Well it's not just a matter of using it for work, anyone might have to send professional emails, be it a job hunter or a small store owner or a thousand of other situations. I can see the fun in the button but I guess that if I did send it by mistake in a professional conversation I too would be dying inside, especially if there's a job or my reputation on the line.
I think email is /primarily/ used as a professional communication tool today. Casual and personal uses of email have been largely replaced by social media.
The most egregious part of this April fools joke is the use of minions. The only thing I am capable of thinking of when I see a minion is the absolute most common soccer mom in the world interacting with the 'internet'.
It is the last thing I want to see in an email, business or personal. Let alone at the top of an email. Let alone at the top of an email I cannot respond to. If I can't respond to it, I don't want to see whatever it was no matter what it was.
Not a good idea, minions aren't funny. If Google hadn't screwed with the standard behaviour of their email product it's still not a good idea.
But yes, i agree that using them in professional emails might not be the best thing. Now, we could have a conversation about why someone is using private email accounts for professional purposes.
The only flag raised with me regarding using a minion, is that minions are copyrighted. It makes me wonder if they got clearance from Universal / Illumination before publishing this prank. (If not, I really doubt Universal / Illumination would be too happy with headlines today.)
If anything, they have introduced unnecessary code to an already complex application that people actually use. More code means more bugs. They should take Microsofts 'no more easter eggs' approach and stop dicking around.
Writing software is the company's function. "More code means more bugs" implies there is no opportunity or freedom for improvement.
(Also, Microsoft took a 'no more easter eggs' approach? Wow, I didn't know. That's.... Well, if I want to go program somewhere with no personal freedom or trust from management, I know where I can go!).
> "More code means more bugs" implies there is no opportunity or freedom for improvement.
This twists a bit the meaning of what I have said. This particular feature is made to be throw-away and is useless. Programmers should strive to make their code as simple as possible while keeping all of the _necessary_ features of the software. This feature was not necessary.
"Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs."
It wasn't a bug it was a feature. Maybe I'm too much of an engineer but I HATE when PM's/managers/PR representatives just classify all unexpected and undesired behaviour as "bugs". A "bug" implies I made a mistake. I didn't make a mistake. I developed EXACTLY what you told me, after numerous rounds of confirmation and feedback loops. It's not a bug if it's doing exactly what it was supposed to.
In the pop-out compose, it _replaced_ the send&archive.
In the regular compose/reply/forward, it added another button to the side.
I'm thinking the "bug" is that in the pop-out, it replaced the send&archive, so people _inadvertently_ clicked it out of muscle memory.
The actual bug was apparently a little more nuanced than 'for some people'. If you tried the mic drop button in an empty email, it would fail to send. If you then used that same email draft and sent it regularly, the effect would still apply.
That's a pretty bad bug! I imagine a pretty standard behavior would be open a compose window, notice the new button and click it out of curiosity (safely, since you have a blank email), and then go ahead with your normal email.
It's hard to screw things up too badly with something like the flight simulator. It's just a hidden toy completely disconnected from the rest of the program.
But when you start messing with the user's content as a joke, god help you.
For fun, on our site one of the developers made it so that if you entered the Konami code, every image would be replaced by random cat pictures. This was immediately ripped out of prod a few weeks later when a client asked why there were a bunch of cat photos in their dashboard. Still no idea how they triggered it.
I once did this on an internal app, we had a hotkeys library installed, so I added the GTA cheats to raise and lower your wanted level. It just added a temporary notice in the top right of your screen, nothing major. Turns out that if you mashed the keyboard, the library didn't properly handle 6+ character combinations, and would fire the callback anyways.
Well, to be fair, I suspect PM's/managers/PR representatives HATE when angry engineers go on knee-jerk rants about how a bug which they know nothing about is a "feature"... :-)
Yes, the word "bug" isn't restricted to only implementation, but it certainly has that connotation. In deanCommie's case, it sounds like the PM is using the existing connotation of the word "bug" to assign blame to the implementation when it correctly implements the broken design.
When the list of "bugs" are used in performance metrics which affect your career, correctly assigning blame becomes important.
Agreed, bug can lack nuance. We have subtypes for our bugs in our tracker and try to use them liberally. Generally spec defect (as opposed to code defect) is only used when someone closes a bug "by design", at which point you say the design is wrong.
It's an effective way of putting power in the hands of people impacted, for better or for worse. I've certainly reopened "by design" bugs in areas I don't own because I think the design it wrong. Done with tact (and usually a note explaining/alerting the person) it generally goes over well.
Bugs can happen at any stage of the development cycle. Typically the farther away a bug is found from the stage it entered the more expensive it is to fix.
You don't have any responsibility for what you build? Maybe it's on you, too. (As a PM, I HATE when engineers are full of confirmations and feedback loops but cop the 'not my fault, I just build exactly what you tell me' attitude the moment there's something to fix)
The PM is responsible for the requirements. If my PRD fails to be explicit or is not involved in the QA process, the PM needs to take ownership. Yes, everyone is responsible for the UX, but the PM especially.
Yeah well, when I find a bug I go to my PM and I say "Dude, I messed up. Here's the problem. Here's what you need to tell the customers to do/not do. Here's what i need to fix it."
When there's a problem with requirements and the users are screaming, and the system isn't doing what they want (but exactly what they built), the PM comes to me and says "We fucked up. You need to drop everything and fix this right away."
This has been the case with almost every PM I've ever worked with.
April Fools is such a collective waste of time. Not only does it lower productivity of many people for a day, some "pranks" actually take days to prepare. I imagine that producing SnoopaVision for Youtube [1] wasn't exactly cheap.
I'm really angry that they could have seen this as anything but a dangerous idea. Strange sense of humour they have. I guess when you work at Google you don't need to worry so much about job hunting or career stuff. They are really out of touch.
Maybe we can use this comment as a place to give our best guesses for to the percentage of liars on the internet.
