Gmail had an april fool joke running on April 1, saying that Gmail had introduced an automatic mood controller and email typer for people. It would auto-reply, auto-correct etc. It was supposed to have been based on AI etc etc.
April fools joke, it may have been, but some of the new labs feature are indeed futuristic. Very futuristic. The latest feature – ‘Suggest user’, suggests any names, you may have missed in the cc list. Everytime something like this comes up, I always end up with a “Ahah. I have had a situation like that!”. And I bet everyone has. You plan to send an email to everyone in the family, and miss out your fathers name ? You plan to send an email to all your friends in Bangalore, but forget your neighbour !
This whole ‘labs’ thing of Google is really good. Folks inside people who capture their most frequent aha ! moments and put it in as experimental features – is by far the most creative product innovation methodology I have ever seen.
Visit the gmail blog post for more details here.