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: product
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: product
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has begun a campaign of patent infringement lawsuits against companies ranging from YouTube and Facebook to eBay and Office Depot.
Allen’s patents were originally granted to his company, Interval Media, which shut down in 2006. The company w
“We recognize that innovation has a value, and patents are the way to protect that,” said a spokesman for Allen. When asked about the notable absence of Microsoft and Amazon from the suit,
the spokesman wrote in an email, “This is the most recent step in a long process, but it is not necessarily the end of the process.”
But do the patents themselves actually have any value? If so, why wasn’t Allen’s company able to make money on them to begin with?
The patents include 6,757,682, “Alerting Users To Items of Current Interest,” which covers suggesting items from an online store based on the content of the current page. AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, Office Max, Staples, Yahoo & YouTube are all accused of infringing on this patent.
The first question which comes to mind is how this wouldn’t be considered obvious for anyone in the online selling industry? Just because something hasn’t been worked out in code already doesn’t mean other developers haven’t thought of it.
More likely, what it means is either it’s a solution for an as of yet non-existent (or at least minor) problem or it’s simply not something they’ve decided to implement (or prioritize).
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