« My Very First Cartoon | Main | Their Starters Must Be On A Bye Week »

March 15, 2006

Shaking My Fist At Gmail

Little Google e-mail reading robots, why have you forsaken me?

My big plan for last Tuesday was that I was going to watch the Barcelona - Chelsea UEFA Champion's League match on tape delay on ESPN2. As all seven longtime readers can attest, Barca - Chelsea Champions League ties have a long and storied history here at thatkidinthecorner (Shouting at the TV, Continental Edition, March 2005). Despite being "in C@L at work" instead of "in Amsterdam at some bar" I remained determined to enjoy the game.

The game would be live on the Left Coast starting at 11:45 am. Normally it would be broadcast live on ESPN2, but due to the World Baseball Classic, the game would be shown on tape delay at 9:30 pm PST. (Broadcast simultaneously on the East Coast at 12:30 am -- yikes, certainly a much tougher time to watch!) My goal for the afternoon would be to avoid the result and watch the game as though I was seeing it live that evening.

Many preparations were made!

E-mails with "NO SPOILERS" in the title were exchanged. Sports content sites were avoided (even relatively innocuous ones, though I still felt okay checking the NFL site and profootballtalk for details on the NFL labor negotiations). Personalized web portals were temporarily reconfigured or avoided altogether. Coworkers who might want to discuss such things were warned of my plan.

These preparations were thorough!

For the most part, the afternoon was incident-free. I was pretty busy at work, and wasn't even really tempted to look at any of the dangerous/ risky places on the Internets. Then, a little after 5 pm, I decided to look at my Gmail.

Gmail, once my primary e-mail account, is now a secondary account for me. I really don't check it more than once or twice a day. And that isn't really Gmail's fault, per se -- larger forces in my life conspired against Gmail. (For a while, I was definitely a huge Gmail supporter. I liked the speed, I liked that it let me economize on clicks, and I liked that it packed a lot of information into one screen.) Though I'm not a huge user anymore, I've certainly noticed that they've been upgrading Gmail pretty frequently of late and adding all sorts of new features and gizmos -- though I haven't really tried all of them yet (especially the chat thingie -- shame on me!). And, to be honest, it's been fighting with my browser a bit of late -- since they opened up Gmail to the public, I feel like it's been a lot less reliable. Of course, I've been fooling with a new browser, so who knows. Anyhoo, this is all a long way of saying that they've been adding new gizmos to the Gmail lately. You got it.

It is at one of said gizmos that I am now shaking my fist!

As I glanced at my inbox, my eye caught the lone news headline at the top of the page in the web clips carousel: Ronaldinho leads Barcelona past Chelsea. AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! Damn you, Gmail! I know that your anonymous little e-mail robots were scraping the text of my e-mails for keywords and attempting to match relevant news stories to the preferences you inferred from said e-mails. It's terribly generous of you! And very clever (if not a little bit invasive)! But it is not what I wanted from my e-mail last Tuesday. In fact, it was the exact opposite of what I wanted. It ruined my surprise. I don't need my e-mail to ruin surprises for me.

At a macro level, this is a nice little anecdote that highlights just how hard it is to introduce innovation, especially in technology. For the most part, Gmail has been very impressive -- it certainly impacted the paradign for web-based e-mail. But while it's nifty that they were able to read my e-mail and know that I'm the sort of person who follows UEFA Champions League soccer, it's not so impressive that I ran into that information in a place I didn't want it. Yes, the web clip is a nice features. But it'd be even nicer if they made it a little easier to turn it off (maybe a little inline x next to the arrow buttons). Shame on me for not being more thorough, for sure. But shame on them for pushing information where it wasn't wanted.

Maybe this is an edge case, and maybe my reaction is a reflection of the world I'm in of late (and maybe I'm just crying over split milk), but it definitely details the importance of thinking through how people will use your products before you just chuck new features at them. Of course, it's worth noting that this certainly isn't a Gmail or Google-specific problem -- it's tough to find a technology firm that isn't regularly guilty of shipping features for the sake of shipping features. Gmail (an otherwise supercool product) just ended up in my crosshairs because they ruined the goofy soccer game for me.

(The web clips will be turned off on the 28th-29th.)

Posted by thatkid at March 15, 2006 8:02 PM under Biznass

Comments

Post a comment

About ThatKid

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 thatkidinthecorner