Short version: Google couldn't keep Reader going because it would take money to get it working on the new Google+ infrastructure that failed spectacularly.
Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.
It's worse than that- Google+ broke the basic syntax in google search. Adding + before a word used to make it mandatory. They change it to quotations marks so they could have +username instead of @username for google plus. That still bothers me and Google search doesn't work as well.
That is my single biggest complaint about G+, that they would have compromised search for the biggest boondoggle google has ever created.
I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.
Every company has their time in the wilderness - MS just emerged from theirs, Apple had theirs, and Google started theirs a while back.
They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.
Really good point, unfortunately I think one of the biggest reasons any big company does get out of "the woods" is through competition starting to scare them.
Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space.
More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.
Except that it was likely investors pushing Google to come up with a response to Facebook that caused them to create Google Plus, even though in the process they had to kill several more vibrant social networks that had organically grown around their existing products.
Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.
Heh, Google killed Reader so I could consider any alternative to Google before using their products. So it's been DuckDuckGo, Firefox, box.com, other OpenId providers etc. I still use gmail, because i only use email for boring stuff like amazon or whatever, not communication with friends, and it's not like I see any of their ads anyway because I use adblockers (part of the reason i use firefox - you can't block ads using chrome on android). I use Android. That's good. They're not screwed that up yet, although i'm sure given enough time they will.
I also really wish that they would revert this change. But maybe Google+ was created just because they wanted to get rid of the + operator in Google search?
This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else.
When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts.
The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate.
Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.
Oh. Eye-opener. Is this why in the past year or two random contacts are doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and I can't merge them, and sometimes one app (like Hangouts/messaging) won't know a phone number is attached to a contact while another (the phone app) will, etc?
The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately.
Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.
That "answer" had no facts and doesn't pass the smell test for me. "Old infrastructure"? Not very specific... "Google+ infrastructure"? Huh? Maybe they mean updating the authorization infrastructure, but even that is probably <= the dev effort on these April Fools pranks.
"There was no manpower" so uh... hire a few interested engineers? Maybe pick from the thousands of angry people who were loudly complaining about it? Or at least give the data to an archive - that's what I'm angriest about personally. They had archives of tons of defunct blogs, and they just deleted them.
Don't read too much into it, it was a business decision, not a question of resources. It's obvious that Google could have kept reader alive without much trouble if they wanted.
If you look on the Google file system, it has no support for deleting files (data is overwritten) and Google itself has a running business model around hoarding data, would make no sense to lose something that might be valuable to them in the future just for the sake of saving some storage.
True. Doesn't help anyone else who wants to read the blogs though. And even thought the storage is redundant, the fact that it's controlled by a single company makes it a single point of failure. I also hope Geocities is around somewhere and is recovered at some point in the future.
A lot of Geocities was archived. You can access one of them at reocities.com. There is also a 650+ GB torrent out there containing the archived sites. It's still a work in progress, apparently, but perusing the "neighborhoods" on reocities.com brings back memories.
You might be right, I'm always suspecting that they hoard as much data as they can. That would be a very googly thing to happen.
Mangling data is an interesting thing you raise. Would reveal some issues with their professionalism. Albeit after the disaster we watched today on their April's 1st joke, I wouldn't be surprised if indeed that was the (sad) case as you mention.. :/
Google Reader was, up until that point, the best Google had done at social discoverability and discoverability in a non-search ways. They had a foothold in the space and they just dumped it out and Facebook and Twitter won.
As someone's that maintained deprecated services, I can say that's easier thought than done. Each piece underneath you will eventually ask you to migrate off it, for any number of reasons: It is deprecated itself and being removed, or it has a bug that was fixed in another version, ... Then the replacement / new version won't support all your use cases, so you need to coordinate with them development of that support.
And this is all only about code, not about the cost of keeping the service running with good availability on old infrastructure.
This. Parents comment is typical of management, and frankly I applaud Google for having the confidence to ignore it rather than incurring all of the technical debt.
It's a good joke, and I recommend people follow @Pinboard on Twitter, but the reality is that Google killed Reader because they wanted to, not because they had. They're immensely profitable and fund crazy things like Google Glass or Calico to the tune of many millions of dollars.
Of course, this is the point of the tweet. It's not supposed to be a literal equation of LOEs.
Unfortunately, a lot of blogs have shut down from a loss of traffic.
Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.
Does that include the operational cost though? I know it's probably trivial when you're at google's scale, but fetching every RSS feed on the internet every few minutes (or whatever their latency was, it seemed pretty low), processing and storing it seems fairly expensive.
Wow, what an incredibly, obviously bad idea. I spotted this last night and immediately realized how this would go down. If you have 900 million users (as gmail does) and you add a button right next to the send button that also has the word "send" on it, you are going to have a significant numbers of users send emails using that button! AND it adds a gif AND it archives the email thread AND those features aren't explained when you hover over the button! I have a feeling the vast majority of gmail users don't know how to find their archived email threads, so those users will never see the replies to the email they sent. The gmail team was asleep at the wheel on this one.
No. They intentionally drove off the road for fun and somehow didn't understand humans enough to realize that it would be really infuriating to some of their ~1 billion users.
They did the same thing with their "Call your Dad today" calendar reminder and many other things. Google's product teams seem to be both deaf (help forums overflowing with "+1s" for simple fixes) and tone-deaf.
This whole thing makes me realize I should just switch to Microsoft's apps/ecosystem and retain my Gmail address. There's no reason to put up with Google's terrible product decisions anymore.
It seems to be a combination of the Silicon Valley echo chamber + groupthink. They're completely ignorant of any perspective that isn't their own.
It's the one thing I hate about Android. The UIs of Google apps have gotten consistently worse over the years, mainly because they've been prioritizing aesthetics over functionality/ease of use.
I'm assuming their thought process is something along the lines of "This is obvious to me. Therefore, it will be obvious to the millions of Android users". No, it's obvious to you because you just thought of it, it's most definitely not obvious to everyone else.
It's not like I'm in a position to do so anyway, but I would never consider implementing some kind of prank into a vital service that hundreds of millions of people use on a daily basis. Let alone a prank that could be so easily mistaken for a core function of the service.
Words can't even begin to describe how arrogant/stupid this was, and now users are paying the price.
Not all mistakes are born equal in reach and consequences. I would like to think that yes, most people in HN (most people, period) would not make a mistake like this.
>>It seems to be a combination of the Silicon Valley echo chamber + groupthink. They're completely ignorant of any perspective that isn't their own.
This is totally expected when your employees are overwhelmingly in their 20s and have never held a job outside of a tech company in the valley.
My old company was full of developers like that. Fresh out of college, doesn't know how the real world works, yet is expected to develop products for the real world. It was horribly frustrating working with them.
> It's the one thing I hate about Android. The UIs of Google
> apps have gotten consistently worse over the years, mainly
> because they've been prioritizing aesthetics over
> functionality/ease of use.
Care to elaborate on this with a few examples? I have the opposite complaint. They seem to be focussing on ease of use precisely at the expense of functionality. I'd rather stuff was a little more complicated, because it would give me more control over stuff. Note that I don't want it complicated for the sake of complexity. But I've noticed a increase in "adding features makes stuff complicated" and joke memes about "just make it an option". Well, programming - proper programming - IS hard, but it's worth it because you get a better product.
