Fishburn Hedges

01.09.2010

Why has Google added new functionality to its Gmail application? For most people in the real world, email’s OK as it is. Sure, sometimes you feel that many are irrelevant. Too often the bleep of a new arrival signifies your boss is breathing down your neck. But email does a simple job well. Right?

Not so fast. Scan the technology blogs, and you’ll get a different picture altogether. 'Email is broken' reflected Jemima Kiss at The Guardian earlier this year, as she contemplated ways to fix it.

And as Sam Diaz at ZD Net mused yesterday, 'email is broken and has been for some time'. It’s a refrain that can be heard from technology bloggers whenever they get the chance.

Gmail to deal with bologna

This week provided just such an opportunity, as Google launched a new prioritising filter for users of Gmail.  This natty new tool will learn how you read and respond to your email, cleverly calculating how important each one is, and placing your most vital communications into a special “priority” inbox.

Cryptically, Gmail’s product director Keith Coleman said, 'this is like a spam filter for the bologna.' What on Earth is he talking about and why has Google bothered?

Rating the tastiness of your inbox

To save you the time of looking it up yourself, 'Bologna' in this case is short for Bologna Sausage, which is similar to Mortadella – in other words, it’s a bit like Spam, only nicer.

And spam of the electronic variety, as we all know, is one of the costliest, most productivity sapping issues our society faces today, as the length of the Wikipedia entry on the issue surely testifies.

But hang on – is spam really such a major issue? Well, if you don’t think so, you’ve probably just categorised yourself as “normal”, the “majority”, or – perish the thought – a 'laggard'.

In the minds of innovators

For most people, electronic spam is a relatively minor irritant. But for a certain group of technology 'innovators', it’s a massive issue, and one that has broken email.

You may well wonder how these 'innovator' types have the time to categorise email by naming it after European sausages. But this attention to the minutiae is a vital aspect of the onward march of technology.  It’s the care and attention given by millions of geeks to issues such as just how 'tasty' an email is that eventually percolates to the top and drives the valuable innovations that we all gladly use.

We’ve seen the same passion for the detail before. How else do you think Google’s original search engine came about? It was because some deeply dorkish individuals got to thinking about whether Altavista, Lycos or Hotbot were really doing an adequate job in search.

Two of the most business savvy of these were called Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and as far as I can tell, they evidently prefer Bologna to Spam.

Posted by Peter Sigrist