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New in Labs: Sender time zone

Wednesday, April 08, 2009 7:51 PM

Posted by Marcin Brodziak, Software Engineer

Let's say your girlfriend sends you an angry email. It's mostly about how you behaved at the party last night and then left for a business trip without saying goodbye. You read it from the other side of the globe, jet-lagged after a 12 hour flight. You want to call and sort things out, but forget that it's now almost 3:00 am her time. After waking her up, things only get worse.

There's a new feature in Gmail Labs called Sender Time Zone that can help. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see green phone icons next to people who are probably awake and readily reachable (if it's between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm in the sender's local time zone) and red ones next to those who could be sleeping or out of the office:

Click "show details" and you can see when a message was sent in the sender's time zone as well as what time it is for them now:

I got another request for you - can you take in flight details (i.e. arrival time & departure time) as well?  This way, I don't have to re-enter the information into my Google calendar, assuming that your RSS feed I subscribed to would pencil in the days and times when I am travelling. 

I ask for this because I need the flight times in order to plan meetings in between my flights.

Thanks a lot!

BlogBus想做一本杂志。

好事啊！

雜誌的名字就叫"我-城"吧。

I wish you could take note of what the smarty pants at Dopplr are doing, and automate the transfer of travel itineraries that I receive in email messages into my outlook calendar?

For your reference, here is the hint on how Dopplr realized the automation:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

I've got an idea for you.  How about making a bookmarket, scripts or what not some that would automatically grab trip details from e-ticket or itinerary that users receive from airlines via email? 

This way users don't have to spend time re-entering the details again.  Imagine how boring it is to entering your departure and arrival times over and over again when you book a flight, a hotel and then entering it into Dopplr and personal calendar.

Postscript:  On a second thought, I wish calendar makers (such as Outlook Developers, Gmail Developers, etc. ) would consider the above idea as well.  This would save me lots of time and make my life easier!

Update: I was told that Tripit.com would do the trick.  

Update II: Wow, the smarty pants at Dopplr has a solution to the above!  Thanks guys, you're absolutely brilliant!

Is there such thing as a Outlook Web Access notifier for Firefox (something similar to Gmail Notifier, so that I don't have to compulsively look at my blackberry or logon to OWA when I am working from home on a Mac. By the way, I really like the notifier on MS Outlook 2007 (you know that little alert that pops up whenever a new mail arrives).

I wish you could consider adding the timezone function that is now available in Microsoft Outlook 2007, so that I don't have to sketch my head and waste time converting between times in various timezones whenever I add an event from another timezone into my calendar. 

By the way, is there a way I could easily share my calendar privately with my mother who is a Yahoo user?  (She refuses to switch to Google.)

Perhaps Hengge should re-consider bringing the platform to the English speaking world.  I think you guys are now ready for that.

I am too lazy to write in Chinese tonight, so someone who knows Hengge, relay this message to him please.  Thanks.