I know you people are probably sick of hearing me talk about Google – hell, I’m sick of talking about Google – but the company continues to amaze me.  This is going to sound really stupid, but sometimes it’s like they read my mind.  I remember back in 2004 trying to find an old email in either Outlook at work or on my old Yahoo account and thinking “Google needs to come out with Google search for email.”  Then shortly thereafter they announced Gmail.  Voila.  (I may have mentioned it before, but I actually paid $20 on Ebay to buy an early invitation to Gmail so that I could secure the address I wanted.)

Anyway, since then they’ve improved Gmail tremendously with the addition of built-in chat and, most-recently, built-in videochat and audio calls – all right from Gmail.  They also completely redesigned Gmail’s programming to make it considerably faster, increased the available storage (which is essentially infinite as it continues to grow every day), and added too many other features to mention each of them.

Just this week – like two days ago – I was thinking “Man, I love me some Gmail, but I am so sick of this pale, sickly light blue color scheme.  I’m just tired of looking at it.  I wish Google would let me change Gmail’s color scheme.”  (And I’m aware that there are Greasemonkey and Stylish extensions for Firefox that allow you to change the color scheme – I’ve tried them and they seemed like they really slowed Gmail down so I always switched back for the sake of speed.)

So I woke up this morning and saw that Gmail is in the process of rolling out themes for Gmail!  Woo-hoo!  I don’t have them yet – they’re rolling them out to all Gmail users over the next couple of days – but some of you may already have them.  There should be a new Themes category in your Settings menu when you have them.

Some of them are kind of stupid and frivolous – like the Ninja theme, etc. – but a couple of them look pretty sharp and a lot more businesslike and easier on the eyes than the old default theme.  I like this one called Shiny:

And here’s a shot of a bunch of them – maybe all of them for now, not sure:

The second theme in the top row also looks like it may have promise – the dark navy and orange one.  I can’t wait to get these so I can check them out!

Okay, enough Google.  For now.  I wonder what they’ll announce tomorrow?

(Oh, today they also announced that they’re shuttering their short-lived virtual world experiment, Lively.  Never heard of it?  There you go.)

[UPDATE:  No, I do not own any stock in Google.  Why not I have no idea.]