Analysing The Results Of The Gmail Custom Time April Fools Post
So yesterday was April fools day, one of my favorite days of the year. Suffice it to say that I was bored at work and feeling a bit mischievous. Although the bullpen I sit in is full of lively and fun-loving IT and forensic accountants, the morning went by without incident, which was pretty lame and disappointing (Everyone’s trying to close out their 3-31 projects, so I can’t blame them really). By noon I was dying to see something go down. And then I saw Gmail’s little “Custom Time” April fools spoof and decided to try and have a little bloggy fun on my own.
To be completely honest, I didn’t really know what to think of the Custom Time page that Google put up. It was definitely creative, but it seemed so obvious, and not that funny…would people even notice? Would they really believe it? Was it worth it to Google to actually pay a team of employees to brain storm the idea, make a creative, and go through the process of getting engineers to add a little red link in the top right hand corner of Gmail for just a day? I asked a couple of guys at work what they thought and I got some quick validation - Creative, but also obvious, pointless and ignorable. A couple of guys even said they were really irritated at first. Interesting. Still, I wasn’t convinced that my IT audit buddies were a true representative sample of “all Gmail users.” I needed some hard data. After all, these guys spend all day analyzing data for potential fraud. So after I got back from lunch I decided it was worth a half-hour to see if I could push the lie and get a rise out of a few people. In retrospect it was a feeble attempt to have some fun, but I half expected some people to be legitimately pissed. Maybe non-Gmail users hadn’t heard about it or didn’t notice? Maybe people knew about the spoof, but thought it was lame….but maybe some people were infuriated? I was legit curious. All things considered, I started to wonder how April-fools-aware the average stumble-upon user really was, and, given that it was April 1st, I posted a quick-and-dirty rant about Google being evil.
After hitting “publish” and asking a couple of friends to stumble the post, I waited. I half expected a bunch of comments that just called me out — Hey idiot, it’s April Fools! — Fraser gets 50 points for his reaction time and wit in that regard. But I was secretly dying to spark some heated debate about the sanctity of time with at least a few unsuspecting idiots, who, unaware that it was 04/01 might have felt threatened/outraged by Google’s little white lie. Despite a small spike in traffic to 113 unique visitors yesterday, I had no such luck in that regard. In fact, I only got one comment from a stumbler “hahahah. That’s funny“. But the data I did get from Google analytics was interesting enough, and confirmed that either (A) I am a bad liar, or (B) most stumblers agree with the IT Auditors. The truth is probably a mix of both ;-). As you can see, the high bounce rate and low average time spent on the post shows pretty definitively that people didn’t care at all, and the lack of comments on the post confirms it, which, I think, begs a few questions. Did people even notice or care about the spoof yesterday? Did people think it was funny? The title of this morning’s TechCrunch’s post “Gmail April Fools Not Very Funny. On The Upside They Started A Wikipedia War” kind of says it all. And 753,000 RSS readers were delivered that slag post this morning. So why did Google devote any resources to the spoof at all if they ran the risk of pissing people off, and provoking bad PR on big blogs TechCrunch? Thoughts anyone?
Gmail’s New “Custom Time” Feature Opens The Floodgates to Time Stamp Manipulation
You’ve probably seen novelty programs like TimeMachiner that allow you to send emails into the future. But what about being able to send emails into the past? Better yet, what about being able to send emails to a recipient marked as read into the past? Gmail’s new beta “custom time” , which was released yesterday, lets you do just that. Kiss your trust in time stamps goodbye.
At some point, we’ve all had or witnessed (some form of) the following argument:
Person A: Why didn’t you do X? Dude, I sent you an email about that a week ago….
Person B: No you didn’t. I check my email 40 times a day. I would never miss something like that.
Person A: Check your email. Trust me. It’s there…
From now on, if you’re “Person A” in this argument, it’s entirely possible that you’ll rush to your inbox expecting validation and instead be surprised and embarrassed to find a “read” message from “Person B”. Of course, you’ve never actually read the message before, but there’s no way to prove that you didn’t. What do you do then?
I’ve always found comfort in the sanctity of time stamps. I trust and count on them, so just reading about this beta set me on fire. In regular Google fashion, they’ve made the functionality super easy to use, which makes it all the more terrifying.
The only saving grace, really, is that Gmail says it’ll limit users to just 10 pre-dated emails per year, siting that Google researchers have concluded that “allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time.” Maybe it’s just me, but it would only take ONE pre-dated email showing up in my inbox to render me faithless.
If you haven’t seen the testimonials on the Custom Time Beta description page, I wholeheartedly encourage you to take a quick gander over there. I’ve captured my favorites in a screenshot. Dude, I thought Google’s motto was “Don’t Be Evil“?
What do you think? Please comment freely.
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