Most useful feature, ever: GMail Undo Send E-mail

How often did you regret sending that e-mail that you wrote to someone in a fit of rage, or where you accidentally cc’d someone that shouldn’t see what you really think about them? It has happened to all of us.

Well, you now have 5 seconds to undo your possibly career-killing e-mails when you use Gmail.

After enabling the feature, Undo Send works much like Gmail’s other “undo” features. When you send an email, you get a message confirming it has been sent, along with a link to “Undo.” This message lasts for 5 seconds, at which point you lose the opportunity to take it back.
While that might not be much time, it’s probably enough to pull back emails where you forget an attachment, forget to cc someone, or catch an obvious typo. As for emails you later wish you hadn’t sent because of the content, Gmail still can’t help you there.

Via Mashable

Google Street View in Germany

I was driving home from work today when I saw the google street view camera car, opened my window and waved. So looks like I will be on the street view when you look for Bockenheimer Warte. 🙂

Streetview is coming to 3 German cities: Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin, and this has gotten some weird press. Germans are very privacy-sensitive, more so than other nationalities, anyway. But some of the arguments against Street View, while possible, or even true, seem petty, paranoid and irrelevant. Basically, it seems like an exercise in neo-luddite nay-saying in the name of the people.

For example, sure thieves can stake out neighborhoods and look for nice cars to steal, but you would still have to know where to look, and you would still need to go there to stake it out. Or the fact that some people don’t like other people looking at their house. Hello? What about all those people walking by your house? Wanna blind-fold them? And people who don’t like being in the pictures (even though their faces are blurred out)? Going by this standard, you couldnt send a TV camera crew to film anything in the city, either. Those arguments seem contrived and designed to make people paranoid.

In a Tagesschau Poll, people here seem pretty muchdivided on the issue and the press is trying to make it look a bit negative.

I for one think street view rocks and I am happy it is coming to my town.

Nastiness Trending

When we started using Google Trends to glean some trend insights, it was all business at first. Then, it became a tool look at some trends no one likes to talk about. We started entering stuff like “Porn” or even worse “child porn” or anything nasty. Hence, I coigned the term “Nastiness Trending”. It’s quite a sublime thing, from which to derive a weird, negative pleasure. The pleasure part comes from knowing which countries have the nastiest google users, and being lucky if your country isn’t in the Top 10.

Obviously, we weren’t the only one with this idea, in fact a German newspaper made an article about it.

However, the whole thing is a bit tricky, because you have to choose the keywords in a certain language, so you cannot definitively say that, e.g. in the porn case, South Africans are the nastiest.

I am waiting for the day where you can do compound trending in different languages.

Nastiness Trending

When we started using Google Trends to glean some trend insights, it was all business at first. Then, it became a tool look at some trends no one likes to talk about. We started entering stuff like “Porn” or even worse “child porn” or anything nasty. Hence, I coigned the term “Nastiness Trending”. It’s quite a sublime thing, from which to derive a weird, negative pleasure. The pleasure part comes from knowing which countries have the nastiest google users, and being lucky if your country isn’t in the Top 10.

Obviously, we weren’t the only one with this idea, in fact a German newspaper made an article about it.

However, the whole thing is a bit tricky, because you have to choose the keywords in a certain language, so you cannot definitively say that, e.g. in the porn case, South Africans are the nastiest.

I am waiting for the day where you can do compound trending in different languages.