Not an Android feature, but similar. Last year someone at Google thought it would be smart to redesign the bookmark feature in Chrome to make it more aesthetic looking. Instead it completely made Chrome bookmarks useless. They eventually changed course and updated Chrome to return to the way it was.
Also not Android, but Google has rendered the App Engine/Compute Engine dashboard completely useless. Double overlapping sidebars and a huge amount of wasted space everywhere makes simple tasks like finding a log entry difficult. The old design at appengine.google.com which Google is slowly deprecating was highly functional despite not being flat and "pretty." This is just one example. It's my personal opinion that Google is showing a tremendous lack of design ability in areas that they should be getting right at this point.
Here's a big example: a lot of what they release these days is for mobile first, and if the desktop-geared version is ever released, its design is just the mobile app in a bigger window. Example: Google Photos.
(Related: WTF did they have to deprecate the old Photos and Picasa, which still have much superior options? They only "advantage" the new Photos has is the so-called AI, e.g. ability to auto-categorize your pictures of dogs.)
Its far from limit to Google. I wonder if it is a geek/SV thing, as i keep seeing "solutions" come out of there that are hopelessly utopian in their naivety when it comes to considering human behavior and reactions.
It isn't limited to Google. At the end of 2014 Facebook put this thing in my brother's feed that said "It's been a great year" and then put in post he made right after our mother passed away. I wonder if it's a being young thing too?
Facebook, specifically, is struggling with the issue that strong correlation doesn't imply semantic value (i.e. posts with a lot of activity can be really good OR really bad) and corner cases. The semantic value issue they're addressing with the multifaceted "like" button.
The corner cases issue may not be fixed. As harsh as it is to say---and as unacceptable, perhaps, as it should be to work this way---there is a train of thought that goes "Even if we get the occasional bad result, when we have a billion users and 99% of the results are good; ship it. That's 990 million happy customers." The 1% bad results have to be really bad to tip the scales.
For such integral products, I'd expect them to have some sort of concept of "out of all your users, some of them will be having the worst day/week/month/year of their lives while heavily interacting with your product".
Do people perceive, perhaps, that there's a difference between "corporate Microsoft" and "AI research Microsoft," and the former would never make a mistake with their products like the latter has? I find that a less-than-likely assumption.
Microsoft makes annoying product mistakes like everybody else and obviously isn't immune to PR blunders.
However, they're also pleasingly boring and know where their bread is buttered, so I sort of do trust them not to introduce April Fools Day jokes into their important business applications.
> This whole thing makes me realize I should just switch to Microsoft's apps/ecosystem and retain my Gmail address. There's no reason to put up with Google's terrible product decisions anymore.
Why specifically mention Microsoft? Seems like you could have concluded you 'should' switch away from Google's ecosystem without coupling it to your desire to switch to Microsoft.
Simple solution, just stop using the heaping pile of crap that is Gmail. I did that about 4 years ago and I can actually read my email and have things work in the bog standard way vs. some convoluted non idiomatic way that Google wants you to.
I feel like no one is addressing one of the biggest problems with these April Fool's things: they're just not funny. PigeonRank might have been cute 10+ years ago, but now it's the same joke over and over.
You know how in your group of friends there's one or two who are just super funny and make everyone laugh out loud? But then there's your other friend who every once in a while cracks a joke and you just kinda smile a bit? Yeah, that's who's putting together these pranks.
Wow... I was absolutely sure that this backfire story WAS the April Fools' joke. It just seemed so farfetched. The animated gif I could understand, but actually blocking all future replies? That's where I figured that nobody would ever actually implement something so stupid and dangerous.
Yes, it's the side effects and real world changes to outgoing mails that is just beyond stupid and uncharacteristically bad even for Google April Fool's jokes. I don't even understand how the mere idea could be approved. It's like if they got an intern to "come up with something fun".
Really an immature oversight not just in the tone, but in the actual understanding of the product. It's a utility for most users.
What if AT&T just played a fart sound in the middle of a call if you hit a button on your screen? Of course that would go wrong. How did they think this was any different? They're not just some startup anymore.
Picture receiving a phone call from the police in which you learn that your son and daughter had been killed in a vehicle collision.
While you are collecting your thoughts, perhaps before you fully realise that your life has been changed forever, the silence is punctuated by a loud tphrrrphththpht.
What email client would you recommend? I've been stuck in Thunderbird because I require PGP/GPG, but I really hate it. Do you have a favorite client? I really do like Google's Inbox, but the lack of PGP is a blocker for me.
Do you actually "require" PGP, or is it just a preference?
I ask because as Bruce Schneier pointed out, his email security's only as good as that of the people he messages. With so many people using gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc., striving for total privacy is expensive.
Thus, I politely wonder whether you've set unrealistic expectations.
It's required by my employer. Almost all email I get is encrypted and/or signed.
For services we have running that send email but don't know how to encrypt (like Redmine and Jenkins), I wrote a little smtp proxy that all it does is look at the from and to addresses, select appropriate keys, construct a new encrypted email and forward it to the real smtp server. It's written in Python and is super-simple but has worked for years now.
That's really interesting. I care a lot about email encryption -- I want to make something better and easier to use than current PGP programs. One major hurdle is apathy. Talking to potential users, even if we could wave a magic wand and make end-to-end encryption effortless, many people just don't care.
A few companies (and their associated governments) have vast central databases containing most of the world's mail. At one point that would've been considered dystopian, but today many people just take it for granted.
I've previously worked in financial technology, and even financial advisors dealing with sensitive client info would always just use plain email.
--
If you're comfortable telling me: what country and industry are you in?
Is it the norm to require PGP use on the job, or is your employer an exception?
If the OP uses PGP only for signing and signature verification, it's not privacy he's after.
If the OP uses PGP for encryption, then his conversation partners use it too, and thus can't use gmail, outlook or yahoo (I am under the impression that desktop outlook has no support for PGP).
Really wish that we had a good, fast, Thunderbird alternative by now other than MS Outlook. But everyone seems to assume that you are supposed to use a web client like gmail now.
Gnus on Emacs was very good with IMAP for me, where sources were Fastmail and Gmail. Encryption and signing works, but I haven't used it in email that much, so I can't comment.
Gnome's Evolution was good too, IIRC. There are also Mutt and Pine, but they are terminal clients, so IDK how they handle inline images, tho mutt was OK with html.
I use notmuch[1] in emacs, fetchmail to get email, and local MTA set up to deliver to my maildir.
HTML email is rendered with w3m which does a decent job.
Searching my local email with notmuch is blazing fast and works even better than Gmail's searching (IMO).
Certainly not everyone's cup of tea but if you like emacs otherwise, it's a great alternative to Gnus. Gnus is originally and primarily a newsreader and treating email like news works in some ways but fails in others. Also searching in Gnus is something I never really got to work well.
I'm using a rmail+m{pop,smtp}+mairix+spamassassin approach nowadays (My email provider's spam filtering is crap, so I do it myself, with a whitelist from my BBDB). Notmuch always seemed interesting but I couldn't dive in yet. I have some free time this week, so I'll try. If your configuration is public (i.e. on github), would you mind sharing a link?
