Filed under: E-mail, Web services, Google
What's Gmail's "Magic Inbox?"
Google Operating System spotted some code in Gmail that points to an upcoming feature called "Magic Inbox" or "Icebox-Inbox." It's not clear what this mystery feature is going to do, but it looks like it's a new way of prioritizing your incoming mail based on senders you've interacted with frequently. Commenters at gOS have been attacking the feature based on speculation about how it might work, but I'm not jumping to any conclusions.
As evidence for their theory that Magic Inbox is based on some kind of friend priority algorithm, gOS cites a feature called Friend Finder that Google is known to be working on. They explain that "Friend Finder analyzes a user's email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a user has strong email connections based on incoming/outgoing traffic and the frequency and speed in which two parties respond to each other," which would be a good way to determine which messages belong at the top of a busy inbox.
As I said, I'm not jumping to conclusions about the exact way this is going to work. There already seems to be a strong reaction both for and against this feature, and we don't even know what it does yet. Any inside tips, readers? Do any anonymous Gmail team members out there want to tell the real story?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
TM said 9:17AM on 5-22-2009
Inbox preview maybe?
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-in-labs-inbox-preview.html
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wrabbit said 9:27AM on 5-22-2009
@TM: I think that might be it.
In any case, not sure what's so controversial about the "friend filtering" inbox, sounds like it'd be an optional feature, and most likely one you have to turn on yourself.
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Racetrack_Owner said 9:30AM on 5-22-2009
Google needs to spend a lot more timing finishing what they have and less time dreaming up marginal features. The GMail API is simply awful, full of bugs and holes, missing decent documentation, inconsistent across the supported platforms, references a litany of incomplete or totally missing features, etc.
It would also be nice if at least one developer at Google actually communicated with companies instead of just "friends"... Google's handling of a non-person contact is embarrassingly awful, made worse now because that ridiculous oversight is carried over into Android.
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nanomatrix said 12:19PM on 5-22-2009
@Racetrack_Owner.
I disagree, I find that the companies that spend too much time polishing crap never get anything done... akin to 3d Realms. I think there is a happy medium and I am ok with the perpetual beta status in that it keeps the product free.
@TM I think he is right too, when I read the article its the first thing I read. Likely so it can be yanked out before the rest of the page loads.
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