Gmail's 5 second Undo Send. (yawn)

If you're a gmail user you've now got some new functionality. Undo Send (when enabled) gives you a popup for 5 seconds before it sends the email, theoretically giving you time to prevent your email from being sent with a typo or missing attachement.

Yawn.

CNN is so smitten with this feature and other gmail trivia like "Mail Goggles" (to help users stop sending "mail you later regret) that it's featured at the top of the technology section:

"Undo Send" is also just the latest example of the dozens of creative -- and sometimes downright wacky -- online features developed at Gmail Labs to address common e-mail problems.

The number of lab features has more than tripled, to more than 36, as Gmail celebrates its fifth birthday next week.

Of course, that other shoe dropping you hear is that this doesn't actually 'Undo' anything. It simply inserts a 5 second timer after you click send before Gmail actually sends your email. That's it. Not to much going on behind the curtain and you won't need a team of crack engineers to develop functionality like that. It's like trying to build a spaceship with paddle-wheel boat technology.

Now call me prejudiced but I'm going to draw a few comparisons between Gmail's 'Undo Send' and Sendsides' feature, 'Recall' that's enabled with every account.

First, Gmail's Undo Send; Inserts a popup window for 5 seconds before your email is actually sent.

Next up; Recall. Sendside's Recall feature allows you to retract any message or file at any time after it's been sent... or delivered, or read, or forwarded.

Sent it yesterday? Fine. The recipient's allready read it? No problem. It's been forwarded? Yep. In fact, you can see who it's been forwarded to and if they've opened it, when, and every time they've looked at or downloaded your attachment.

Sendside's functionality is so far beyond what gmail is developing it's unreal. Of course, Google's at a severe disadvantage since Gmail is built on the same SMTP protocols that were implemented in 1982 and haven't changed since then. It won't always be that way of course. Individuals and businesses want to be able to really recall and control their content, see when they're message is read, and stop hassling with email workarounds.

Email won't be dislodged easily. It has 100% market penetration and works perfectly well for telling your wife you'll be home late for dinner.

Of course, the horse and buggy had 100% market penetration at one time too.

Google Design (or lack thereof)

"When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems."

Google's lead designer is leaving. When I first heard this I thought... "Google has a designer?"

Indeed they do, or did. (I"m sure they still have pleanty of designers.) But, their lead diesigner is leaving and has posted something I didn't expect from anyone associated with Google and design, a thoughful post on how anyaytics and performance based testing can strip away both the aesthetics and the humany from an interface.

Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

I can’t fault Google for this reliance on data. And I can’t exactly point to financial failure or a shrinking number of users to prove it has done anything wrong. Billions of shareholder dollars are at stake. The company has millions of users around the world to please. That’s no easy task. Google has momentum, and its leadership found a path that works very well. When I joined, I thought there was potential to help the company change course in its design direction. But I learned that Google had set its course long before I arrived. Google was a massive aircraft carrier, and I was just a small dinghy trying to push it a few degrees North.

So true it makes me wonder how the guy survived as long as he did. The amazing success that Google has shown has been without any aesthetic that's recognizable at all. Two things are for sure; Google is not Apple, and when a company is ruled by engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems.

Googles Interest Based Advertising

Google has launched “interest-based advertising,” which will display ads based on the user’s previous searches and page views. Google’s experiment with behavioral targeting has also been done by Yahoo and others as a way of increasing ad revenue through a more granular focus on viewers, but has led to privacy concerns.

Google announced on March 11 that it was launching a beta version of what it terms “interest-based advertising,” a type of behavioral targeting that delivers ads to users based on their previous searches and page views.