The Mountain View, Calif., company (NASDAQ: GOOG), which makes most of its money from advertising, spends that money on a wide variety of issues, from the profound to the absurd.
Last week, Google plopped out a policy document, a plan to get people thinking about weaning the United States off fossil fuels.
This week, as a post on the “official Gmail blog” puts it, the problem to be cured is angry or embarrassing emails sent by drunk people.
Gmail plans to offer “Mail Goggles,” a kind of sobriety test to make sure a sender is sober enough to send a message. Rather than test the sender’s alcohol blood level, the program prompts the user with a series of math problems (69-38 =?, 11x2=?, and so on) which must be solved within a time limit.
The program’s default setting is for late at night on the weekend, when, as the blog says “you’re most likely to need it.”
Jon Perlow, the Google worker who wrote the post, says his inspiration for the product was “the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message.”
No comments:
Post a Comment