How many of the people claiming to have clicked a button few minutes / hours after it was out and having spectacular irreversible consequences to their lives is just a phony?
I would say between 40% and 90%, but don't know better than that.
Send a follow-up email with a brief explanation and a link to this article. If your employer/benefactor/whatever still insists on feeling slighted then you may want to reconsider if you want business relationship with them.
Impressions can go a long ways. What if you were emailing you exwife's lawyer or judge? Potential new customer that may save your business? Email is a critical communication tool of the modern day, it was ill conceived and clearly not thought out on Google's behalf.
Stuff like this makes me consider less about ever applying to Google. idk, they've got smart people at their company, but there seems to be an underlying disconnect with real everyday users. I think autistic would be too harsh to describe their collective mindset...
They have real every day users, but Google doesn't understand those users. Many Googlers eat at Google, play at Google, and most of their friends are other Googlers.
You'll notice Google has almost no comprehension of real people's lives. Google designers have never had to do work on a 1024x768 screen at the office.
Googlers live in a bubble where technology is perfect, which is why they seem to believe technology can solve a lot of human issues much easier than they actually can. For them, it's possible.
I think this is a little hyperbolic but not too much. I'd expect a similar mindset and internal use of G+ is a large reason it wasn't scrapped a year ago.
Google understands users better than you think. They mine millions of interactions to see what people are doing so understand what is liked and not liked. This prank was not a data driven so back fired.
Google has automated this process. They don't do nearly enough actual interaction with actual users about problems. This is actually an example of what I'm talking about. Where they assume an automated data collector is more valuable than even just sitting down with one person and watching them use the website.
Google understands users the same way an AI will understand what a sunset is, and why people like to look at them. It'll be able to tell you it's yellow orange, happens at 6:10pm eastern time, from your GPS coordnates will be appear x cm wide, has a brightness value of y, etc. It'll understand the uniqueness of the color range.
But the AI won't really understand why people watch a sunset.
The UX researchers here at Google DO in fact sit down with many people and watch them use all sorts of parts of google, gmail, etc. In fact they go out of their way to run usability studies in various parts of the countries, because, you know, selection bias.
Also automated data is collected.
The real problem here is, if you have X million users, can you really know them as a unified set of people? Of course not.
Sure this prank backfired, but hey, have some compassion for the people who worked on it. They were trying to be funny, and trying to bring a little light to people's life. There was no intention of ruining anyone's day.
I am opted into their user studies group. I haven't seen a new invitation in a couple of years now. And the way they handle user studies, opt in via Google Form, they still see a particularly biased community: Hardcore Google users, most likely technical in nature.
If Google went to a senior citizens' home, and watched how some of their less technically inclined users used their products, I'm confident Google would fire everyone with the word "designer" in their title and start over.
But this is largely immaterial to this particular joke. The joke was funny. The choice to implement it for real was not.
So, what you're saying is, from your limited view point, you have a conclusive overview of all of UX? Also, Google designers are intensely incompetent and deserve to be fired?
I dunno, you sure are quick to judge a very difficult subject area.
Google designers ARE intensely incompetent. And design's a pretty simple subject area. The problem is, designers need to justify their continued jobs, after a product is launched. So there's a constant set of increasingly more complicated overengineering projects to "redesign" things to stay "trendy". Generally sacrificing usability in exchange.
Ever since Google hired their "VP of Design", their products have heavily shifted away from being functionally useful.
There's a reason Gmail is the last bastion of competent design at Google. There's a reason that even Googlers said they wouldn't use Gmail if Inbox became the "new Gmail", and this is probably where this conversation rounds back to this prank:
Because if that is "functionally useful" then I will happily continue using trendy. The thing with design is that it is not a simple subject area. You are constantly balancing several (somtimes mutually exclusive) objectives.
At the end of the day, blame end-users. They use the products that are "trendy" and look nice. They dictate good design.
My not really updated portfolio page isn't really intended to be 'useful', lol. Though the navigation is much clearer than many websites today, and the pages load on pretty much any device nearly instantaneously.
You highlight my exact point: To you design is purely functional. To the overwhelming majority of people it isn't. That's the reason Google's Design initiative (Material Design) was started in the first place. Good design practices across all Google Services.
You want bad design, try most of the AWS tools. You can have both functionality and appeal. Pretending they are mutually exclusive is silly.
Or maybe the buttons I click shouldn't suddenly change without warning? This isn't a case of a user ignoring an important dialog box then wondering why their computer doesn't work anymore; the button just suddenly started to do something different, which is terrible user interface design.
To put it another way, how am I supposed to get anything done when I'm spending all my time making sure the interface doesn't change beneath my feet?
It replaced the Send And Archive button that lives next to Send. (Adding a new one is still a bad idea, imho, but would have been borderline forgivable)
First off, yes, Google messed up here. They even acknowledged it themselves and took it down asap once they realized it.
But second, people need to cut Google a little slack here. We all make mistakes, or errors in judgement, and Google is no different. Do we really want to live in a world where companies are afraid to innovate and try anything new, because people are going to jump on their backs if things don't work out? Part of the reason why Google was able to create so many great products, like Maps, Mail and so on, is because they've created an environment that's very conducive to creativity and experimentation.
As a consumer, I love the fact that Google has given me so many awesome productivity tools, with great features, completely for free, and I don't want them to ever lose the creative/experimental culture that made it possible. If you're not a fan of such a culture, if you just want a no-nonsense humorless stable suit-driven product, well, Microsoft has you well covered.
There's a difference between being blocked from innovation and having UX engineers look at something. It is the job of these folks to find out things like this; they don't have blinkers on when it comes to knowing about how the app gets used and how people can fail at things.
It's quite likely that this was just directly shipped given that it's a one-day thing.
Nobody's asking them to stop innovating; you can be more rigorous in your shipping process (which they usually are) without affecting innovation.
