The Power of Feedback
I have been writing to a lot of people and companies lately about various issues. One thing I have discovered in doing this is that my feedback can be very very powerful.
The best example of this has to do with Gmail. I was having a problem with Gmail in Safari where if Gmail was loading in the background in Safari it would suddenly take focus when it had finished loading.
This was extremely annoying because I might have been on the verge of closing a tab or in the midst of editing something in another tab when, all of a sudden, Safari would switch back to Gmail automatically, which often resulted in my performing an unintended action on Gmail, like closing the tab it was in or, even worse, enacting a keyboard shortcut like ‘x#’, which would select and then trash a message.
I think that this behavior had something to due with the AJAX nature of Gmail that allowed it to control the browser in this way, because when I switched to Gmail’s basic HTML view the problem would go away.
I am happy to announce, however, that as of today this problem appears to be history. I wrote to Google about this via their Gmail Feedback form a few days ago. I have no idea whether they acted on my advice, and the advice of many others who have undoubtedly written to them about this in the past, but it is a very welcome change nonetheless. Kudos to the folks at Gmail if they did indeed take into serious consideration the feedback of their customers.
Still, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that given the fact that this behavior has been true of Gmail and Safari for over two and a half years, and the fact that I just wrote them about it a few days ago and suddenly I find that it’s no longer a problem for me is a mighty big coincidence and that perhaps the giant Google did seriously listen to my little suggestion.
To me, the moral in this is that complaining about things on one’s blog can be cathartic, but communicating one’s opinions to the people who have the power to change things can get results.
