Earlier this week, Google announced to gmail calendar users that they plan to discontinue support for a key feature in less than a month. When you schedule an appointment, you have the option of setting reminders. The reminder can be an email message, a popup message on your phone or desktop, or a SMS message to your phone. The latter is the one they plan to discontinue. The reason they explain is because that feature was created before people relied on smart phones for managing their calendars.
The problem is, they ASSUME we read all of the several hundred "alerts" our phone sends us for everything from an upcoming meeting, to a special offer for those passing in front of a restaurant or local shop. Some of us LIKE having three methods of reminding ourselves, the methods serve different purposes.
- An email message two weeks before for a conference or travel event - that way I have time to make final arrangements and can forward the email if necessary, I will see the email in my daily routine and handle it in a timely manner.
- A popup reminder shortly before an appointment which may be a meeting with others or may be time I have set aside in my schedule to accomplish a priority task.
- A text message an hour before a meeting across town, so I remember to leave on time so I can make it. With so many reminders and popups, I want to have an SMS message for these higher priority things so they don't get lost in the sea of routine popups.
Hopefully Google will recognize the error of their ways and continue support for SMS. It sure would be nice if they ASKED US HOW WE USE THINGS before deciding in their infinate wisdome how things should be used and dicatated to us, stripping away valuable functionality.
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