What this fiasco has to do with innovation, sorry? This is merely a puerile joke, it's like pissin' in the kitchen and shoutin' "April fools!" I can't believe that some people with +$100.000 wages came up with such an idea, and some manager approved it, and the team implemented this, and deployed it, and not a single sane person was there to say, hey, this can bust someone. I'd sack whomever involved.
Reading replies to this I think it might be a good idea to take a few deep breaths, then consider just how small this mistake is, how it should be a lesson learned and that no one needs to be fired over it.
So you're saying that this is all getting a little too silly? I hereby award you the first ever HN Colonel prize. It may not have come off exactly right, but it was still pretty funny. If we stop getting April fools pranks from Google, the internet will be a materially worse place.
Wow, what a bunch of babies. I'm sorry, I just don't see how sending a "mic drop" email could ruin so many lives in just a few hours. It's not like it sent some NSFW gif or random insults or something. Accidentally sent one? Just send a new email to the person with a link to an article about it and say, oops, I got pranked, sorry?
Is it really this hard to understand the issue here? How long have we spent collectively explaining very basic functionality of systems to the elderly, to our parents, friends, etc?
This doesn't upset me. This doesn't upset you. This doesn't upset hundreds of thousands of people and as unfunny as this is, I'm sure many are laughing about it.
However, it can upset some people. Some people who would mistakenly click the button because, god forbid, they forgot not to use the internet at all on April 1st, and that mistake would appear in an extremely important conversation.
And that mistake would appear during career discussions. And that mistake would get someone not hired, or fired, or whatever.
You guys want to complain, talk about how they should "look harder", how they should "take responsibility" and "own up to their mistakes", how they should "be happy not to work somewhere people are so uptight"? Have some fucking empathy.
I'd wager the majority of HN is well off, or well off enough that they don't have to worry about the rent or their water bill. But I'd like to see some of the people here struggling to make ends meet. Maybe you won't be so sociopathic about the potential for serious harm.
But you _are_ upset at the _idea_ of people potentially being upset by it. This thread makes you sick. Are you suggesting it's classist to observe the prank as harmless?
I understand where you're coming from, and I understand how someone may have clicked it by accident. I am struggling to empathize with the recipient who would see this, and a follow-up email explaining it was a mistake, and let that affect them.
The prank doesn't upset me. Where did I suggest that the thread doesn't upset me? Damn right the thread upsets me. People are downvoting left and right those that dare to suggest jobs are not a commodity you can just throw away and replace a week later. Not for everyone.
And no, there's no classism at play. It's purely and simply a lack of empathy. A lack of understanding of what it's like to be in a situation where losing your job may cost you your home, your children or even your life.
> I am struggling to empathize with the recipient who would see this
Then don't empathize with the recipient. Plenty of bosses are jerks. But empathize with the sender, who would lose a job they cared about and can't necessarily get a new one like they grow on trees.
Shouldn't you also ask for empathy in people who are upset by it? They seem to have the least empathy of everybody, if they are going to fire somebody over animated GIF.
I am merely pointing out that it's a little unfair, or perhaps absurd, if a person who points out a lack of empathy in other people (people who get upset at those GIFs to the point of hurting someone) gets blamed - by you - for a lack of empathy with their victims.
Unfortunately, people like that probably won't come to HN and leave comment - cool, I just fired someone over it! But they absolutely should get the blame.
There is no way anybody loses his jobs because of this. How hard is it to link one of the million articles about this to whoever you sent that email too? It's not ideal but pretending that it'll have drastic consequences is ridiculous and completely destroy whatever point these people want to make.
I'm not joking. If you're livelihood is so at risk that you could lose it over a minion gif you have a terrible unhappy life. It was a house of cards ready to fall at any moment anyway. You'd be much better off / happier having to find a new job / wife / whatever else is causing so much pain in the long run.
Speaking from experience of a job triggering a stress induced bout of trigeminal neuralgia that made me want to die. After two weeks of that I quit my job of five years and found a much lower stress one.
It's one thing that you don't understand what it's actually like to live on the edge. Maybe you haven't experienced it. I don't wish for you to experience it.
But it's another frankly repulsive thing for you to act superior and give such awful advice to those people.
Maybe you should experience what it's like. Try and give you a better idea of what it's like to be a few dollars away from being homeless. Have your children removed from your care because you cannot provide from them. Have your entire life thrown away if you lose your job.
Not everyone can just "find a new job". Why don't you come here in Greece and ask the majority of the population why they can't find a job?
I HAVE experienced what it is like. Its insulting that you would make assumptions. If you are living in such a terrible place you really are better off with a fresh start. Speaking from experience. If a minion gif can "ruin your life" it was already a infix able house of cards. I've updated my previous comment with details.
No, you quite clearly haven't, and it's insulting for everyone in that position that you would pretend you have.
As for your experience per your edit, I'm sorry you had such a high stress job and it's good to hear you got a better one, but that's not at all the situations I was talking about.
Have you been in a situation where you don't know how to pay the rent, will get kicked out if you don't and have no place to live if you get kicked out?
Have you been in jail for something meaningless and experienced employer after employer declining even having you in an interview because of the red flag?
Have you been part of an economy where the majority of the population cannot find a job because nobody is hiring, because nobody has money left?
If you had a job in any of those situations, you'd be damn glad to have it and you wouldn't be looking for a "fresh start" just because the conditions are not ideal.
> No, you quite clearly haven't, and it's insulting for everyone in that position that you would pretend you have.
You're assuming that someone who differs from you in opinion (not their view of the facts), is stupider than you, less experienced than you, and dishonest. That's not an argument, that's just peer pressure.
edit: and whoever flagged it, I'd love to know what kind of criteria they were using (flagged: not feeling my pain deeply enough?)
I'm not assuming. He edited his post with a story which has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of thing we're dealing with here.
