20th
OCT

With the development of instant communication mediums like email, text messaging and cell phones, any person that we ever want to talk to is just a click or dial away. That’s not always a good thing, especially after a night at the bar.

InventHelp’s Invention Girl certainly doesn’t participate in this behavior, but I’ve HEARD about folks who’ve had one too many at happy hour and – gasp! – decide that it would be a good time to send an email to that ex who dumped them, the boss who fired them or the friend who betrayed them.

And even though it feels good at the time, chances are they’ll regret it in the morning.

That’s why the ever-clever Google developed Mail Goggles, a new feature in Gmail that aims to prevent those “What was I thinking?” moments. The name is a clever play on “beer goggles,” which is the tendency to overestimate the attractiveness of a potential partner due to intoxication.

To activate the Goggles, Gmail users should click the “Settings” link at the top of a Gmail page, then go to the “Labs” section. Users should preemptively pick times and days – so, if you hit the pub on Friday nights like clockwork, schedule the Goggle to kick in around then. Then, if you arrive home and you’re feeling…well, chatty, Google will require you to solve some basic math problems to see if your cognitive skills are intact.

Gmail engineer Jon Perlow was inspired (like so many inventors) by personal experiences. “Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message,” he said on the company blog. “Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together.”

If he could come up with a way to prevent “drunk dialing” or “drunk texting,” the overenthusiastic communicators of the world might wake up with less of a hangover. And truth be told, even InventHelp’s Invention Girl has sent out an email that was best left in the draft folder!


Related InventHelp posts:

  1. An Emoticon is Worth a Thousand Words
  2. InventHelp’s Invention Girl Predicts: DVD-By-Mail Service Bound for Extinction
  3. Microsoft Promises "Less Nagging" in Windows 7
  4. InventHelp’s Invention Girl Uncovers Great Deals through Bad Grammar
  5. Keep Grandpa Connected with the Sunnygram Invention