I know that the engineers at Google don’t need to take suggestions from me, but here it is anyway: I think it would be nice to have a way to notify people of how many unread Gmail emails they have from the Google search homepage. Preferably how many unread and how many unread since they last logged in, since many people keep unread messages for a while.
It’s simple, but I think it would be useful.
And yes, I know about the Gmail notifier, but this wouldn’t require extra software and would be used by more people.
From Google’s point of view, the benefit of this feature would be making its site even stickier (if that’s possible). If every time you go do a search you are reminded to check your Gmail, you’ll probably spend more time on Google-owned sites. And if you know that a quick way to check your mail is to go to your Google bookmark (home page in my browsers), you’ll go there more often, and once there, chances are good that you’ll click on Google News or do a search or whatever.
November 17, 2008 at 10:16 am |
Google has the customizable homepage option where you can have a widget of your inbox. Check out iGoogle.
November 17, 2008 at 11:13 am |
Hi Liam,
Thanks for the suggestion.
I suppose that would work, though I’ve always stuck with the “regular” Google homepage because I prefer it to iGoogle. I think even iGoogle would benefit from that simple notifier — it would take much less space.
November 17, 2008 at 3:57 pm |
Good idea, but given Google’s fanatical focus on keeping the main search page as fast and simple as possible, I’m guessing they probably wouldn’t ever implement this. I do wish that the major web sites would allow for customizable versions of their core products so we could choose to sacrifice a bit of speed for features like this, if we wanted to.
November 17, 2008 at 4:18 pm |
If speed is an issue, they could probably allow the feature to be disabled, or code the page in such a way that everything else loads without waiting for that number (which could pop a few fractions of seconds later, whatever – wouldn’t make it any less usable).
It certainly would be a smaller hit on performance than switching to the iGoogle page (which is fast anyway, but relatively more bandwidth intensive).