Being in a high stress job and being able to leave it to get a better one is not the same thing as being in a situation where you cannot lose your job lest you risk your children, your home etc.
And even without such an edit, it's ridiculously easy to tell he hasn't been in that situation. If you go around telling people "pah, they just need a fresh start, new job, new wife", you've not been in a situation where you understand this isn't always an option. Good for you, but you live in one hell of a bubble.
I seriously doubt that you have. You wouldn't be writing nonsense about a "fresh start" or "finding a new job/wife" otherwise. Even steps much more insignificant than those are simply impossible for a vast amount of people on this planet.
Your comments in this thread used way too much inflammatory language and crossed the line into incivility, culminating in accusing people of being sociopathic. Please don't do that. It's no picnic to be around someone bursting with indignation, even when one agrees with them.
The HN guidelines ask you specifically not to call names in comments, whether or not someone else says bad things. You called a lot of names; that's understandable on a subject that evokes strong emotion, but those also are the occasions where the guidelines most apply. Had you followed them and edited those bits out, your comments would have been more persuasive, and also more dignified.
Sorry, you're right. I'm guessing you're talking about my other comment then? I agree it was too strong, but by the time I wanted to edit it it wasn't editable anymore.
I just picked one comment to reply to, but the problem was across all of them. The above one is also too 'strong', to use your word, in a personal way.
I sympathize with the emotion behind it, but when you weaponize it like that and direct it at somebody, you break the bonds of community here—which are so weak to begin with, that protecting them has to be everyone's priority.
As I understand it, the gag was triggering on the normal send button too, at least for some.
How would you know you sent one, or got pranked, if you used the normal send button? I'd be pissed in that scenario if it was work related. Bosses famously often lack senses of humour.
What a thoughtless, jerky attitude. Two seconds of poking around Twitter would have found you many real examples of horrified GMail users dealing with the fallout from this "prank", not just people dealing with a job search and potential employers, but people writing very emotionally charged e-mails, like condolence notices to people on the death of their child.
Which now has a Minion GIF in it.
It is one thing for a prank to do something to the UI of a product, like invert the colors or display Comic Sans. It is quite another when it alters the content of the very messages you are passing.
I was referring mainly to the people quoted in the article, but rest assured, if it changed your font to ComicSans or inverted the colors, countless people would still say their lives have been damaged beyond repair.
TL;DR "people are careless and stupid, use a new feature on important messages without checking to see what it does first, then whine about it when they get burned"
It's important to avoid the thought-terminating cliche "Oh, it was just human error" and look at the problems in the UI that cause the errors in the first place. If the ignition in your car was one day replaced by an ejector seat, and you hit it without thinking because that's what you do every day, I doubt you'd be placing the blame on yourself.
Given that a car is a dangerous piece of machinery that could quite easily kill myself and people around me if it malfunctions, yes I do give it a once-over every time I get into it throughout the day, which includes the interior controls.
Getting back on topic, given historical data, it's foolish to not expect something to happen/change on April 1st, especially on google products.
Not sure if this prank/feature appeared on google's "For Work" (paid offering), but if it did, that would be sucky.
However on the free gmail side of things - not to be a jerk about this - but perhaps this should remind users that they are not the real customers for google...and that free platforms like this do in fact come with baggage. I'm not saying google intentionally meant to screw over their users (I totally get this was all meant in jest). But what incentive does google have other than saying "Oops, sorry". Any expectations for compensation i think are silly; and many users forget that. Does it suck that someone lost their job because of this? Hellz yeah, no doubt about that! But can we really expect google to do anything else except shut down this prank even if only after-the-fact? Again, it sucks, but this should serve to show/remind some of those users that these free platforms are not like your local electric/water utility, and should not be fully depended upon, certainly not for such important things as jobs, etc.
Now, they could be in on the joke and/or all just picking up the original story and parroting it without any fact checking. I'm still hoping the real prank here was getting the media to cover a fake prank, but I'm becoming less sure of my instincts.
It's also worth noting that I saw the button in my GMail interface early this morning (as well as the little pop-up explaining it), and now, a few hours later, that button is gone, and it is still very much 1 April. I would think if the backlash was just part of the joke, the button would still be there.
Yeah, okay, that sounds pretty conclusive. When I replied, I hadn't yet seen a non-jokey-sounding report of a real person saying they'd experienced it. That sucks – both because the apparent negative impact on real people's lives and because I was really hoping it was an elaborate prank on the media.
Google sabotaging their own product just for a few laughs is a great way of reminding people that they don't really care about providing any services other than selling ads.
Also, what's the point of this prank when Gmail has a global audience? Only a minority of users will be aware that their tools might fail today because it's April Fools in the US.
Looks to me like there was a disconnect between what marketing wanted and what was delivered. Marketing saw this idea as a bit of fun, something that would create some good press and be playful.
Unfortunately the implementation was terrible, it confused users and lead people trying to seriously use the product to send silly pictures around.
Saying they don't care about the product because of this is silly. So many people use it because it is one of the best email applications around. A botched bit of fun doesn't mean the product is going to shit.
I'm not seeing this in my UI, is it an independent april fool's joke here? ah I see it's supposedly been taken down, now I don't know if it actually ever existed.
Short version: Google couldn't keep Reader going because it would take money to get it working on the new Google+ infrastructure that failed spectacularly.
Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.
Oh. Eye-opener. Is this why in the past year or two random contacts are doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and I can't merge them, and sometimes one app (like Hangouts/messaging) won't know a phone number is attached to a contact while another (the phone app) will, etc?
The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately.
Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.
It's worse than that- Google+ broke the basic syntax in google search. Adding + before a word used to make it mandatory. They change it to quotations marks so they could have +username instead of @username for google plus. That still bothers me and Google search doesn't work as well.
That is my single biggest complaint about G+, that they would have compromised search for the biggest boondoggle google has ever created.
I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.
