, access Yahoo! Address Book and phone contacts, as well as share photos that you’ve taken on your phone.”

“The Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger Android apps offer many of the core features that you find in their PC counterparts,” adds Perry. “In the Yahoo! Mail Android app, you can search for important messages with our Full Search and Smart Folders features and organize messages into the same personal folders you use on the PC. In Messenger you can set your Yahoo! Messenger status message, view the status messages of your buddy list contacts and chat with your MSN/Windows Live Messenger friends.”

Google has decided that instead of showing completely irrelevant ads in such cases, it will just dig back into another conversation from your Gmail usage, and show you ads related to that. This is illustrated in the clip below.

“Let’s say you’re looking at a confirmation email from a hotel in Chicago. Next to your email, you might see ads about flights to Chicago,” explains Gmail Product Manager Steve Crossan. “But sometimes, there aren’t any good ads to match to a particular message. From now on, you’ll sometimes see ads matched to another recent email instead. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren’t any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead.”

Google is careful to point out that it doesn’t store any extra information to show these ads. It just picks a different recent email to match. It’s all automated, and no humans are involved in picking the ads. The process is compared to Gmail’s spellchecker. Google also notes that no email or personal information is shared with advertisers.

The change will be rolling out over the next several days, so if you are still seeing ads completely irrelevant to any conversation you’ve had, you may not have the new system implemented yet.

Yahoo says people can now “do more, share more, and stay better connected from their inbox.” They also say that the new enhancements they’ve made to Yahoo Mail are a “key milestone’ to the Yahoo Open Strategy, which extends social and open features.

The new design comes with an application box that users can personalize. It combines a calendar, a notepad, and other third-party apps. There’s a new Evie app, which will launch next month and let users create and send invitations to events, as well as check the status of events and add them to their calendar. The app list will also include Flickr, PayPal, Picnik, Xoopit, and ZumoDrive  apps.

There are some new photo sharing features in the new version, which let the user multi-select and drag and drop photos so they are easier to attach to emails. You can also view thumbnail previews and rotate pictures.

Speaking of attachments, they have also increased the limit on file size up to 25MB (it was 10 before).

Yahoo also has a new mobile version of mail on the way, which provides one-click access to check, compose, and search email. It comes with support for downloading attachments like Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, and photos. It also comes with the ability to access personal folders. Yahoo says the mobile enhancements will be available on over 400 devices with HTML browsers.