Old school choice: nmh[0]. It is a very different way of interacting with email. From section 1.2.1[1]:
Because MH commands aren't part of a monolithic
mail system, you can use them at any time; you
don't have to start or quit the mail agent.
It's fine to mix other UNIX commands between
your MH commands, to leave your mail for a
while and do something else, and to work at
several terminals at the same time. Because
you use MH commands from a shell prompt, you
can use all the power of the shell.
I've used Postfix+fetchmail successfully, but am going to look into "msmtp" mentioned by @gkya above as it is new to me.
Also, OfflineIMAP[0] looks to be a solid IMAP solution, which may replace my use of fetchmail. However, a maintainer of OfflineIMAP indicates he is focused on imapfw[1]. So maybe that's one to look into as well. It's not that I'm unhappy with fetchmail, but it doesn't hurt to know what the relative strengths and weaknesses are of the choices available.
I personally really liked using Mutt. I've stopped using it because snoozing emails is really, really useful, and no IMAP client supports this. (I hope that snoozing emails becomes part of the "next-gen" messaging protocol)
What don't you like about Thunderbird? I was about to recommend it as an email client to a client but hadn't heard any overt criticisms. Is it good at security but bad at UI?
I use Inbox and Gmail for my personal email, so that's what I'm comparing it to.
I'm not a fan of Thunderbird's aesthetics, but obviously that's subjective.
Functionally, a lot of my problems stem from the Enigmail plugin and Thunderbird search. It really wants encrypted mail to stay encrypted and that means search doesn't work. Last time I looked, there was some hacky workaround with configuring a filter to make a copy of incoming mail and decrypt the copy, but I couldn't get it to work reliably.
I just took a look at PostBox and it looks great. Unfortunately, on their Add Ons page (https://www.postbox-inc.com/add-ons) they only list Enigmail 1.2. Enigmail is up to version 1.9.x.
IMHO, that's a pretty important add on to keep current.
This is a good advice, at least for the geeks and even for the semi-geeks. I use mutt and never got stung like this. But mutt may not be much suitable for most users. Any other good clients (thunderbird) can do.
Email clients can change their interface or fuck with your mail in other ways. They may not do it on a "one day only" basis, but they can certainly introduce other problems.
Not sure if this prank/feature appeared on google's "For Work" (paid offering), but if it did, that would be sucky.
However on the free gmail side of things - not to be a jerk about this - but perhaps this should remind users that they are not the real customers for google...and that free platforms like this do in fact come with baggage. I'm not saying google intentionally meant to screw over their users (I totally get this was all meant in jest). But what incentive does google have other than saying "Oops, sorry". Any expectations for compensation i think are silly; and many users forget that. Does it suck that someone lost their job because of this? Hellz yeah, no doubt about that! But can we really expect google to do anything else except shut down this prank even if only after-the-fact? Again, it sucks, but this should serve to show/remind some of those users that these free platforms are not like your local electric/water utility, and should not be fully depended upon, certainly not for such important things as jobs, etc.
As a colorblind user I'm not quite sure what color the send+mic button is, but I'm drawn to it much more strongly than the normal send button. At the very least you'd think they would have had a pop-up confirmation message...
As a non-colorblind user, me too. The orange is a lot more vibrant and attractive than the blue and doesn't convey much of a "warning, something different" message.
It doesn't seem like Google tested this on many real-world users before deploying...?
This exactly. My eye was drawn to the orange button last night as I went to send an email to my professor. I nearly clicked it, not remembering the date. Luckily, I just thought it might be some new weird voice feature I must not understand...that was close.
Except they both say send. The stupid icon on the other one looks like a maraca. I would have never guessed "mic drop." Let's ignore that "mic drop" is a cultural expression that someone who grew up in a different country may not be familiar with. To be honest it look like a "send and play music" button to me.
Someday when you accidentally click the wrong button in something, perhaps when you are old or suffer from some disability, I hope that you remember this comment of yours.
Furthermore, the icon doesn't have anything for you to read, since it uses an image (whose meaning may still not be clear to an older or disabled person; it kind of looks like an ice cream cone to me).
As a person that sends dozens, sometimes hundreds of emails a day, I click the button that's I always click.
A UI that requires the user to read every button and look at every icon that they click on because it may have been changed to do something completely different is a terrible UI.
While I might notice a new color, I'm not certain that I would.
I just don't actually believe you. I haven't observed a _single user ever_ who consistently maintains the behavior you describe across all interactions they have.
In doing usability design even for astronauts or pilots I don't think you could fully trust a user to behave as you describe.
Just to think how much control google (or any other operator of free platform/service) has over the content of any messages pumped through their platform: Instead of google inserting that minion GIF, what if they simply added "...Not" to the end of every email?
Fictional example #1:
Hi everyone,
We're having a baby!...Not (Then google appends "...Not" to the end.)
Fictional example #2:
Hi everyone,
Grandma passed away...Not
Fictional example #3:
Hi everyone,
We're moving away to city/state/country XYZ!...Not
Fictional example #4:
Hi everyone,
We're getting a divorce!...Not
Encrypted messaging or not, that's a lot of control to have (by a provider) over what users send out. Or maybe i'm thinking too pessimistically?
I was one of around 30 grandchildren of my grandma's 12 children. I heard about her death via email— it would have been impractical to share the news otherwise, or to ask her caretakers to make 50 or even 12 calls while dealing with all the exigencies of the funeral.
My grandmother had around 35 grandchildren and 10 greatgrandchildren when she passed. Notifying everyone wasn't hard. One child called a couple of their siblings those called a couple more siblings and/or their kids. Their kids told their kids. Then the inlaws called their sides of the family. Everyone was notified in a few hours. It wasn't even organized beforehand, these things happen in an ad hoc manner. No one person even had the contact information for even half of the others.
Friend/Family calling trees take no effort to organize and happen organically. You mostly just call the people who you are closest to and the others do the same with a few people making sure so and so who isn't close to anyone gets the word. I have an absolutely gigantic family on both sides (50 or so cousins total) and this had always been the way it operated on both sides of the family and there was never any advanced planning.
In fact when the news is very distressing (spouse death) the person usually only notifies one or two very close people. Those people make sure the word gets out.
If anything, they have introduced unnecessary code to an already complex application that people actually use. More code means more bugs. They should take Microsofts 'no more easter eggs' approach and stop dicking around.
Writing software is the company's function. "More code means more bugs" implies there is no opportunity or freedom for improvement.
(Also, Microsoft took a 'no more easter eggs' approach? Wow, I didn't know. That's.... Well, if I want to go program somewhere with no personal freedom or trust from management, I know where I can go!).
> "More code means more bugs" implies there is no opportunity or freedom for improvement.
This twists a bit the meaning of what I have said. This particular feature is made to be throw-away and is useless. Programmers should strive to make their code as simple as possible while keeping all of the _necessary_ features of the software. This feature was not necessary.
Google sabotaging their own product just for a few laughs is a great way of reminding people that they don't really care about providing any services other than selling ads.
Also, what's the point of this prank when Gmail has a global audience? Only a minority of users will be aware that their tools might fail today because it's April Fools in the US.
