Gmail, I love you.
Posted Mar 18, 2010, 2:13 PM UTC
16078
That's actually a little creepy.
Send "My box of lesbian midget porn is on the way!" to twitter?
Update facebook status to "excited?"
Submit "For each upvote..." to reddit?
Where does the madness end?
23
I'm not sure the creepy part is where you think it is.
17
It would be more creepy if a real person is providing those suggestions. Thankfully, it's Google's algorithm doing the work. It doesn't have to be creepy unless you initiate on those suggestions.
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[deleted]
10
I wanted a Gmail invite so bad, I did the only logical thing. I pretended I was a girl, whined somewhere--I think on Fark, but I don't remember--and I had three invites in less than an hour.
People still sell Google Voice invites on Ebay.
http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=p3907.m38.l1313&_nkw=google+voice+invite
10
Google Voice invites are so 2009.
1
I feel kinda shitty, I've got a Google Voice account all set up and working, and I've never logged back in after I finally got my invite. All the while there are people out there ready to maim a kitty for simply a chance to have one...
0
I'm the same way. I got an invite, signed up, tied it to my cell, and forgot about it. The other day somebody's fax machine decided my google number was another fax and kept calling until I logged in and blocked them.
1
Why don't you use it for your voicemail? Having your voicemail transcribed and sent to your email/phone is its most useful feature IMO.
2
yeah, i caught a realy good(short) username.
0
I love you gmail, thank you for reading my personal mail.
10
I wonder how people would feel if an advertising company ran the US post office and read your mail to figure out the best way to advertise to you.
5
Except nobody at Google is reading your mail. It's an algorithm, and the data persists only until your ads are served.
It's very, very different to have an indifferent algorithm scan your mail and have a human being read (and remember) your mail.
15
Having them read by a human feels different from having them read by a software.
11
Yeah, I hope they touch the screen while they read, just stroke my words a little.
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OMG my router reads all my email!
3
They provide a high quality product for free and are up front about their practices. There are a million other ways to receive email if you don't like it.
3
I'm so glad I sold them my soul.
8
Who needs a soul when you have google docs?
2
Yahoo does the same thing, but instead of linking it to the side, they just link to it right in the email.
5
OMFG! THAT's SO FUCKING AMAZING.
(written in the manner of GOOG fanboys)
0
FYI yahoo mail does this as well. I use gmail, but only for personal e-mail. Yahoo is used for orders/signup spam, etc.
4
So, nick..... what did you get?!
3
wow... you fail at reading partially blacked-out emails
0
oh, hey. look at that.
shoes.
3
What do you mean?
Oh sweet, a penny!
2
...except when it confuses a telephone number for a DHL tracking number. Can't win them all, I guess.
3
I blame that on DHL
0
It's been doing that for quite a while.
What I think is cool though, is that if you have contacts saved to your Google account and get an android phone, it will automatically pull all that information so that you dont have to enter it in by hand.
3
That's not cool, that's just scary. I don't want google knowing anything about me, but privacy is a thing of the past these days.
2
No. You have to manually enter them on the website first. Then you log into your phone with your Google login information and it will pull them. Similar to what Yahoo Messenger does.
So basically, if you want to keep it private, dont put it on the web.
2
My favorite is when it pulls a Google Chat user pic unknowingly and it pops up the next time that person calls.
1
Works on the iPhone as well. Setup one account and you get your mail, contacts, physical addresses (one touch for google maps), phone numbers and calendar as well. All automatically synchronized. It's practically lifechanging.
0
The attention to detail impresses me, I use the high score theme and only recently realized it changes based on the time of the day.
2
and it only took 30 seconds to implement
2
Oh, stop fellating google.
Any one of us would have coded this. We could have, and we would have. The only special thing about google is that it's run by techies, so somebody is willing to pay for features like this.
2
No, let him finish.
3
In this context, your user name is disturbing.
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:D
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GOOGLE KNOWS ALL!
