GMail's American Bias
I have been using GMail for quite a while now, and am impressed by the service. It's very easy to use, I love the way it groups conversations, and best off all it's fast!
However, I had been starting to wonder when the new features that have been announced (eg Web Clips , Google Talk integration , or even the delete button ) a while ago now would appear.
I asked around and found out that a lot of people already had the features, so I started looking in the settings for the switch to turn them on.
It turns out that this switch is actually the language setting. Set this to English (US) and all the features are there, but set it to English (UK) and they disappear!
I can't see anything specific to America in these features, so really can't understand why this setting is being used to control them. Perhaps they just don't like us Brits! :)
posted by Gezz at
6:39 pm
2 Comments:
It's not so much a bias as efficiency - they need to roll out the feature quickly; moving it to another language takes time. I was using UK English too, since I'm from Canada, but the only real difference that languages introduce in this respect are spellchecking which I don't use, so I didn't get too upset about it.
By
Krupo, at 4:32 pm
That's nothing...
Wait till you live in a country like South Africa: All of a sudden, half the features become pretty useless - no weather forecasts, no local news, no maps...
Someday in a galazy far far away I guess.
By
Unknown, at 12:44 pm
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