Looks to me like there was a disconnect between what marketing wanted and what was delivered. Marketing saw this idea as a bit of fun, something that would create some good press and be playful.
Unfortunately the implementation was terrible, it confused users and lead people trying to seriously use the product to send silly pictures around.
Saying they don't care about the product because of this is silly. So many people use it because it is one of the best email applications around. A botched bit of fun doesn't mean the product is going to shit.
Yeah. Making Google Maps for the moon (with cheese at the maximum zoom level) was a combination of interesting and funny in a way that wasn’t absolutely contemptuous of the user
Could be. But that requires strong leadership, because you have to effectively say (probably at a very late stage, like launch review) "this joke is crap and will hurt people, not gonna happen" and burn the work of the team that did it (and I am sure there were at least two people involved here).
That's what should have happened because the nature of an April Fools joke is that it bypasses the pre-testing, canarying, "go back to the drawing board", staged rollouts etc that most features would go through on their way to exposure to hundreds of millions of people. You can't do a 10% rollout on a joke that's meant to last one day.
I think Google should give up on April Fools jokes. Some of them have become so elaborate (like the Maps one last year) that it's obvious they have too many staff and not enough to do.
FWIW, when I worked with the Doodle team, there absolutely were doodles that were canceled the day before they were scheduled to run, either because someone deemed them offensive or they had a critical bug or they just weren't up to Google's quality standards. It sucked for the engineers, and there was usually a postmortem afterwards about how the issue could've been caught earlier, but it happened.
I was also responsible for a bunch of easter eggs, including TLing the [let it snow] one that ran just over the holidays in 2011. We did do staged 10% rollouts. It was usually an abbreviated staged rollout, where we would push to 10% for an hour or two, monitor Twitter for flames, check the logs to make sure all browsers were interacting with it (to catch browser bugs), and listen for an SRE yelling at us, but it was there.
Didn't work on GMail nor on any of the April Fools jokes, and I haven't been there for close to 2 years now, but that was my experience on Search & Doodles.
perhaps it was obvious to everyone already, but i'm more and more beginning to feel that the company should place higher cultural value in UX, other than just quality programming
I think the worst thing about this is that once you hit the button, you wouldn't get any more replies from that thread. Is this really how it worked — that Gmail essentially shut you out of subsequent replies to the conversation in a non-undoable way? (Edit: Maybe you could revive the ability to get replies by un-archiving the thread? Does anybody know?) It just makes explaining yourself in the event of a mistake (and even viewing the fallout) that much harder.
It also looks like they put the button where "Send" would normally go. Mistakes seem inevitable; this is pretty mind-boggling.
I would bet real money that a proper survey would show that 95% of Gmail users don't know about that feature, let alone understand how to use it or undo it.
Note I am not disagreeing with you, just adding to the point that this was a super-bad idea.
I think the lesson here isn't so much about April Fools as it is about user interface design. Google put an orange warning on the button to let users know that the button would do something different, and people still clicked it out of habit. We users simply don't expect that buttons will suddenly change functionality. Google felt that the warnings they had in place were sufficient. Clearly they weren't.
>We users simply don't expect that buttons will suddenly change functionality.
I see this over and over again. Users don't read things they assume are static. Users navigate by item placement, rather than color/text/size/shape. This is interface design 101.
On black Friday last year, I ordered a nice sheet set as a Christmas present for my SO, and the website was set up such that you could click through all the different colors and sizes for each sheet set and the same product page would simply update with Ajax to include new images/prices. So I found the sheets that I wanted and clicked "Add to Cart" -- the location of the button never changed, so I didn't really have to look at it in order to do this.
I found out only much later that the "Add to Cart" button updated on a few of the sheet sets to include a small "Will ship on <date two months in the future>" message above it, indicating that they were out of stock. The button itself remained unchanged, and in the same position.
The company was like "well, we warned you on the ordering page" I had to go back to the website to figure out what they were talking about. They ended up changing their policy of offering out of stock items for sale, in response to massive customer backlash.
If they actually wanted to notify users, they could have grayed out the "Add to Cart" button and created a new "Reserve for <Date>" or "Pre-Order, ships <Date>" button in a different location (probably below the "Add to Cart"). ALWAYS assume users won't notice your message, unless you force them to do something different than what they're used to.
On one end of the spectrum, you have people who use gmail all the time who expect a button to be someplace and will just click it from peripheral vision. Some may not even notice that it's orange, others may subconsciously ignore the orange since these days UI changes all the time but nobody's going to put a prominent button at the bottom of an email form that's not "Send", right?
On the other end of the spectrum, you have folks who are not used to the internet at all, and only use a couple of sites (like gmail) after being instructed how to by friends or relatives. These folks know to click a "send" button. A "send" button with a little microphone drawing looks totally ok to click from this POV.
What if tomorrow some fools at Google think it is okay to play April fools prank with their automated cars? or their robots? and the car/robot goes berserk due to that?
This type of foolish pranks should backfire more strikingly. If they cannot treat their main (or at least one of the very important) business seriously, then they may face some very unpleasant things later.
What if tomorrow some engineers at Google think it is okay to do a normal update to their automated cars? or their robots? and the car/robot goes berserk due to that?
I did not say that this is impossible. It seems you are confused between accidental bugs and deliberate pranks. So, to address your issue: 1) it would not be unreasonable to expect that the "normal update" to their cars/robots should have passed some serious and rigorous testing/verification and the business/physical impact on end-user experience must have been assessed before rolling the "normal" updates; 2) and a serious business entity will not allow any such deliberate/damaging prank to slip through such a process.
> 1) it would not be unreasonable to expect that the "normal update" to their cars/robots should have passed some serious and rigorous testing/verification and the business/physical impact on end-user experience must have been assessed before rolling the "normal" updates;
So your point here is that safety-critical updates need to be rigorously tested? I agree with that, but I don't see any connection to whether it's okay to have pranks. I'm not confusing bugs and pranks, my entire point is that they're quite separate. Your bug risk is there with or without pranks. So if you feel like adding a prank, go ahead, just subject it to the same safety testing. That they released a UI update that annoys people does not imply anything about their ability to do safety testing.
> 2) and a serious business entity will not allow any such deliberate/damaging prank to slip through such a process.
I'll split "deliberate/damaging" into multiple cases.
Deliberate pranks: those are deliberate, they don't "slip through".
Safety-related damages: these are important, and not what happened here.
Non-safety-related damages: this getting through does not imply they have bad safey testing, so the comment about cars/robots going berserk is a non-sequitur.
>>Safety-related damages: these are important, and not what happened here.
Please define safety.
People lost their jobs due to this irresponsible prank. People might have missed replies from their doctors due to such foolishness. If now Google says that that's according to their "terms and conditions" then well, it clearly shows that Google is unreliable.
That's your notion of safety. For me (and I am sure for many others too) it means a product that is critical to my my workflow and the one on which my financial, health and other such critical aspects of life depend, if such a product (here Gmail) goes berserk due to some foolish prank played by the company then the company (here Google) is irresponsible and unreliable. Cars and robots present only some kinds of safety problems, not all.
If you weren't making any distinction then I don't understand why you brought up cars/robots going berserk in the first place.
