This scathing denunciation of the new Gmail interface can also be used as a handy tool for those of us who have been baffled by it so far but can't be bothered to figure out how to use it.
For an hour or two today, Gmail was down. The entire world basically screeched to a halt. The economy crashed. A monkey in a coat wandered around an Ikea, in Toronto. And in offices everywhere, people were forced to talk to each other. Why did we ever think it was a good idea to trust our entire life to an Internet text-ad company that thought "Google+" was a good idea?
What did you do during the Great Mayan Apocalypse of December 10, 2012? Was it "fun," or did you keep trying to reload Gmail every thirty seconds, like a drug-addicted laboratory animal? Share your story of what it [...]
Lately I've been getting the occasional e-mails from MySpace and Friendster, those relics of social networking from a more innocent, Blingee-filled time, asking me to come back to the old hangouts and see what's new. The notes read like half-hearted booty calls filtered through a marketing department, with the vague dread that the old fun times are dead and buried lurking underneath every extra exclamation point. On that note, today comes news that the folks at Microsoft are on the verge of "reinventing Windows Live Hotmail," nipping and tucking the old webmail service in hopes that they can lure back those people who were enticed by Gmail's [...]
*flaps arms, freaks out* UPDATE, 5:24 p.m.: OMG GMAIL IS BACK. I missed it SO MUCH!
Death approaches, for one and all. But what about our important data stored within free services that Google may or may not shut down before our death? For this, there's Google Afterlife. It's not called Google Afterlife, but that's just what some tech writers have named it, because "Inactive Account Manager" sounds like something Verizon would do to you for $6.99 a month, in or out of the grave.
Here's how it works: You can go to some Google page and click some things. No more worries about death! After your demise, if Google hasn't killed off the service, the particular way you misunderstood "Inactive Account Manager" will function [...]
Yay, I got my Gmail Priority Inbox! Yes, your Gmail can now be divided into "important" and "totally common." This solves all my organization and email response problems, clearly. Why won't totally wholesome and beneficial corporation Gmail provide me with a personal spider monkey that is trained to deal with email?
Have you or your friends had your Gmail accounts hacked for the purposes of shilling Viagra? The good news is that you're not alone. The slightly troubling news is that this mini-epidemic has been ensuing for quite a while in Internet time, and there doesn't really seem to be much news on what, exactly, is going on!
Google's official support forum has a lengthy thread on the hacks, started by someone who felt the pain on April 10:
Checking further I could see someone logged in to my account from Mobile device from brazil and I never use mobile device. Am from India only. Anyway changed [...]
I would recommend that you only shit-talk your friends to your other friends in person for the next few weeks until you have gotten the hang of The Way We Send Gmail Now. It will save you a lot of apologizing in the long run.
In Marshall McLuhan's prophetic 1964 analysis, Understanding Media, he defines the telephone as "speech without walls." At the end of the 19th century, the new postal system of telephone calls went beyond letters and telegrams to collapse the time and space between two distinct-and simultaneous-voices. Yet within the course of telephonic traffic, lines get jammed. We stare at phones with telepathic (if often futile) fervor, our eyes and mind willing it to ring. Our appetites for attention and news and scandal feed our wish for the phone to ring. As phones grow more digitized and versatile-and, sometimes, less versatile and less simultaneous-our dependence on them means we must [...]
GOD NO NOT GMAIL AGAIN NO GOD WHY!!!!!! Why did we trust you? You said you were the benevolent corporation!
