Google Inbox

[reggie14]

These forums are probably still the geekiest web forum I frequent. I figure someone here has managed to get their hands on a Google Inbox invite, not even including Jeff and our Google overlords.

So, here's my shameless attempt to get an invite from one of you. If you have one you're willing to share, I'd greatly appreciate it. PM me and I'll send you my gmail address.

While in other aspects of life I'm a bit more of a privacy nut, I've completely bought into the whole letting Google manage my life thing. Google Now, while fairly limited, ends up being very useful to me- particularly when I'm on trips. But I've always figured they ought to be able to do more based on the contents of my emails. Sometimes I show people the cards it brings up- hotel/car/flight reservations, mostly- and they find it a little creepy that Google's keeping track of that stuff. I figure they already have access to that data, so I might as well get some benefit by having so much of my data concentrated there.

[KryptoNyte]

Mr. Anderson, did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? ... It was a disaster, no one would accept the program.

[reggie14]

Thinking about how long ago that movie came out makes me feel old...

I just got an invite and I've spent a few minutes using it. Before anyone asks, I don't have any invites yet. I'm not sure how I feel about it so far. I guess I was expecting more from it. When I read some of the early descriptions I thought it was going to do more intelligent grouping. For example, I thought it would bundle your flight, hotel, and car rental for a single trip together. It certainly does put those all in a "Travel" bundle, but it does so along with all your other trips.

Basically, it's like Gmail, but adds a couple more message categories (bundles), and doesn't use tabs to split them out. It's nice to be able to be able to create new bundles, although that basically just functions like automatically applying a label to incoming messages with a filter.

I think I still mostly like the general ideas, but it's not the revolutionary step that I expected. And like the other reviewers, I find the desktop interface a little clunky. They definitely appear to be focusing on small screens with a minimalist interface. And from a straight email client perspective, it's not as full-featured as Gmail, but presumably that will come with time.

[nycjoe]

Originally Posted by reggie14

While in other aspects of life I'm a bit more of a privacy nut, I've completely bought into the whole letting Google manage my life thing.

That's interesting. I was never very privacy conscious, but following the purchase and deprecation of SageTV and a number of other products I used (postini, sparrow, gmail-EAS, the list goes on) I have become very apprehensive about using Google and have gone to great lengths to wean myself of their services.