(Or do you make a distinction, but you would call it something different? Then just say that, and I'll use the term you want. My contention has nothing to do with word choice. Nobody wins an argument about word choice.)
>>If you weren't making any distinction then I don't understand why you brought up cars/robots going berserk in the first place.
I brought up the issue mainly for these reasons: a) safety issues in cars/robots are more obvious; b) if google can do this (such harmful pranks) with email, then they can do such (harmful) pranks with their other products too, including cars/robots.
I wanted to bring out these issues on the discussion.
Personally, I think it's more about responsible policy when your email client has a roughly 16% market share.
They have to know that people occasionally use gmail for things that matter. Given the size of the user base, any kind of easter egg/joke/prank is going to create issues.
First off, yes, Google messed up here. They even acknowledged it themselves and took it down asap once they realized it.
But second, people need to cut Google a little slack here. We all make mistakes, or errors in judgement, and Google is no different. Do we really want to live in a world where companies are afraid to innovate and try anything new, because people are going to jump on their backs if things don't work out? Part of the reason why Google was able to create so many great products, like Maps, Mail and so on, is because they've created an environment that's very conducive to creativity and experimentation.
As a consumer, I love the fact that Google has given me so many awesome productivity tools, with great features, completely for free, and I don't want them to ever lose the creative/experimental culture that made it possible. If you're not a fan of such a culture, if you just want a no-nonsense humorless stable suit-driven product, well, Microsoft has you well covered.
What this fiasco has to do with innovation, sorry? This is merely a puerile joke, it's like pissin' in the kitchen and shoutin' "April fools!" I can't believe that some people with +$100.000 wages came up with such an idea, and some manager approved it, and the team implemented this, and deployed it, and not a single sane person was there to say, hey, this can bust someone. I'd sack whomever involved.
There's a difference between being blocked from innovation and having UX engineers look at something. It is the job of these folks to find out things like this; they don't have blinkers on when it comes to knowing about how the app gets used and how people can fail at things.
It's quite likely that this was just directly shipped given that it's a one-day thing.
Nobody's asking them to stop innovating; you can be more rigorous in your shipping process (which they usually are) without affecting innovation.
Reading replies to this I think it might be a good idea to take a few deep breaths, then consider just how small this mistake is, how it should be a lesson learned and that no one needs to be fired over it.
So you're saying that this is all getting a little too silly? I hereby award you the first ever HN Colonel prize. It may not have come off exactly right, but it was still pretty funny. If we stop getting April fools pranks from Google, the internet will be a materially worse place.
Or maybe the buttons I click shouldn't suddenly change without warning? This isn't a case of a user ignoring an important dialog box then wondering why their computer doesn't work anymore; the button just suddenly started to do something different, which is terrible user interface design.
To put it another way, how am I supposed to get anything done when I'm spending all my time making sure the interface doesn't change beneath my feet?
It replaced the Send And Archive button that lives next to Send. (Adding a new one is still a bad idea, imho, but would have been borderline forgivable)
Fun side effect of long-running AJAX apps: even though Google disabled the feature, it will still be live for everyone who has a gmail window since (at least) yesterday. The feature must have had a timed activation.
You have to refresh the page. And apparently even that may not be enough. I Ctrl-R refreshed in Firefox and still saw the button (aggressive caching?). I closed the tab and loaded gmail in a new tab, and finally button went away.
I still have the button too! Refreshed and it didn't go away. I assume I have to log out to actually remove it. I'm not sure how long this tab has been open for.
Send a follow-up email with a brief explanation and a link to this article. If your employer/benefactor/whatever still insists on feeling slighted then you may want to reconsider if you want business relationship with them.
Impressions can go a long ways. What if you were emailing you exwife's lawyer or judge? Potential new customer that may save your business? Email is a critical communication tool of the modern day, it was ill conceived and clearly not thought out on Google's behalf.
I'm really angry that they could have seen this as anything but a dangerous idea. Strange sense of humour they have. I guess when you work at Google you don't need to worry so much about job hunting or career stuff. They are really out of touch.
Maybe we can use this comment as a place to give our best guesses for to the percentage of liars on the internet.
How many of the people claiming to have clicked a button few minutes / hours after it was out and having spectacular irreversible consequences to their lives is just a phony?
I would say between 40% and 90%, but don't know better than that.
I saw this last night while on a call with a friend. I emailed him and asked him to reply and saw that I didn't get the reply, and we both agreed that this was a spectacularly bad idea. About an hour later I saw my wife hovering over the mic drop button and warned her that she probably didn't want to use it. I love that Google's brand is fun and whimsical, but there are some things that are not OK for such a critical service. It's like if the electric company sent a signal down the wire on July 4th to make every AC motor start humming the national anthem.
please make this an actual feature in labs. lose the gif and have it send an auto reply to all future responses indicating I am no longer reading the email thread. in the auto-reply have a link leading to how to use bcc
This makes me wonder what the process is for these "jokes". Has anyone here been involved in an April Fools day joke that was as visible as this or on as important a product as Gmail? Where does the idea originate? How many people are involved in its approval? How much time and attention is paid to it? I think the answers to these type of questions would be pretty interesting.
I was the push behind Opera Softwares 'Face Gestures' April fool. This was concise over a lunch time chat, vetted by my manager and went to production (I would link the video but struggling to copy/paste). I felt it was amusing and some might believe it at the beginning but 99% of people would realise it's a joke by the end of the video. The response was good. It was fun for us to make something different and gave our users a laugh and got a bit of press for the brand. I think this is the goal more than actually fooling large numbers of people. Some harmless fun so to say.
That said over the years we had a few people asking about this feature as a serious option...
Weird thing to say, considering that this "feature" goes to alter the conversation. No matter what the UI changes other, the primary tenet is to not alter and obfuscate the conversation. So, from this point of view, they actually messed with the core feature of the app: sending and receiving emails/messages, without alteration to the message.
Now, they could be in on the joke and/or all just picking up the original story and parroting it without any fact checking. I'm still hoping the real prank here was getting the media to cover a fake prank, but I'm becoming less sure of my instincts.
It's also worth noting that I saw the button in my GMail interface early this morning (as well as the little pop-up explaining it), and now, a few hours later, that button is gone, and it is still very much 1 April. I would think if the backlash was just part of the joke, the button would still be there.
Yeah, okay, that sounds pretty conclusive. When I replied, I hadn't yet seen a non-jokey-sounding report of a real person saying they'd experienced it. That sucks – both because the apparent negative impact on real people's lives and because I was really hoping it was an elaborate prank on the media.
The general anger I'm feeling this morning over all the think-they-are-funny programmers / tech people who spread pain and suffering expecting everyone to knows its April 1st and they should expect things to work differently so they should ignore their muscle memory. I really cannot think of another term that would correctly fit. Beer swilling, hey watch me program this, juvenile foolishness.
I thought when reading about that "Drop the mic" joke, that gmail will temporarily drop recording from the users microphone, and will not send the audio to google, so they won't be able to listen what is spoken in that room.
I thought that's a neat feature, unfortunately only temporary.
Romanian government used that tactic for some years on all old cable phones, until google brought that feature to the masses with the new smartphone and laptop technology.
