I know. I've gone from 'almost daily' to 'barely weekly'. And I do truly apologise. It certainly isn't intentional, and I've been using my train journeys to do a lot of catching up on other things. Although, no sooner am I to be caught up than I have a well-earned, hard-worked-for, once-in-a-lifetime holiday.
Want another hyphen? Go on then...
-
Anyhow... I was checking my Gmail at work the other day.
Everyone is amazed by Google. Google is so simple, yet so intelligent. You start typing and it predicts what you are typing next, it already knows what you are thinking, fills in the blanks and shows you the answers within seconds.
And this is even without holding an account identifying you, as previously discussed.
So Gmail. Well, I've already ranted about how stupid its ad suggestions are, suggesting Spam recipes purely because you are in a Google-defined spam folder.
But now it gets more daft.
One if the 'innovations' if you can call it that of Gmail is 'labels'. Whereas before you could simply store things in folders, now you could ALSO assign labels. And that, apparently was a crucial difference. You should be able to associate one email with many labels. Whereas before you had to stick it in one folder, now it could be in a folder, but attached to a number of others by way of these labels.
But what that actually means is confusion. Neither the human mind nor the computer mind is adapted to putting one thing into many places. Even with computers at the moment, you have one master copy, from which you make back-up or testing copies, and to which you point shortcuts. I don't know as we will ever quite get there in the current generation, so whilst I am not averse to "thinking outside the box" and entirely new solutions to problems, I don't think this achieves what it is supposed to, or in fact anything at all.
However, one of the things I did notice was a little yellow arrow to the side of each email. Each and every single email. I hovered over this icon and it told me this meant it had flagged the message as 'important'. Not that I had flagged the message as important, that IT had flagged the message as important. Each and every message. So, my 'important' label tab was rammed with every message I had received, not in any particular order.
Gmail told me that I could start deselecting messages, so that Gmail could 'learn' which messages were important to me. But this presents me with two problems...
Firstly, how will I trust Gmail to decide that? If they have defaulted every single message as being important and I have to knock them down, rather than electively bump them up in priority, it shows they don't really understand me. So would it ever learn from me?
And secondly, how much time and effort is it going to take for me to teach Gmail what is important to me? If it isn't even starting out with a basic level of intuition, is it going to take me telling it the same thing more than once? Is it seemingly at random going to start attaching importance or even other labels to things based on one selection a few years ago? The amount of effort seems to me to be far disproportionate to any ultimate benefit. And therefore that icon and that label and that tab are useless to me. Very unimportant, though obviously Gmail will probably miss the irony.
It could be worse though, it could be Hotmail, which seems to spend so long reloading and refreshing so as to make links practically unclickable.
Want another hyphen? Go on then...
-
Anyhow... I was checking my Gmail at work the other day.
Everyone is amazed by Google. Google is so simple, yet so intelligent. You start typing and it predicts what you are typing next, it already knows what you are thinking, fills in the blanks and shows you the answers within seconds.
And this is even without holding an account identifying you, as previously discussed.
So Gmail. Well, I've already ranted about how stupid its ad suggestions are, suggesting Spam recipes purely because you are in a Google-defined spam folder.
But now it gets more daft.
One if the 'innovations' if you can call it that of Gmail is 'labels'. Whereas before you could simply store things in folders, now you could ALSO assign labels. And that, apparently was a crucial difference. You should be able to associate one email with many labels. Whereas before you had to stick it in one folder, now it could be in a folder, but attached to a number of others by way of these labels.
But what that actually means is confusion. Neither the human mind nor the computer mind is adapted to putting one thing into many places. Even with computers at the moment, you have one master copy, from which you make back-up or testing copies, and to which you point shortcuts. I don't know as we will ever quite get there in the current generation, so whilst I am not averse to "thinking outside the box" and entirely new solutions to problems, I don't think this achieves what it is supposed to, or in fact anything at all.
However, one of the things I did notice was a little yellow arrow to the side of each email. Each and every single email. I hovered over this icon and it told me this meant it had flagged the message as 'important'. Not that I had flagged the message as important, that IT had flagged the message as important. Each and every message. So, my 'important' label tab was rammed with every message I had received, not in any particular order.
Gmail told me that I could start deselecting messages, so that Gmail could 'learn' which messages were important to me. But this presents me with two problems...
Firstly, how will I trust Gmail to decide that? If they have defaulted every single message as being important and I have to knock them down, rather than electively bump them up in priority, it shows they don't really understand me. So would it ever learn from me?
And secondly, how much time and effort is it going to take for me to teach Gmail what is important to me? If it isn't even starting out with a basic level of intuition, is it going to take me telling it the same thing more than once? Is it seemingly at random going to start attaching importance or even other labels to things based on one selection a few years ago? The amount of effort seems to me to be far disproportionate to any ultimate benefit. And therefore that icon and that label and that tab are useless to me. Very unimportant, though obviously Gmail will probably miss the irony.
It could be worse though, it could be Hotmail, which seems to spend so long reloading and refreshing so as to make links practically unclickable.
No comments:
Post a Comment