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edit: GODGLE
5
I love Gmail, and it's taken a lot of effort for me to go over to threadsy, even though I love trying new things, because I'm such a loyal Gmail user. I love having twitter and facebook integrated into my inbox.
1
If threadsy put mentions into my inbox as they happen (instead of 15-30 minutes later) and allowed me to send from alternate email addresses, I'd go back to it.
1
I just have different Google Apps for all my emails, so it allows me to send from each of them. I get my emails within 5min, I think (about the same as gmail). What I really need is threaded messages, signatures and keyboard shortcuts. I really use keyboard shortcuts a lot.
2
Thanks for making me aware of this!
1
This is great for my cheesecake business. I do exactly what the shipper of your package did. Then I tag it with "Order Shipped" and I can pull up every shipping confirmation I've ever sent and track each package.
1
Cut out the middleman. Send cheesecake by gmail.
3
As we've seen of the course of the last few days, Gmail is an amazing bit of programming.
Not because it's features are breathtakingly amazing, but because they are thoughtful additions made by a gigantic company. How does someone as large as Google remain so empathetic to their users? It's really quite impressive.
Add to that the fact that gmail generally works really, really well (good up time, not terribly buggy, etc) and it's even more astounding.
They really need to be teaching these lessons in management classes...
One of the main reasons is that all of Google uses Gmail, so when they think of a feature they want, they just go and add it. One of my favorites is that you can reply to an email from your sent box, and it goes to who you originally sent it to (not to yourself). Using your own product is a great way to guarantee it's good.
I have been told that at Google, the desktop icon for Google Docs is a can of dog food.
Yep, i work at Google and I can verify that. We also get to play around with just about any new app / doc / tool that Google wants to release to the product, it's called Dog Fooding (as in eat your own dog food) - hence the icon.
Whoever downvoted you needs a good bitch slapping.
maybe it was MSN.
Probably yahoo. That dude's crazy.
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His slightly retarded little brother, AOL, is the one that scares me!
I don't know 'bout that man. I'm on the google love train as much as the next guy. But, first and foremost they are an advertising company. They know what you want because they track just about everything you do.
They are a massive company, and 97% of their revenue comes from ads. They know this business and I can't fault them for that. But they are still just ad men who happen to be really, really good at their jobs.
True but they use a big chunk of that revenue to provide us with products that work far better than even the closest competitor and they do it for free. Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that those products are also perfect vehicles for their ads but even their ads are the least intrusive and annoying in the industry.
They are also a company that seems hell bent on cataloging every piece of information on the planet. Which, like you said, gives us fantastic products at no price. But they are still an advertising company that is cataloging every piece of information on the planet.
Their motto may be "do no evil", but if all it takes is a motto to placate everyone, then we're in bad shape.
More features equals more clicks, equals more unique data, equal more data to mine, equals mo moneys for google. I really really doubt it's due to them being so empathetic to its users.
There are plenty other websites that rely on userdata to leverage money and don't provide nearly the same comfort in usability as Google.
Case in point: Facebook
I'm not saying it's altruistic of Google to provide this service... but it is empathetic of users.
The programming is so amazing that they still cannot parse appointments out of email messages and suggest adding them to the equally impressive google calendar. Seriously, I love and live in Gmail, but why have they still not been able to add this??
Actually, it can.
Upvote for the technically correct reply. Note, however, that Gmail's event detection is not very good. It misses many/most common invite structures. (Sorry, no examples handy. ) It also does a poor job of dealing with invites from Outlook. For example, it can't handle .ics files and Gcal doesn't let you confirm or reject an Outlook invite unless you save it then reopen the event, click Yes and save. More Google dogs need a side of Outlook with their meals.
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The happier they keep their users, the more likely they'll stick around, thus guaranteeing all of your data is available at their disposal at any time. They'll go out of their way with innovative features like this to ensure that they can mine all of your data for "future reference."
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