Every company has their time in the wilderness - MS just emerged from theirs, Apple had theirs, and Google started theirs a while back.
They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.
Really good point, unfortunately I think one of the biggest reasons any big company does get out of "the woods" is through competition starting to scare them.
Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space.
More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.
Except that it was likely investors pushing Google to come up with a response to Facebook that caused them to create Google Plus, even though in the process they had to kill several more vibrant social networks that had organically grown around their existing products.
Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.
I also really wish that they would revert this change. But maybe Google+ was created just because they wanted to get rid of the + operator in Google search?
Heh, Google killed Reader so I could consider any alternative to Google before using their products. So it's been DuckDuckGo, Firefox, box.com, other OpenId providers etc. I still use gmail, because i only use email for boring stuff like amazon or whatever, not communication with friends, and it's not like I see any of their ads anyway because I use adblockers (part of the reason i use firefox - you can't block ads using chrome on android). I use Android. That's good. They're not screwed that up yet, although i'm sure given enough time they will.
This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else.
When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts.
The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate.
Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.
As someone's that maintained deprecated services, I can say that's easier thought than done. Each piece underneath you will eventually ask you to migrate off it, for any number of reasons: It is deprecated itself and being removed, or it has a bug that was fixed in another version, ... Then the replacement / new version won't support all your use cases, so you need to coordinate with them development of that support.
And this is all only about code, not about the cost of keeping the service running with good availability on old infrastructure.
This. Parents comment is typical of management, and frankly I applaud Google for having the confidence to ignore it rather than incurring all of the technical debt.
"There was no manpower" so uh... hire a few interested engineers? Maybe pick from the thousands of angry people who were loudly complaining about it? Or at least give the data to an archive - that's what I'm angriest about personally. They had archives of tons of defunct blogs, and they just deleted them.
Don't read too much into it, it was a business decision, not a question of resources. It's obvious that Google could have kept reader alive without much trouble if they wanted.
If you look on the Google file system, it has no support for deleting files (data is overwritten) and Google itself has a running business model around hoarding data, would make no sense to lose something that might be valuable to them in the future just for the sake of saving some storage.
True. Doesn't help anyone else who wants to read the blogs though. And even thought the storage is redundant, the fact that it's controlled by a single company makes it a single point of failure. I also hope Geocities is around somewhere and is recovered at some point in the future.
A lot of Geocities was archived. You can access one of them at reocities.com. There is also a 650+ GB torrent out there containing the archived sites. It's still a work in progress, apparently, but perusing the "neighborhoods" on reocities.com brings back memories.
You might be right, I'm always suspecting that they hoard as much data as they can. That would be a very googly thing to happen.
Mangling data is an interesting thing you raise. Would reveal some issues with their professionalism. Albeit after the disaster we watched today on their April's 1st joke, I wouldn't be surprised if indeed that was the (sad) case as you mention.. :/
That "answer" had no facts and doesn't pass the smell test for me. "Old infrastructure"? Not very specific... "Google+ infrastructure"? Huh? Maybe they mean updating the authorization infrastructure, but even that is probably <= the dev effort on these April Fools pranks.
Google Reader was, up until that point, the best Google had done at social discoverability and discoverability in a non-search ways. They had a foothold in the space and they just dumped it out and Facebook and Twitter won.
It's a good joke, and I recommend people follow @Pinboard on Twitter, but the reality is that Google killed Reader because they wanted to, not because they had. They're immensely profitable and fund crazy things like Google Glass or Calico to the tune of many millions of dollars.
Of course, this is the point of the tweet. It's not supposed to be a literal equation of LOEs.
Does that include the operational cost though? I know it's probably trivial when you're at google's scale, but fetching every RSS feed on the internet every few minutes (or whatever their latency was, it seemed pretty low), processing and storing it seems fairly expensive.
Unfortunately, a lot of blogs have shut down from a loss of traffic.
Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.
Yeah. Making Google Maps for the moon (with cheese at the maximum zoom level) was a combination of interesting and funny in a way that wasn’t absolutely contemptuous of the user
perhaps it was obvious to everyone already, but i'm more and more beginning to feel that the company should place higher cultural value in UX, other than just quality programming
Could be. But that requires strong leadership, because you have to effectively say (probably at a very late stage, like launch review) "this joke is crap and will hurt people, not gonna happen" and burn the work of the team that did it (and I am sure there were at least two people involved here).
That's what should have happened because the nature of an April Fools joke is that it bypasses the pre-testing, canarying, "go back to the drawing board", staged rollouts etc that most features would go through on their way to exposure to hundreds of millions of people. You can't do a 10% rollout on a joke that's meant to last one day.
I think Google should give up on April Fools jokes. Some of them have become so elaborate (like the Maps one last year) that it's obvious they have too many staff and not enough to do.
FWIW, when I worked with the Doodle team, there absolutely were doodles that were canceled the day before they were scheduled to run, either because someone deemed them offensive or they had a critical bug or they just weren't up to Google's quality standards. It sucked for the engineers, and there was usually a postmortem afterwards about how the issue could've been caught earlier, but it happened.
I was also responsible for a bunch of easter eggs, including TLing the [let it snow] one that ran just over the holidays in 2011. We did do staged 10% rollouts. It was usually an abbreviated staged rollout, where we would push to 10% for an hour or two, monitor Twitter for flames, check the logs to make sure all browsers were interacting with it (to catch browser bugs), and listen for an SRE yelling at us, but it was there.
Didn't work on GMail nor on any of the April Fools jokes, and I haven't been there for close to 2 years now, but that was my experience on Search & Doodles.
Just to think how much control google (or any other operator of free platform/service) has over the content of any messages pumped through their platform: Instead of google inserting that minion GIF, what if they simply added "...Not" to the end of every email?
Fictional example #1:
Hi everyone,
We're having a baby!...Not (Then google appends "...Not" to the end.)