An addendum to my comment above: Three days later I have now also been bitten by Google's April Fool's feature/bug!
Today I received an email from someone asking why I was not replying to the other email thread started on April 1st. The person had clicked the 'drop the mic' button, and was not seeing any further replies to that thread. Not good!
I seen it earlier, but I just assumed it was something about using your mic to record an email.... I wasn't really paying attention.
It told you about the feature in a pop up ( I think) when you went to compose a new email and the button was there next to the send button when composing.
Yes, we had great fun with it around the office and no careers were ruined. My manager rescheduled my 1-on-1 timeslot and used the mic drop to hilarious effect.
Did anyone take a screenshot of the Mic Drop button before it was removed? There are GIFs showing the sent email with the minion, but could find any showing the /button/ in action.
I would guess they missed the idea that people use muscle memory to close irritating pop-ups without trying to figure out why it's there, or what it relates to. They are then left with 2 send buttons, one with a now ambiguous microphone icon.
Unfortunately, the popup Google chose to use looks like an advertisement. The red "new" banner and animated gif.
They might have reacted differently to an actual dialog at first click that says "This will inject an image into your outbound email, and mute the conversation. Continue?" (with the default choice set to "NO".
It would be cool if websites didn't pop up dialogs for stupid reasons. 90% of dialogs that appear without user interaction are intrusive and unnecessary so users get used to closing them. Would you like to take a survey?, download our mobile app?, full screen ads, and my favorite - "our site has changed dramatically, here's a tutorial."
Did the button actually operate as advertised? It wouldn't surprise me if it did nothing, and the real April fools joke were planted fake outrage "I got fired over this!" tweets.
I'm not seeing this in my UI, is it an independent april fool's joke here? ah I see it's supposedly been taken down, now I don't know if it actually ever existed.
"Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs."
It wasn't a bug it was a feature. Maybe I'm too much of an engineer but I HATE when PM's/managers/PR representatives just classify all unexpected and undesired behaviour as "bugs". A "bug" implies I made a mistake. I didn't make a mistake. I developed EXACTLY what you told me, after numerous rounds of confirmation and feedback loops. It's not a bug if it's doing exactly what it was supposed to.
In the pop-out compose, it _replaced_ the send&archive.
In the regular compose/reply/forward, it added another button to the side.
I'm thinking the "bug" is that in the pop-out, it replaced the send&archive, so people _inadvertently_ clicked it out of muscle memory.
The actual bug was apparently a little more nuanced than 'for some people'. If you tried the mic drop button in an empty email, it would fail to send. If you then used that same email draft and sent it regularly, the effect would still apply.
For fun, on our site one of the developers made it so that if you entered the Konami code, every image would be replaced by random cat pictures. This was immediately ripped out of prod a few weeks later when a client asked why there were a bunch of cat photos in their dashboard. Still no idea how they triggered it.
I once did this on an internal app, we had a hotkeys library installed, so I added the GTA cheats to raise and lower your wanted level. It just added a temporary notice in the top right of your screen, nothing major. Turns out that if you mashed the keyboard, the library didn't properly handle 6+ character combinations, and would fire the callback anyways.
It's hard to screw things up too badly with something like the flight simulator. It's just a hidden toy completely disconnected from the rest of the program.
But when you start messing with the user's content as a joke, god help you.
That's a pretty bad bug! I imagine a pretty standard behavior would be open a compose window, notice the new button and click it out of curiosity (safely, since you have a blank email), and then go ahead with your normal email.
Yes, the word "bug" isn't restricted to only implementation, but it certainly has that connotation. In deanCommie's case, it sounds like the PM is using the existing connotation of the word "bug" to assign blame to the implementation when it correctly implements the broken design.
When the list of "bugs" are used in performance metrics which affect your career, correctly assigning blame becomes important.
Agreed, bug can lack nuance. We have subtypes for our bugs in our tracker and try to use them liberally. Generally spec defect (as opposed to code defect) is only used when someone closes a bug "by design", at which point you say the design is wrong.
It's an effective way of putting power in the hands of people impacted, for better or for worse. I've certainly reopened "by design" bugs in areas I don't own because I think the design it wrong. Done with tact (and usually a note explaining/alerting the person) it generally goes over well.
Well, to be fair, I suspect PM's/managers/PR representatives HATE when angry engineers go on knee-jerk rants about how a bug which they know nothing about is a "feature"... :-)
Bugs can happen at any stage of the development cycle. Typically the farther away a bug is found from the stage it entered the more expensive it is to fix.
You don't have any responsibility for what you build? Maybe it's on you, too. (As a PM, I HATE when engineers are full of confirmations and feedback loops but cop the 'not my fault, I just build exactly what you tell me' attitude the moment there's something to fix)
The PM is responsible for the requirements. If my PRD fails to be explicit or is not involved in the QA process, the PM needs to take ownership. Yes, everyone is responsible for the UX, but the PM especially.
Yeah well, when I find a bug I go to my PM and I say "Dude, I messed up. Here's the problem. Here's what you need to tell the customers to do/not do. Here's what i need to fix it."
When there's a problem with requirements and the users are screaming, and the system isn't doing what they want (but exactly what they built), the PM comes to me and says "We fucked up. You need to drop everything and fix this right away."
This has been the case with almost every PM I've ever worked with.
Wow, what a bunch of babies. I'm sorry, I just don't see how sending a "mic drop" email could ruin so many lives in just a few hours. It's not like it sent some NSFW gif or random insults or something. Accidentally sent one? Just send a new email to the person with a link to an article about it and say, oops, I got pranked, sorry?
What a thoughtless, jerky attitude. Two seconds of poking around Twitter would have found you many real examples of horrified GMail users dealing with the fallout from this "prank", not just people dealing with a job search and potential employers, but people writing very emotionally charged e-mails, like condolence notices to people on the death of their child.
Which now has a Minion GIF in it.
It is one thing for a prank to do something to the UI of a product, like invert the colors or display Comic Sans. It is quite another when it alters the content of the very messages you are passing.
I was referring mainly to the people quoted in the article, but rest assured, if it changed your font to ComicSans or inverted the colors, countless people would still say their lives have been damaged beyond repair.
As I understand it, the gag was triggering on the normal send button too, at least for some.
How would you know you sent one, or got pranked, if you used the normal send button? I'd be pissed in that scenario if it was work related. Bosses famously often lack senses of humour.
I'm not joking. If you're livelihood is so at risk that you could lose it over a minion gif you have a terrible unhappy life. It was a house of cards ready to fall at any moment anyway. You'd be much better off / happier having to find a new job / wife / whatever else is causing so much pain in the long run.
Speaking from experience of a job triggering a stress induced bout of trigeminal neuralgia that made me want to die. After two weeks of that I quit my job of five years and found a much lower stress one.
It's one thing that you don't understand what it's actually like to live on the edge. Maybe you haven't experienced it. I don't wish for you to experience it.
But it's another frankly repulsive thing for you to act superior and give such awful advice to those people.
Maybe you should experience what it's like. Try and give you a better idea of what it's like to be a few dollars away from being homeless. Have your children removed from your care because you cannot provide from them. Have your entire life thrown away if you lose your job.
Not everyone can just "find a new job". Why don't you come here in Greece and ask the majority of the population why they can't find a job?
