The latest from TechCrunch
- Remember Magic Inbox? Yep, That's What Is Now Gmail Priority Inbox
- Former Digg Engineer: Digg v4 Is Here To Stay
- Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You. And It's Fantastic.
| Remember Magic Inbox? Yep, That's What Is Now Gmail Priority Inbox | Top |
| In May 2009, I wrote a post speculating about something called “Magic Inbox.” What was so special about it? It was a reference found in the code of Gmail by the blog Google Operating System , and appeared to point to a new Gmail feature that would sort your email with the help of your social connections. Many of us wondered if such a feature would be launching soon. But that never happened. Well, until tonight, that is. Magic Inbox is the new Gmail Priority Inbox . Gmail Product Director Keith Coleman made that revelation during our meeting with him last week to discuss the new Priority Inbox. Magic Inbox had been in testing at Google for a long, long time leading up to this launch. “ We went through so many versions of this ,” Coleman said. In fact, Coleman noted that the idea to prioritze email based on who you contact that most was an original idea for Gmail itself, but no one could nail the combination of user interface and features. Obviously now, they think they have. Over the years, Google has tried various grouped views, and even ordering email in one inbox by order of importance, Coleman noted. But this priority filter is what they finally decided to focus on several months ago. With the feature turned on, Priority Email looks at a lot of things, such as who you email a lot, who you chat with, and who you actually read email from, among other things. That’s slightly different from the Magic Inbox code dug up last year, which seemed to be focused on the idea of “friends”. As we’re all well aware, “friends” has been a tricky concept for Google to tackle — though they’re about to try again with whatever their upcoming social product is. For this, it was smart to go with something less predicated on a concrete social construct, and go with something more vague. How does it work? It’s magic. We finally found out what’s in the box . CrunchBase Information Gmail Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Former Digg Engineer: Digg v4 Is Here To Stay | Top |
| “Digg v4 is not a redesign, not a reskin, it is a 100% rewrite. It's completely new design, code, architecture, and infrastructure. It has almost no relationship to the v3 system whatsoever. “ Social news site Digg is currently in the particularly bloody throes of its fifth user revolt and, unlike revolts one through four, we’ve heard that Digg is absolutely positively not capitulating to users on this one. Has Kevin Rose finally decided to heed our advice? It’s not so cut and dry according to former Digg engineer Ian Eure who wrote “They Can't Go Back” on his personal blog earlier today. One reason they can’t move backward? Talent, Eure emphasizes, in underline. “Even if they still have the systems and the desire to roll back, they don't have the talent to maintain Digg v3. Nearly everyone who built and worked on the legacy Digg codebase has left the company. When I started at Digg, the engineering team was: Joe Stump, Matt Erkkila, Eli White, Steve Williams, Steve French, Kurt Wilms, Nancy White, Bill Shupp, and Micah Snyder. Operations had Ron Gorodetzky, Scott Baker, and Tim Ellis. Except for Matt, everyone else has moved on. There were others, but those people were the core team that made the legacy code work, and they're gone now.” This makes sense. At the moment the Digg v4 “Top News” page is basically aggregating feeds from other aggregators like Reddit which is an algorithm flaw that needs to be fixed, now. Before your next episode of Diggnation, even. The amount of pain that the power users are feeling makes for good drama and great headlines, but is secondary to the major coding issues and design flaws allowing competitors to garner traffic off your site. If your business is about aggregating eyeballs, it’s crucial to keep your eye on the ball. Update: Kevin Rose responds on the issue of reverting back to Digg v3. “The core of Digg v4 (Cassandra) will enable us to scale for the next few years, so it’s important that we stick with it. As of right now we are rolling the Digg v3 features into the Digg v4 architecture, there will be no need for us to go back once this is complete, as we’ll have the best of both worlds – Digg v3 functionality w/Digg v4 backend.” Comic: Ncomment CrunchBase Information Digg Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You. And It's Fantastic. | Top |
| Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough. The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time. The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time. I’ve been using the service since late last week and have found it to work very well. Occasionally messages that shouldn’t have been marked ‘Important’ are flagged, but I’ve yet to encounter an urgent message that slipped into the ‘everything else’ section. My colleague MG Siegler, who has also had the feature active, has had similar success. It’s great. I love it. But it isn’t perfect. My biggest gripe so far is the fact that there’s no way to tell why a given message has been deemed important. Oftentimes it’s obvious — emails from my coworkers are generally given the golden arrows, as are messages from PR contacts whom I frequently communicate with. But occasionally there are oddballs that have been marked important for no apparent reason. Sure, it’s easy to tell Gmail that ‘this message is not important’ and strip its golden badge. But what if the message was marked important for a reason that is usually sound (perhaps it contains a reference to TechCrunch Disrupt, for example)? It would be nice if I could tell Gmail something to the effect of “this sender is never important”, but not to start frowning on whatever keywords the message contained. Still, it’s a great start. Of course, this introduces a new dynamic to the way a lot of people are going to be reading email. Email intros will become ever more important, because you’ll want to ensure that your message gets marked with coveted ‘important’ tag. It also has much broader implications. Increasingly, content will be displayed to you based on its importance rather than its time stamp — not just when it comes to browsing email, but for social networks and other content as well. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to Gmail and Google Apps users alike over the course of the week. More : Remember Magic Inbox? Yep, That's What Is Now Gmail Priority Inbox CrunchBase Information Gmail Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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