Google announced the addition of OAuth support in Gmail in a blog post today, which is a highly positive move that allows you to give third party applications access to the contents on your email without having to give them your password. You may be familiar with the term from Twitter, who added OAuth support back in April of last year.

Besides making a more secure Gmail environment, the news could be even more significant if it inspires a flush of innovation from third party developers to build custom applications on top of Gmail. Google itself occasionally adds experimental new functionality via Gmail Labs that users can opt into, but a secure OAuth sign-in platform could be a key feature that really promotes an explosion of Gmail apps from outside developers.

It remains to be seen if that Gmail app gold rush will take off, but at least one company is already taking advantage of the new OAuth feature. Syphir makes an iPhone application called SmartPush, which lets you define under what conditions an incoming email should trigger a push notification on your phone. As illustrated in the screenshot above, thanks to OAuth you don’t have to give Syphir your Gmail password in order to access your email. Online cloud backup service Backupify let us know they’ll be adding OAuth support for their Gmail backup service as well beginning tomorrow.

What do you think: will we see an explosion of third party Gmail Apps emerge? What kind of apps would you want to see built on top of your email?

For years, we’ve heard that laptops are replacing desktops, but even though they have the advantage of being mobile, the little buggers (netbooks, especially) have the disadvantage of having a cramped keyboard.

Enter this optimistic folding laptop concept from designer Yang Yongchang – it’s black, it’s sleek, it has a huge (perhaps even a little too big?) keyboard, and some interesting design ideas, as seen on the images below.

The iWeb, as it’s called, is just a bunch of pretty images right now. But now that we have dual screen laptops, seeing something like this actually being sold on the market wouldn’t surprise us at all. Perhaps the next step is a dual-screen, keyboard-folding laptop?