Your comments in this thread used way too much inflammatory language and crossed the line into incivility, culminating in accusing people of being sociopathic. Please don't do that. It's no picnic to be around someone bursting with indignation, even when one agrees with them.
The HN guidelines ask you specifically not to call names in comments, whether or not someone else says bad things. You called a lot of names; that's understandable on a subject that evokes strong emotion, but those also are the occasions where the guidelines most apply. Had you followed them and edited those bits out, your comments would have been more persuasive, and also more dignified.
Sorry, you're right. I'm guessing you're talking about my other comment then? I agree it was too strong, but by the time I wanted to edit it it wasn't editable anymore.
I just picked one comment to reply to, but the problem was across all of them. The above one is also too 'strong', to use your word, in a personal way.
I sympathize with the emotion behind it, but when you weaponize it like that and direct it at somebody, you break the bonds of community here—which are so weak to begin with, that protecting them has to be everyone's priority.
I HAVE experienced what it is like. Its insulting that you would make assumptions. If you are living in such a terrible place you really are better off with a fresh start. Speaking from experience. If a minion gif can "ruin your life" it was already a infix able house of cards. I've updated my previous comment with details.
I seriously doubt that you have. You wouldn't be writing nonsense about a "fresh start" or "finding a new job/wife" otherwise. Even steps much more insignificant than those are simply impossible for a vast amount of people on this planet.
No, you quite clearly haven't, and it's insulting for everyone in that position that you would pretend you have.
As for your experience per your edit, I'm sorry you had such a high stress job and it's good to hear you got a better one, but that's not at all the situations I was talking about.
Have you been in a situation where you don't know how to pay the rent, will get kicked out if you don't and have no place to live if you get kicked out?
Have you been in jail for something meaningless and experienced employer after employer declining even having you in an interview because of the red flag?
Have you been part of an economy where the majority of the population cannot find a job because nobody is hiring, because nobody has money left?
If you had a job in any of those situations, you'd be damn glad to have it and you wouldn't be looking for a "fresh start" just because the conditions are not ideal.
> No, you quite clearly haven't, and it's insulting for everyone in that position that you would pretend you have.
You're assuming that someone who differs from you in opinion (not their view of the facts), is stupider than you, less experienced than you, and dishonest. That's not an argument, that's just peer pressure.
edit: and whoever flagged it, I'd love to know what kind of criteria they were using (flagged: not feeling my pain deeply enough?)
I'm not assuming. He edited his post with a story which has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of thing we're dealing with here.
Being in a high stress job and being able to leave it to get a better one is not the same thing as being in a situation where you cannot lose your job lest you risk your children, your home etc.
And even without such an edit, it's ridiculously easy to tell he hasn't been in that situation. If you go around telling people "pah, they just need a fresh start, new job, new wife", you've not been in a situation where you understand this isn't always an option. Good for you, but you live in one hell of a bubble.
Is it really this hard to understand the issue here? How long have we spent collectively explaining very basic functionality of systems to the elderly, to our parents, friends, etc?
There is no way anybody loses his jobs because of this. How hard is it to link one of the million articles about this to whoever you sent that email too? It's not ideal but pretending that it'll have drastic consequences is ridiculous and completely destroy whatever point these people want to make.
This doesn't upset me. This doesn't upset you. This doesn't upset hundreds of thousands of people and as unfunny as this is, I'm sure many are laughing about it.
However, it can upset some people. Some people who would mistakenly click the button because, god forbid, they forgot not to use the internet at all on April 1st, and that mistake would appear in an extremely important conversation.
And that mistake would appear during career discussions. And that mistake would get someone not hired, or fired, or whatever.
You guys want to complain, talk about how they should "look harder", how they should "take responsibility" and "own up to their mistakes", how they should "be happy not to work somewhere people are so uptight"? Have some fucking empathy.
I'd wager the majority of HN is well off, or well off enough that they don't have to worry about the rent or their water bill. But I'd like to see some of the people here struggling to make ends meet. Maybe you won't be so sociopathic about the potential for serious harm.
But you _are_ upset at the _idea_ of people potentially being upset by it. This thread makes you sick. Are you suggesting it's classist to observe the prank as harmless?
I understand where you're coming from, and I understand how someone may have clicked it by accident. I am struggling to empathize with the recipient who would see this, and a follow-up email explaining it was a mistake, and let that affect them.
The prank doesn't upset me. Where did I suggest that the thread doesn't upset me? Damn right the thread upsets me. People are downvoting left and right those that dare to suggest jobs are not a commodity you can just throw away and replace a week later. Not for everyone.
And no, there's no classism at play. It's purely and simply a lack of empathy. A lack of understanding of what it's like to be in a situation where losing your job may cost you your home, your children or even your life.
> I am struggling to empathize with the recipient who would see this
Then don't empathize with the recipient. Plenty of bosses are jerks. But empathize with the sender, who would lose a job they cared about and can't necessarily get a new one like they grow on trees.
Shouldn't you also ask for empathy in people who are upset by it? They seem to have the least empathy of everybody, if they are going to fire somebody over animated GIF.
I am merely pointing out that it's a little unfair, or perhaps absurd, if a person who points out a lack of empathy in other people (people who get upset at those GIFs to the point of hurting someone) gets blamed - by you - for a lack of empathy with their victims.
Unfortunately, people like that probably won't come to HN and leave comment - cool, I just fired someone over it! But they absolutely should get the blame.
I think email is /primarily/ used as a professional communication tool today. Casual and personal uses of email have been largely replaced by social media.
Well it's not just a matter of using it for work, anyone might have to send professional emails, be it a job hunter or a small store owner or a thousand of other situations. I can see the fun in the button but I guess that if I did send it by mistake in a professional conversation I too would be dying inside, especially if there's a job or my reputation on the line.
But yes, i agree that using them in professional emails might not be the best thing. Now, we could have a conversation about why someone is using private email accounts for professional purposes.
The only flag raised with me regarding using a minion, is that minions are copyrighted. It makes me wonder if they got clearance from Universal / Illumination before publishing this prank. (If not, I really doubt Universal / Illumination would be too happy with headlines today.)
I love how so many people are butthurt about this.
Google owes you nothing. They are a business and you are their customer using their product for free. If you don't like it, GTFO.
This argument against criticism is so tired. The world doesn't owe anyone anything: that doesn't mean when someone does something stupid that you have no right to complain about it.
Stuff like this makes me consider less about ever applying to Google. idk, they've got smart people at their company, but there seems to be an underlying disconnect with real everyday users. I think autistic would be too harsh to describe their collective mindset...
They have real every day users, but Google doesn't understand those users. Many Googlers eat at Google, play at Google, and most of their friends are other Googlers.
You'll notice Google has almost no comprehension of real people's lives. Google designers have never had to do work on a 1024x768 screen at the office.
Googlers live in a bubble where technology is perfect, which is why they seem to believe technology can solve a lot of human issues much easier than they actually can. For them, it's possible.
I think this is a little hyperbolic but not too much. I'd expect a similar mindset and internal use of G+ is a large reason it wasn't scrapped a year ago.
