I fail to see the humor in that.
So… You introduced an easy-to-click button that black-holes an entire thread in a way likely to annoy every recipient; and you did so with the characters pulled from some of the most insipid made-for-toy-tie-ins-and-facebook-meme-slurry in recent memory? And then you released it to production?
I’d make a “What the hell is in the water over there?” crack; but the answer is actually “Trichloroethylene, in sufficent quantities to make it a Superfund site”, so maybe that would be in poor taste. (This isn’t actually Google-specific: Silicon Valley has the nation’s highest concentration of superfund sites, from back before much of the actual IC production moved to places where it is just as dirty and more legal than in California).
Insanity, in any event.
[quote=“beschizza, post:1, topic:75964”][quote]
Due to a bug, the MicDrop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs.
[/quote][/quote]
Was it a bug, or just a really bad UX decision?
Which makes me wonder if they paid any royalties for the privilege of using those images?
They may end up paying for real for this error.
Did it really happen, or is this a meta-april fools joke?
It’s mainly so that Google can suck up as much personal data about you as they can.
This is an excellent question. Let’s check Goo— oh shiiiii
I thought this was kind of funny up until I found out they really put the button in and it really tried to do what they had said it did.
Next thing you’ll be telling me they really did use Pigeons to rank pages for one day in 2002.
The joke or the water?
I don’t know what Trichloroethylene tastes like(and would prefer to keep it that way, zesty organic solvents usually aren’t a great idea), so I’ll only comment on the joke. But the water might also be. Semiconductors don’t have a reputation as a dirty business, because the absolute tonnage is relatively low(in that vein, has anyone had better luck than I have in digging up the answers to questions like “only counting the die itself, not packaging, how many kilograms of Xeons, or A6s, or DDR3 does the world consume annually?”) and the value per ton is stratospheric; but there are some downright scary chemicals involved.
What’s really disappointing here is that Google’s April Fools pranks used to be so good. Remember when GMail was the prank?
If Google did this without getting rights clearance from Universal Studios; then the bafflement and shock expressed in my initial post would be orders of magnitude to small; and my only explanation would involve some sort of MKUltra-II and exotic psychoactives released into the ventilation system at the GooglePlex.
Wikipedia says sweet, burning taste.
Risks, taste and odor thresholds here:
Not really scary. Quite interesting but not really scary.
Only a small handful of stuff is really scary. Dimethyl mercury, for example.
Though some stuff makes it up with amount. But there are generally no such high amounts used in semiconductor manufacture.
hmm playing with well-established UI arrangements and then being surprised when people click things out of muscle memory.
it’s almost as if Google struggles with fundamental UI concepts~
The guy posting that image hurriedly tries to explain it’s a mockup of what could go wrong:
“More like a prediction. I made that GIF as an example of one of the many, many ways modifying people’s outgoing email can go awry.”
… maybe update your description, even though I guess everyone has taken it as truth already. Seems there’s also lots of examples of it genuinely going wrong.
Well, when I logged into my gmail I saw it yesterday… so it really happened.
This.
I guess Google’s UI team still hasn’t learned that people will click the big bright button over the duller one without much thought surprisingly often. They really needed a confirmation dialog (this is what will happen when you hit send, do your really still want to do this?) to come up each time instead of a tooltip.
Also, they need to grow the f*ck up, it’s one thing to add a bit of distracting bling to your maps, it’s something else entirely to screw around with email like this. Who in their right mind OK’d this.
Here’s an idea for next year. Switch the Delete and Reply button. It’ll be hilarious.
Silicon Valley companies pretty much failed to do any safety whatsoever. They put solvents into below-ground storage tanks that magically never needed emptying . . . because, AS THEY WELL KNEW, the contents were leeching out into the ground water. What’s unique about this corporate malfeasance is that people polluted their own back gardens. Normally, rich people like to locate their pollution at a safe distance from their mansions, but in Silicon Valley, there was a widespread denial of any sort of consequences of pollution. People like my uncle seemed to really believe that all the safety warnings were invented by busy-body governmental bureaucrats and everything was fine.
What is possibly most tragic about this is that the Santa Clara Valley (as it was formerly called) had some of the most fertile farm land in the world and had some of the best stone-fruit orchards in the world.
More on-topic: How was it not immediately obvious that this prank was a bad idea? …coming from an ideological background that pollutes it’s own parks, oh wait…
THIS!
(omfg, do they ever)
That applies to much of Google’s UI decisions. Far too clever for their own good, they need to hire some stupid average people.
