'You can either be a sh*t funnel or a sh*t umbrella.' - Todd Jackson Gmail PM

“You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,” Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager.

What he means by that is that as a product with hundreds of millions of users (and a company with thousands of employees) there’s a lot of stuff constantly being hurled at the team — as a shit umbrella, the product managers protect the engineers from getting distracted. It’s not enough to be a “shit funnel” where they would pass some of the junk down to engineers, they need to fully protect the engineers.

As if I needed more reason to love Google. Seriously. LOVE this.

Thanks, MikeB. :)

Average time an American spends looking at a web page: 56 seconds. via wsj

 

56 Seconds
Average time an American spends looking at a Web page.

Source: Nielsen

via "Does the Internet Make You Dumber?" online.wsj.com

 


"In another experiment, recently conducted at Stanford University's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, a team of researchers gave various cognitive tests to 49 people who do a lot of media multitasking and 52 people who multitask much less frequently. The heavy multitaskers performed poorly on all the tests. They were more easily distracted, had less control over their attention, and were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia."

Some of us have been saying this  over and over and over.

AT&T Kills Unlimited-Data Starting Next Week #yikes

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"AT&T's $30 unlimited-data plan for smartphones will be eliminated for new users. Starting next week, it will be replaced by new plans costing $15 a month for 200 megabytes of data traffic or $25 a month for 2 gigabytes. AT&T says 98% of its customers use less than those amounts. Users who exceed 2 gigabytes of usage will pay $10 a month for each additional gigabyte. [...] The company is also dropping the current, $30 unlimited data option for new buyers of Apple's wireless-enabled iPad and replacing it with the $25 a month 2-gigabyte plan."

If you're planning to buy a 3G iPad; do it now and get grandfathered prices. Otherwise, you'll end up screwed. Just sayin'