Fictional example #2:
Hi everyone,
Grandma passed away...Not
Fictional example #3:
Hi everyone,
We're moving away to city/state/country XYZ!...Not
Fictional example #4:
Hi everyone,
We're getting a divorce!...Not
Encrypted messaging or not, that's a lot of control to have (by a provider) over what users send out. Or maybe i'm thinking too pessimistically?
I was one of around 30 grandchildren of my grandma's 12 children. I heard about her death via email— it would have been impractical to share the news otherwise, or to ask her caretakers to make 50 or even 12 calls while dealing with all the exigencies of the funeral.
Friend/Family calling trees take no effort to organize and happen organically. You mostly just call the people who you are closest to and the others do the same with a few people making sure so and so who isn't close to anyone gets the word. I have an absolutely gigantic family on both sides (50 or so cousins total) and this had always been the way it operated on both sides of the family and there was never any advanced planning.
In fact when the news is very distressing (spouse death) the person usually only notifies one or two very close people. Those people make sure the word gets out.
My grandmother had around 35 grandchildren and 10 greatgrandchildren when she passed. Notifying everyone wasn't hard. One child called a couple of their siblings those called a couple more siblings and/or their kids. Their kids told their kids. Then the inlaws called their sides of the family. Everyone was notified in a few hours. It wasn't even organized beforehand, these things happen in an ad hoc manner. No one person even had the contact information for even half of the others.
400 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadI think email is /primarily/ used as a professional communication tool today. Casual and personal uses of email have been largely replaced by social media.
It is the last thing I want to see in an email, business or personal. Let alone at the top of an email. Let alone at the top of an email I cannot respond to. If I can't respond to it, I don't want to see whatever it was no matter what it was.
Not a good idea, minions aren't funny. If Google hadn't screwed with the standard behaviour of their email product it's still not a good idea.
But yes, i agree that using them in professional emails might not be the best thing. Now, we could have a conversation about why someone is using private email accounts for professional purposes.
ಠ_ಠ
I had fun once. It was awful!
If anything, they have introduced unnecessary code to an already complex application that people actually use. More code means more bugs. They should take Microsofts 'no more easter eggs' approach and stop dicking around.
(Also, Microsoft took a 'no more easter eggs' approach? Wow, I didn't know. That's.... Well, if I want to go program somewhere with no personal freedom or trust from management, I know where I can go!).
This twists a bit the meaning of what I have said. This particular feature is made to be throw-away and is useless. Programmers should strive to make their code as simple as possible while keeping all of the _necessary_ features of the software. This feature was not necessary.
As for the Microsoft policy here is the source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/10/21/wh...
Personally I would hope that the programmers' personal freedom is not expressed in easter eggs in mission critical software
It wasn't a bug it was a feature. Maybe I'm too much of an engineer but I HATE when PM's/managers/PR representatives just classify all unexpected and undesired behaviour as "bugs". A "bug" implies I made a mistake. I didn't make a mistake. I developed EXACTLY what you told me, after numerous rounds of confirmation and feedback loops. It's not a bug if it's doing exactly what it was supposed to.
https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715770400555315202
https://twitter.com/cabel/status/715769273545785344
I guess this kind of thing is why we no longer have flight simulators in our spreadsheets and so forth.
But when you start messing with the user's content as a joke, god help you.
Hopefully!
We all felt very stupid and unprofessional.
When the list of "bugs" are used in performance metrics which affect your career, correctly assigning blame becomes important.
EDIT Wording, pre-coffee.
When there's a problem with requirements and the users are screaming, and the system isn't doing what they want (but exactly what they built), the PM comes to me and says "We fucked up. You need to drop everything and fix this right away."
This has been the case with almost every PM I've ever worked with.
I definitely got a layover notice telling me about it last night around 8PM CST.
>to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry. The feature has been turned off.
I did enjoy the it's a feature/bug dual language though.
There is a fix available for this issue:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#installation
April Fools is such a collective waste of time. Not only does it lower productivity of many people for a day, some "pranks" actually take days to prepare. I imagine that producing SnoopaVision for Youtube [1] wasn't exactly cheap.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/snoopavision
How many of the people claiming to have clicked a button few minutes / hours after it was out and having spectacular irreversible consequences to their lives is just a phony?
I would say between 40% and 90%, but don't know better than that.
Their real everyday users amount in the millions. But please give us more insight using highly inappropriate analogies.
You'll notice Google has almost no comprehension of real people's lives. Google designers have never had to do work on a 1024x768 screen at the office.
Googlers live in a bubble where technology is perfect, which is why they seem to believe technology can solve a lot of human issues much easier than they actually can. For them, it's possible.
But the AI won't really understand why people watch a sunset.
The UX researchers here at Google DO in fact sit down with many people and watch them use all sorts of parts of google, gmail, etc. In fact they go out of their way to run usability studies in various parts of the countries, because, you know, selection bias.
Also automated data is collected.
The real problem here is, if you have X million users, can you really know them as a unified set of people? Of course not.
Sure this prank backfired, but hey, have some compassion for the people who worked on it. They were trying to be funny, and trying to bring a little light to people's life. There was no intention of ruining anyone's day.
If Google went to a senior citizens' home, and watched how some of their less technically inclined users used their products, I'm confident Google would fire everyone with the word "designer" in their title and start over.
But this is largely immaterial to this particular joke. The joke was funny. The choice to implement it for real was not.
I dunno, you sure are quick to judge a very difficult subject area.
Ever since Google hired their "VP of Design", their products have heavily shifted away from being functionally useful.
There's a reason Gmail is the last bastion of competent design at Google. There's a reason that even Googlers said they wouldn't use Gmail if Inbox became the "new Gmail", and this is probably where this conversation rounds back to this prank:
You don't %$@# with email.
http://www.ocdtrekkie.com/
Because if that is "functionally useful" then I will happily continue using trendy. The thing with design is that it is not a simple subject area. You are constantly balancing several (somtimes mutually exclusive) objectives.
