hwork.org

The dilemma: when products are good and consumers begin to depend on them, what happens when products change ? When TiVo, who boldly decided to give TV viewers control over what they watch, decided to throw ads over commercial fast-forwarding, they made their product arguably less groovy and some people weren’t happy. Is Gmail, Google’s free email service, going to do the same?

Unlike TiVo, Gmail isn’t static (I can’t revert to an earlier version), and since I don’t pay squat, I don’t feel like complaining loudly. But here’s the gist: instead of targeted ads on the side of email texts, now they’re placed in a bar above the main box used for inbox/composing. ‘Gmail Clip’ is probably a new advertising mechanism for Gmail users, or I could be wrong and it is Google’s offering of easy RSS-functionality. From what I can tell, not all Gmail users have seen ‘Gmail Clips’ on their accounts.

The story out there is mostly about the RSS capabilities, and that it can give you oppurtunity to add your favorite blogs and have Gmail stream new articles in for you. But there are two, possibly trivial annoyances with this:
-one, my mouse that once went to labelling or archiving buttons now goes to this ‘clip’ bar.
-two, targeted ads now show up in a much more prominent way — in the center, taking up more space, placed where functionality used to be instead out of the way.

The only intelligent thing I can offer on this topic:
when good products show signs of possibly getting worse, as larger, more prominent ads might well, how can users not help but feel helpless? Does the sequence of events indicate that Google has deliberately inticed users with great features only to reign them back in? I’m probably just full of it.

Any other Gmail users dig?