I just tried to create a new label in my gmail account (labels are roughly equivalent to mail folders in an ordinary mail system), and my proposed label was denied. The label was ‘voicemail’. This leads me to speculate that perhaps google is reserving this label for future use.

Google has already moved into the voice-over-IP arena, so it is not difficult to imagine that they will update gtalk so that people can use it to receive voicemail (which would be stored in that user’s gmail account under the label ‘voicemail’). Just a tiny tidbit of idle speculation. It’s not that much of a long-shot really, Skype just announced free outgoing calls to land-lines on their network, so it won’t be that surprising if other VOIP providers follow suit in a race to the bottom.

But back to Google and Google’s future; I think this label creation method could be used to divine what other features Google plans to unleash. I haven’t yet succeeded at guessing any other blocked gmail labels, but an enterprising competitor could throw the dictionary at the label creation form and perhaps mine some useful information. Here are the results of a few of my other attempts, none of which were blocked:

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 2:56 am and is filed under Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.