In its eternal quest to “not be evil” Google has decided to take on one of the banes of man – himself, and his time-inconsistency.
It is doing this by introducing a new service to gmail. You can set up this service to significantly increase the transaction cost associated with sending an email when you are drunk!
In the “drunk” state you may think it is a good idea to email your ex girlfriend/boyfriend and say strange things – however, prior to being drunk you may decide that any benefit associated with emailing someone in your drunk state is more than canceled out by the embarrassing phone call the next day.
This feature allows you to increase the cost to writing the email in your drunk state – allowing you to “pre-commit” to not sending embarrassing emails.
With classy features like this you can tell that a genius like Hal Varian is working for them 
3 comments
Eric Crampton says:
November 5, 2008 at 9:40 am (UTC 12 )
If you’re in Christchurch next March, Hal Varian will be delivering our fourth annual Condliffe Memorial Lecture.
agnitio says:
November 5, 2008 at 10:22 am (UTC 12 )
That could warrant a TVHE field trip I think, do you know what the talk will be about?
Please keep us posted:)
Matt Nolan says:
November 17, 2008 at 12:46 pm (UTC 12 )
That would be extremely awesome – it would definitely warrant a field trip