Apparently the smarty-pants engineers at Google are as human as the rest of us – meaning they’ve engaged in the e-mail equivalent of drunk dialing. And they aim to put a stop to it, by way of new software, called Mail Goggles, that red flags late night, potentially problematic e-mails to the ex and forces you to answer a series of timed math questions prior to sending.
(Already I see a hitch: Does it have to be math? How about French New Wave trivia, or a name-the-sexual-dysfunction series of Philip Roth multiple choices?)
Excerpt from the Guardian UK’s article “Google Mail Goggles aims to end drunken email embarrassment” after the jump:
The idea, according to the Gmail engineer Jon Perlow, is to help those who are a little too tired and emotional to foresee the consequences of their actions.
“Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send,” Perlow confessed on the Gmail blog.
“Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late-night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together.”
The programme, he said, was designed to establish whether “you’re really sure you want to send that late-night Friday email … what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple maths problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?”.
[link via Matt Dentler’s indieWIRE blog]
This article appears in October 3 • 2008.
