Shaunak's Universe

If Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked me to scrub the floors of the Google office for half an hour a week, in exchange for using the new Priority Inbox feature on Gmail, I probably would. It's neat, well conceived, well implemented, efficient and nifty. Very nifty. In my book, it's the best thing to happen to E-mail, since Gmail.

It concept is easy enough; your Inbox is divided into three sections: 'Priority', 'Starred' and 'Everything Else'.

The Priority section contains all the emails and threads that Google thinks are important to you, and are unread. Once you read these messages, they are moved below to the Everything Else section. The stared section consists of emails that you have marked with a star, and are still sitting in you Inbox. The Everything Else section contrives of, well, everything else. (No surprises here!) Unread messages that Google thinks are unimportant: chain mails and Facebook notifications for instance, priority mails that you have finished reading, or messages that you have manually marked unimportant.

Since a picture is worth a kilo-word, here is a screen-shot of the priority Inbox in action. I have edited out some parts of the image, because after all, it is my mailbox, and I deserve a little privacy. No?

All this is of-course dependent on Google's “thoughts” on you E-mails. And boy, are they good at this thinking business. To be honest, I was a little apprehensive about the effectiveness of the algorithm at first. But after using this for a while now, I am impressed with the accuracy of the software. It works great right out of the box. Spare a couple of promotional emails, it has demoted nearly all social networking notifications, chain-mails and other unimportant messages downwards, all neatly lined up for quick deletion. And by no means does it do so blindly; it understands that replies and comments on Flickr etc. are important to me, so prioritizes them, while youtube, instructibles and what have you, notifications automatically head southward.

To top it off, the system is Bayesian, so it will adapt to your use.

All in all, its a powerful feature that saves a lot of time and effort. Its a zillion times more useful that Google's recent forays into innovation; case and point: the new ajax-ified image search. Not to mention Google wave. But hey, failures are only stepping stones to success, Aren't they? And this time, Google has hit the mark with an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The wonderful promotion people Google have made an amazing video explaining the new feature. I do recommended you watch it. It is delightful.

The priority inbox can be enabled from here: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html