At the end of the day, blame end-users. They use the products that are "trendy" and look nice. They dictate good design.
You want bad design, try most of the AWS tools. You can have both functionality and appeal. Pretending they are mutually exclusive is silly.
To put it another way, how am I supposed to get anything done when I'm spending all my time making sure the interface doesn't change beneath my feet?
From what I seen, the buttons didn't change, send has always been where it was, just another one was added.
It replaced the Send And Archive button that lives next to Send. (Adding a new one is still a bad idea, imho, but would have been borderline forgivable)
But second, people need to cut Google a little slack here. We all make mistakes, or errors in judgement, and Google is no different. Do we really want to live in a world where companies are afraid to innovate and try anything new, because people are going to jump on their backs if things don't work out? Part of the reason why Google was able to create so many great products, like Maps, Mail and so on, is because they've created an environment that's very conducive to creativity and experimentation.
As a consumer, I love the fact that Google has given me so many awesome productivity tools, with great features, completely for free, and I don't want them to ever lose the creative/experimental culture that made it possible. If you're not a fan of such a culture, if you just want a no-nonsense humorless stable suit-driven product, well, Microsoft has you well covered.
And make no mistake, this has hurt people, seriously.
Unless Google actually seeks those out and rights the wrong they did them, there is no sympathy or forgiveness they deserve in any way whatsoever.
It's quite likely that this was just directly shipped given that it's a one-day thing.
Nobody's asking them to stop innovating; you can be more rigorous in your shipping process (which they usually are) without affecting innovation.
Don't forget always-on surveillance of its users ;)
Why did it reach shipping before they realised it is the real question.
This is a terrible idea before it even leaves the whiteboard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colonel_(Monty_Python)
Not hard to see why something like this would create unintended consequences of an important nature: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715752594551869440
This doesn't upset me. This doesn't upset you. This doesn't upset hundreds of thousands of people and as unfunny as this is, I'm sure many are laughing about it.
However, it can upset some people. Some people who would mistakenly click the button because, god forbid, they forgot not to use the internet at all on April 1st, and that mistake would appear in an extremely important conversation.
And that mistake would appear during career discussions. And that mistake would get someone not hired, or fired, or whatever.
You guys want to complain, talk about how they should "look harder", how they should "take responsibility" and "own up to their mistakes", how they should "be happy not to work somewhere people are so uptight"? Have some fucking empathy.
I'd wager the majority of HN is well off, or well off enough that they don't have to worry about the rent or their water bill. But I'd like to see some of the people here struggling to make ends meet. Maybe you won't be so sociopathic about the potential for serious harm.
This thread makes me sick.
I understand where you're coming from, and I understand how someone may have clicked it by accident. I am struggling to empathize with the recipient who would see this, and a follow-up email explaining it was a mistake, and let that affect them.
And no, there's no classism at play. It's purely and simply a lack of empathy. A lack of understanding of what it's like to be in a situation where losing your job may cost you your home, your children or even your life.
> I am struggling to empathize with the recipient who would see this
Then don't empathize with the recipient. Plenty of bosses are jerks. But empathize with the sender, who would lose a job they cared about and can't necessarily get a new one like they grow on trees.
Shouldn't you also ask for empathy in people who are upset by it? They seem to have the least empathy of everybody, if they are going to fire somebody over animated GIF.
I haven't seen any of those people here on HN. Not today, at least. So I can't actually tell them. Show me someone and I'll be glad to have a chat...
Unfortunately, people like that probably won't come to HN and leave comment - cool, I just fired someone over it! But they absolutely should get the blame.
It's like people who explain away their assholish behaviour by saying "it was just a joke, lighten up".
Speaking from experience of a job triggering a stress induced bout of trigeminal neuralgia that made me want to die. After two weeks of that I quit my job of five years and found a much lower stress one.
But it's another frankly repulsive thing for you to act superior and give such awful advice to those people.
Maybe you should experience what it's like. Try and give you a better idea of what it's like to be a few dollars away from being homeless. Have your children removed from your care because you cannot provide from them. Have your entire life thrown away if you lose your job.
Not everyone can just "find a new job". Why don't you come here in Greece and ask the majority of the population why they can't find a job?
No, you quite clearly haven't, and it's insulting for everyone in that position that you would pretend you have.
As for your experience per your edit, I'm sorry you had such a high stress job and it's good to hear you got a better one, but that's not at all the situations I was talking about.
Have you been in a situation where you don't know how to pay the rent, will get kicked out if you don't and have no place to live if you get kicked out?
Have you been in jail for something meaningless and experienced employer after employer declining even having you in an interview because of the red flag?
Have you been part of an economy where the majority of the population cannot find a job because nobody is hiring, because nobody has money left?
If you had a job in any of those situations, you'd be damn glad to have it and you wouldn't be looking for a "fresh start" just because the conditions are not ideal.
You're assuming that someone who differs from you in opinion (not their view of the facts), is stupider than you, less experienced than you, and dishonest. That's not an argument, that's just peer pressure.
edit: and whoever flagged it, I'd love to know what kind of criteria they were using (flagged: not feeling my pain deeply enough?)
Being in a high stress job and being able to leave it to get a better one is not the same thing as being in a situation where you cannot lose your job lest you risk your children, your home etc.
And even without such an edit, it's ridiculously easy to tell he hasn't been in that situation. If you go around telling people "pah, they just need a fresh start, new job, new wife", you've not been in a situation where you understand this isn't always an option. Good for you, but you live in one hell of a bubble.
The HN guidelines ask you specifically not to call names in comments, whether or not someone else says bad things. You called a lot of names; that's understandable on a subject that evokes strong emotion, but those also are the occasions where the guidelines most apply. Had you followed them and edited those bits out, your comments would have been more persuasive, and also more dignified.
