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Codebreaker

At Google, some ideas graduate. Others die.

Marketplace Contributor May 2, 2012


It’s true in any lab. Like it or not, mice get tested Some go on to live healthy lives and watch their grandchildren get experimented on, while others get dropped off at… the mouse farm in the country, never to be seen again. Google announced how its “mice” were doing yesterday in a blog post detailing which Gmail Labs ideas made the cut and which were sent to the farm. The valedictorian of the group: Google Translate. Now all your foreign correspondence emails will be automatically translated. Also in the bunch, something called Title Tweaks, which is supposed to make it easier to see how many unread emails you have, as well as Smart Mute, which filters out those “reply all” emails that you don’t really need to read because they weren’t meant for you.

Sadly, we have to say goodbye to Google Goggles. That was the Labs idea that, if enabled, would ask you to solve a math problem before sending an email. The idea was to turn it on before a night “drunk-mailing” – if you couldn’t answer the problem, no embarrassing emails could be sent. The upshot is that now everyone will get to read my hourly beer pony Olympics updates.

 

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