I hate having to clean out my inbox every day. Who wants to take time out of their busy schedule to clean out clutter, respond to important emails you don’t care about, and keep in touch with friends and family? Not me!

Introducing:

When I first read about Gmail’s new Autopilot program by CADIE, I was ecstatic! And getting to play with it this morning? Heaven!

Five emails from my boss to respond to? Done! (Curses and insults included!)

An important email from a client? Done, and I didn’t even have to give a crap!

And the relationship manager? LOVE IT! Why would I want to read and respond to my loved ones, when I can let Autopilot decide who is worthy of my time and who isn’t? I’ve already terminated relationships with 3 people this morning - and it’s only 9A!

I don’t know about everyone else, but I am loving this new program. I may never have to look at my inbox again. So thank you Google, for continuing to bring us cutting edge technology so we don’t actually have to deal with people on a personal level.

Hurray for technology!

Also…do I even have to say it? Happy April Fool’s Day!

The topic of this blog is putting a pricetag on frustration…and speaking of frustration, I’m preparing a sure to be hilarious recap of web usability problems with TNT.com. (Note to TNT- fire all of your web people.)

In the meantime, I found something online that I felt was very interesting.  Tonight I was searching for a ‘Microsoft Wireless Mouse’ on Amazon and came across something I had never heard of before.  Look at these 2 Amazon links and tell me if you can spot the difference.

Link1

Link 2

Could you spot the difference? Congratulations!  It’s not like it was right in the product headline or anything.  For those that missed it, Amazon is selling the EXACT SAME mouse for about 4 dollars more because it is in, what they call, “Amazon Frustration-Free™ Packaging”.

I hate dealing with those plastic death traps they put around gadgets as much as anyone else, but is it worth a $4 bump in price? What would I be willing to pay in any given situation to get the same thing with less frustration? $10 more for shoes you don’t have to tie (oh wait, that’s why I wear velcro). $100 more for a computer that never crashes? I’d pay it (and as I type this on my iMac I realize I did exactly that…except, more than a hundred dollars extra…).

My overspending aside, the point is, your lack of frustration is worth something. It’s just hard to figure out exactly how much it’s worth. In any given situation when you buy something, I wonder how much extra you would pay for better service, a better experience, an easier delivery method, etc.  How much money are companies losing because they aren’t willing to add that little touch to make their extra service worthwhile and “frustration-free”?

But this is starting to get deep.  In this case, for $4 extra dollars, I’d rather buy a sweet pair of scissors and just go to town on that plastic packaging.

Because in the end, I’d then have a wireless mouse and a cool pair of scissors to do with as I pleased. Win-win.

Alright… so Tuesday at SMX East was pretty insane.  I don’t want to get into the details now, but make sure you bookmark BigWatah.com, because something drop dead awesome is coming soon.

On the train ride home today I’ll be posting my “real Big Watah post” along with some insane pics and the whole story.  So, make sure you go to BigWatah.com right now and bookmark it.

Here’s a quote straight from Big Watah himself…

“I’m sure that Barack Obama has had a ‘Big Watah’ night at least once in his life”, Brent (Big Watah) Payne.

We have put together a comic in celebration of Google Chrome. Hopefully Sergey and Larry have good senses of humor… because we love the product!

I was driving into work today, listening to 96.1 (yes, I’m in my mid-20s and I LOVE oldies), and Dave & Dog had an interesting little factoid to share. Apparently, emails beginning with the letters Q, Y and Z get only about 20% spam, while those beginning with A, M, S, R and P get about 40% or more. This information comes courtesy of Dr. Richard Clayton, a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge, as reported on BBC News.

I thought that was pretty darn interesting - here I thought spammers were keeping up with the times and constantly finding new ways to spam people as much as frickin’ possible. As it turns out, they’re missing out on tons of spamming opportunity.

Sort of in line with this - I’ve noticed my gmail has been missing more spam - for months, I saw not one spam mail in my inbox - they all went right to junk. For the past month or so, I’d say I average at least 1 spam email in my inbox per week - sometimes more. Of course, lucky me, my email begins with an A.

Anyone else notice gmail seems to be slippin’ with spam control? Or is it just my spam-magnet email address?