This one OTOH I'm not sure what's wrong with it.
I sympathize with the emotion behind it, but when you weaponize it like that and direct it at somebody, you break the bonds of community here—which are so weak to begin with, that protecting them has to be everyone's priority.
Thanks for responding so nicely.
How would you know you sent one, or got pranked, if you used the normal send button? I'd be pissed in that scenario if it was work related. Bosses famously often lack senses of humour.
Which now has a Minion GIF in it.
It is one thing for a prank to do something to the UI of a product, like invert the colors or display Comic Sans. It is quite another when it alters the content of the very messages you are passing.
The modern world is pathetic.
Getting back on topic, given historical data, it's foolish to not expect something to happen/change on April 1st, especially on google products.
So yes, I place the blame on the users.
However on the free gmail side of things - not to be a jerk about this - but perhaps this should remind users that they are not the real customers for google...and that free platforms like this do in fact come with baggage. I'm not saying google intentionally meant to screw over their users (I totally get this was all meant in jest). But what incentive does google have other than saying "Oops, sorry". Any expectations for compensation i think are silly; and many users forget that. Does it suck that someone lost their job because of this? Hellz yeah, no doubt about that! But can we really expect google to do anything else except shut down this prank even if only after-the-fact? Again, it sucks, but this should serve to show/remind some of those users that these free platforms are not like your local electric/water utility, and should not be fully depended upon, certainly not for such important things as jobs, etc.
> Note that if you’re a Google Apps business, education or government user this feature was never turned on.
http://time.com/4278950/april-fools-gmail-mic-drop/
http://fortune.com/2016/04/01/google-mic-drop/
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/1/11344044/google-gmail-mic-d...
Now, they could be in on the joke and/or all just picking up the original story and parroting it without any fact checking. I'm still hoping the real prank here was getting the media to cover a fake prank, but I'm becoming less sure of my instincts.
Also, what's the point of this prank when Gmail has a global audience? Only a minority of users will be aware that their tools might fail today because it's April Fools in the US.
Unfortunately the implementation was terrible, it confused users and lead people trying to seriously use the product to send silly pictures around.
Saying they don't care about the product because of this is silly. So many people use it because it is one of the best email applications around. A botched bit of fun doesn't mean the product is going to shit.
source: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/715820699215138817
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-cancel-Reader-rather-th...
Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.
The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately.
Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.
Edit: I have Google Fi
I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.
They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.
Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space.
More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.
Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.
They just got rid of one of the two available operators; quotes were there 10+ years ago.
Thanks buddy.
At least that's what I heard somewhere back then when they broke the + operator.
This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else.
When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts.
The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate.
Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.
And this is all only about code, not about the cost of keeping the service running with good availability on old infrastructure.
The TL;DR is: Maintenance is never free.
If you look on the Google file system, it has no support for deleting files (data is overwritten) and Google itself has a running business model around hoarding data, would make no sense to lose something that might be valuable to them in the future just for the sake of saving some storage.
I can only speak about browser history sync, but it gets deleted after 6 weeks.
Someone broke something and it was producing mangled data. 6 weeks was the "cliff" for when mangled data stopped being visible.
Mangling data is an interesting thing you raise. Would reveal some issues with their professionalism. Albeit after the disaster we watched today on their April's 1st joke, I wouldn't be surprised if indeed that was the (sad) case as you mention.. :/
Of course, this is the point of the tweet. It's not supposed to be a literal equation of LOEs.
I'm paying for my google reader replacement now, and fairly happy about it.
Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.
Apparently none of their "interviewed to death" workers noticed the potential ways this could backfire
While doesn't seem like their brightest idea I still miss the old whimsy Google.
> Apparently none of their "interviewed to death" workers noticed the potential ways this could backfire
This is IMO the really interesting part but I guess there is a strong groupthink culture there.
“Shut up Kris, you’re not being Googley.”
I am willing to bet at least one person on the team raised this as an issue before launch at it was ignored or shouted down.
That's what should have happened because the nature of an April Fools joke is that it bypasses the pre-testing, canarying, "go back to the drawing board", staged rollouts etc that most features would go through on their way to exposure to hundreds of millions of people. You can't do a 10% rollout on a joke that's meant to last one day.
I think Google should give up on April Fools jokes. Some of them have become so elaborate (like the Maps one last year) that it's obvious they have too many staff and not enough to do.
I was also responsible for a bunch of easter eggs, including TLing the [let it snow] one that ran just over the holidays in 2011. We did do staged 10% rollouts. It was usually an abbreviated staged rollout, where we would push to 10% for an hour or two, monitor Twitter for flames, check the logs to make sure all browsers were interacting with it (to catch browser bugs), and listen for an SRE yelling at us, but it was there.
Didn't work on GMail nor on any of the April Fools jokes, and I haven't been there for close to 2 years now, but that was my experience on Search & Doodles.
Fictional example #1: Hi everyone, We're having a baby!...Not (Then google appends "...Not" to the end.)
Fictional example #2: Hi everyone, Grandma passed away...Not
Fictional example #3: Hi everyone, We're moving away to city/state/country XYZ!...Not
Fictional example #4: Hi everyone, We're getting a divorce!...Not
Encrypted messaging or not, that's a lot of control to have (by a provider) over what users send out. Or maybe i'm thinking too pessimistically?
And they take a ton of work to organize.
In fact when the news is very distressing (spouse death) the person usually only notifies one or two very close people. Those people make sure the word gets out.
My grandmother had around 35 grandchildren and 10 greatgrandchildren when she passed. Notifying everyone wasn't hard. One child called a couple of their siblings those called a couple more siblings and/or their kids. Their kids told their kids. Then the inlaws called their sides of the family. Everyone was notified in a few hours. It wasn't even organized beforehand, these things happen in an ad hoc manner. No one person even had the contact information for even half of the others.