Google understands users better than you think. They mine millions of interactions to see what people are doing so understand what is liked and not liked. This prank was not a data driven so back fired.
Google has automated this process. They don't do nearly enough actual interaction with actual users about problems. This is actually an example of what I'm talking about. Where they assume an automated data collector is more valuable than even just sitting down with one person and watching them use the website.
Google understands users the same way an AI will understand what a sunset is, and why people like to look at them. It'll be able to tell you it's yellow orange, happens at 6:10pm eastern time, from your GPS coordnates will be appear x cm wide, has a brightness value of y, etc. It'll understand the uniqueness of the color range.
But the AI won't really understand why people watch a sunset.
The UX researchers here at Google DO in fact sit down with many people and watch them use all sorts of parts of google, gmail, etc. In fact they go out of their way to run usability studies in various parts of the countries, because, you know, selection bias.
Also automated data is collected.
The real problem here is, if you have X million users, can you really know them as a unified set of people? Of course not.
Sure this prank backfired, but hey, have some compassion for the people who worked on it. They were trying to be funny, and trying to bring a little light to people's life. There was no intention of ruining anyone's day.
I am opted into their user studies group. I haven't seen a new invitation in a couple of years now. And the way they handle user studies, opt in via Google Form, they still see a particularly biased community: Hardcore Google users, most likely technical in nature.
If Google went to a senior citizens' home, and watched how some of their less technically inclined users used their products, I'm confident Google would fire everyone with the word "designer" in their title and start over.
But this is largely immaterial to this particular joke. The joke was funny. The choice to implement it for real was not.
So, what you're saying is, from your limited view point, you have a conclusive overview of all of UX? Also, Google designers are intensely incompetent and deserve to be fired?
I dunno, you sure are quick to judge a very difficult subject area.
Google designers ARE intensely incompetent. And design's a pretty simple subject area. The problem is, designers need to justify their continued jobs, after a product is launched. So there's a constant set of increasingly more complicated overengineering projects to "redesign" things to stay "trendy". Generally sacrificing usability in exchange.
Ever since Google hired their "VP of Design", their products have heavily shifted away from being functionally useful.
There's a reason Gmail is the last bastion of competent design at Google. There's a reason that even Googlers said they wouldn't use Gmail if Inbox became the "new Gmail", and this is probably where this conversation rounds back to this prank:
Because if that is "functionally useful" then I will happily continue using trendy. The thing with design is that it is not a simple subject area. You are constantly balancing several (somtimes mutually exclusive) objectives.
At the end of the day, blame end-users. They use the products that are "trendy" and look nice. They dictate good design.
My not really updated portfolio page isn't really intended to be 'useful', lol. Though the navigation is much clearer than many websites today, and the pages load on pretty much any device nearly instantaneously.
You highlight my exact point: To you design is purely functional. To the overwhelming majority of people it isn't. That's the reason Google's Design initiative (Material Design) was started in the first place. Good design practices across all Google Services.
You want bad design, try most of the AWS tools. You can have both functionality and appeal. Pretending they are mutually exclusive is silly.
Let's just say for the sake of argument that this were a serious new feature and not an April 1 joke. Like a fast reply or something that could cause similar outcomes.
Are they allowed to rearrange the buttons then? Or should they never change the UI in fear that users might bump the wrong button due to muscle memory.
The article posted to a UK site with a byline that says "Posted 43 minutes ago". At the time of writing this comment; 43 minutes was ~2pm in the UK, give or take a few minutes.
The article also has an update on 11:50. That update either came ~2 hours before the article was posted, or 8-9 hours in the future.
>So, I'm going to guess the whole article is fake.
Honestly this is the best April Fools I've seen on the internet in years because I've no idea whether the mic drop feature existed or not. The uncertainty in whether it's real owns
No, it's true. I noticed the Drop the Mic thing last night, and ignored because it was late and I was tired, and I didn't understand what the hell it was. I actually thought it was some kind of Whatsapp-like "send voice message", done with an extremely ugly Minion emoticon.
Anyone else thought about the fact that now that they have removed this feature, they have put the "job death" sentence on those that accidentally used it and would have had a reasonable explanation to their boss?
"Look, this button is right here and I thought it was send." Now a non-technical boss will just assume that person is lying because no button is in gmail anymore. Thanks Google. Stay Classy.
I was wondering if this would have some serious legal repercussions for Google.
In the US I believe normal mail cannot be substantially modified in transit, and that this is a Federal offense. For instance for a postal worker to open letters and insert cartoons because it was April Fool's day he would not only lose his job but also be subject to prosecution.
Certainly an email server is in some way exempt as it is possible for software to add headers to an email, but if the server modifies the message and the manner of communication substantially, there might be serious legal ramifications to this practical joke of Google. Especially since this joke impeded the response in a way similar to scratching out the return address of a postal letter.
The very fact that Google thought it worthwhile to do such a thing with personal communication absolutely boggles the mind. Any responsible organization would be insane put their email on their servers after such a stunt.
This is more a sign of the sluggishness of the legal system to follow the reality. More people use email now than regular mail, even for official things. Most companies even accept a pdf of a signed contract as an attachment these days.
The thing is though, if email was treated in a way similar to Federal mail, the whole debate about encryption and due process could be handled by laws that already protect privacy. For some strange reason, because it uses a computer, we lose many fundmental rights that we already had with Federal mail. In a certain way email is a service so fundamental to society now, that it becomes a necessary utility - so many things can't be done without an email address today.
Yeah, it's usually called an "electronic communication" in legal stuff, and cannot be substituted for the mail. I've seen this come up in organization bylaws that say that things need to be done via postal mail, and they need to change their bylaws to allow e-mail to be used instead.
Not a lawyer, but I wonder if Google is on very thin ice here. Federal law about snail mail may not be relevant if someone launches a substantial civil damages suit.
>The very fact that Google thought it worthwhile to do such a thing with personal communication absolutely boggles the mind.
This might have been funny on G's own internal network, kind of. But forcing it on users was astoundingly stupid and tone deaf.
Maybe next year we can have a gif of Eric Schmidt jumping over a shark on water skis.
Surely if you're using software you should be capable of operating it properly? That's probably what might getting people into trouble. If you can't figure out how to send an email properly then you're flagging up to potential employers that you're a bit of a muppet. I'd not want to compound that with a lawsuit which tells potential employers that you're also a humourless cretin.
April Fools is such a collective waste of time. Not only does it lower productivity of many people for a day, some "pranks" actually take days to prepare. I imagine that producing SnoopaVision for Youtube [1] wasn't exactly cheap.
TL;DR "people are careless and stupid, use a new feature on important messages without checking to see what it does first, then whine about it when they get burned"
It's important to avoid the thought-terminating cliche "Oh, it was just human error" and look at the problems in the UI that cause the errors in the first place. If the ignition in your car was one day replaced by an ejector seat, and you hit it without thinking because that's what you do every day, I doubt you'd be placing the blame on yourself.
Given that a car is a dangerous piece of machinery that could quite easily kill myself and people around me if it malfunctions, yes I do give it a once-over every time I get into it throughout the day, which includes the interior controls.
Getting back on topic, given historical data, it's foolish to not expect something to happen/change on April 1st, especially on google products.
source: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/715820699215138817