Google has rolled out the beta version of their Gmail Priority Inbox today, a feature that will automatically rearrange messages in a user’s inbox so the most important ones show up at the top.
For now, the feature is “experimental” and may never go fully live.
Reuters says “the motivation behind Priority Inbox is Google’s conviction that the problem of e-mail overload continues getting worse, forcing people to spend much time and effort managing their inbox both for personal and work-related matters.”
Priority Inbox is optional and users can switch it on or off at their choosing.
If you enable it, Gmail will divide the inbox into three sections; the “priority” box for important messages, the middle box for “starred” and “flagged” messages and the final box for everything else.
Adds Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google’s Enterprise unit: “If you’re in meetings and you come back to your e-mail and you have five minutes between appointments and you have 50 e-mails, which five messages do you spend your time on in that window of time?”
“We see this as an ongoing evolution of the focus of Gmail, which has always been around addressing this problem of information overload,” Glotzbach noted.
Result for: google
Google has renewed its news content licensing deal with the AP this week, following months of negotiations.
The deal will allow Google to post full-text articles from the AP on Google News.
“We look forward to future collaborations, including on ways Google and AP can work together to create a better user experience and new revenue opportunities,” says Josh Cohen, a Google senior business product manager.
Says the AP: “Under the agreement, AP and Google will also work together in a number of new areas, such as ways to improve discovery and distribution of news.”
There was no word on the financials of the deal.
In January, after a negotiation dispute, Google stopped publishing AP stories. They began running them again in February.
Result for: google
Google has acquired the Web start-up Angstro this week while also moving co-founder Rohit Khare to the Google team.
The search giant has been in an acquisition frenzy over the past few months, purchasing a plethora of sites and services that will help their upcoming assault on the social networking world and its champion Facebook.
Khare is a respected Internet researcher and entrepreneur.
Earlier in the summer, Google purchased the social gaming siteSlide, while recruiting its founder Max Levchin to become a VP of engineering for social media efforts. Levchin was the co-founder of PayPal.
Google has also invested $150 million in social gaming market leader Zynga.
The social networking service, dubbed “Google Me” internally is still in “stealth mode” and Google will not publicly discuss it.
Google versus Facebook has become a hot-topic in the tech world, with many believing Facebook will soon start its own advertising network to rival Google’s AdSense, while Google prepares its full assault on the social networking world.
