Don't drink and e-mail without your Mail Goggles

 

Google’s Mail Goggles attempts to prevent users from sending e-mails they might later regret by quizing them with math questions.

It’s 3 a.m. on March 18.

You’ve just returned to your apartment after a night of celebrating the feast of St. Patrick, patron saint of – well, that’s not important right now. Your first instinct is to sit in front of your computer and check your e-mail. Given your current state of “happiness,” you know it’s probably a poor decision to e-mail your boss, your significant other or your mother. But your “happiness” doesn’t care.

Enter the Mail Goggles.

All Gmail users – including users of TUmail Powered by Google – can enable Mail Goggles on their personal accounts. According to a statement from Google, Mail Goggles “is an admittedly tongue-in-cheek feature” to prevent those embarrassing late-night or drunken e-mails.

The concept is simple. After hitting the “send” button, users are asked a series of five math questions with varying levels of difficulty. Users must solve all five questions correctly for the e-mail to be sent. Otherwise, it’s time to walk away.

Mail Goggles is available through the Labs tab on the Settings page of Google mail. While you’re levelheaded, simply enable the lab and set the timing. Your impending actions should be prevented. Upon enabling Mail Goggles, users can determine when the Goggles take effect – whether it’s every day or just a few out of the week. The default setting is “late night on the weekend, as that is the time you’re most likely to need it,” Gmail engineer Jon Perlow said in a blog post.

“When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late-night Friday e-mail,” the post said. “And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click ‘send’ to verify you’re in the right state of mind?”

The level of difficulty can be adjusted, so questions could range from “6 x 3” to “392 + 179.”

Don’t worry about practicing or memorizing, either. The math equations change upon every failure, and it only takes one incorrect answer to prevent your e-mail from being sent.

And while Google can’t guarantee Mail Goggles’ effectiveness, at least give your mother a small chance of maintaining that innocent image she carries of you before you hit “send.”

Chris Stover can be reached at stover@temple.edu.

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Free beer sends winners to ‘bar now’

Bar-Now.com gives users a chance to win alcohol and prizes by answering trivia questions.

Bar-Now.com is not your typical social networking site.

Similar to other sites, users sign up for free with valid e-mail addresses and are provided with their own profiles in which they can add friends and leave comments. Despite these similarities, there is one aspect that distinguishes Bar-Now from its competitors: the chance to win free beer at local bars and restaurants.

“I was lying in bed one night thinking about how we could get returning users to the site, and then it hit me ­– Quizzo,” said Andrew Molnar, 26, co-founder and creator of Bar-Now.com. “It would be a way to ensure that we weren’t just another Yellow Pages listing bars. We actually had a way to get people from the Web site to a bar. I brought the idea to [the other co-founders], and everyone agreed that it would be the focus of the site.”

Quiz-Now, Bar-Now’s version of Quizzo, a free online trivia game, was added to the site in October 2008. The Quiz-Now questions were created by all of the founders, and they range from, “What is the capital of Hawaii?” to “In what year was Jenna Jameson born?” The program selects a random question from the list every week and makes sure that a bar never has the same question twice.

Potential customers can find bars to choose from in their areas by using the bar search tool. By being the first to answer a trivia question correctly, users win beer or other prizes at select bars.

Bars in states where it is illegal to give away free alcohol give out food, admittance or gift certificates. Users need to print out their certificates in order to claim their prizes. The same certificate is e-mailed to the designated bar for verification. If users answer the question incorrectly, they have multiple chances to get it right unless someone else gets it right before them.

In the Philadelphia region, Paddy Whacks is the only bar that participates in the Quiz-Now program. There are three locations where users can redeem their prizes: 150 South St., 2711 Comly Road and 9241-43 Roosevelt Boulevard.

There are 39 other bars listed in the following Philadelphia regions: Center City, Manayunk, Northeast, Old City, Rittenhouse Square, South Street and Waterfront. For each bar listed, the site provides information like dress codes, price ranges, cover charges, wait times, types of food served and the average age group of customers. The bars’ contact information, hours of operation, daily specials and customer reviews can also be accessed from the site.

If your favorite bar is not signed up for Quiz-Now, you still have the opportunity to “bar-dash.” “Bar-dash” is the term used to describe an event invitation. Users include the name for the outing, the name of the bar, a beginning and end time and a description of the event. Then, users can proceed to invite their friends to their specified “bar-dash.”

A section of the site called “B.U.I.” stands for “Bar-Now Under the Influence.” While it is still under construction, there are operating links for Bar-Now drink recipes, drinking games and “Bar-Now’s Lame Guide to Bartending,” for users who want to learn how to mix drinks like a real bartender.

The other co-founders of Bar-Now.com are Andrew’s brothers, Todd Molnar, 24, and Brad Molnar, 27, and his previous college roommate, Brian Bernstein, 26. Andrew and Brian both attended the University of Delaware and majored in computer and information sciences.

One of Andrew’s former co-workers came up with the idea of a Web site that would place webcams in different bars so that people could decide where to go by first checking out the crowd. “We want this site to be fun, and we want to get people off of their [couches] and into the world,” Andrew said. “With Quiz-Now, they only have one week to redeem their gift certificates, and we hope that is the catalyst to get them off of their computer and into their local community.”

With Bar-Now.com, users not only have the opportunity to find new bars and set up outings with friends, they also can attempt to win free beer or many other prizes, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day.

LaToya Allen can be reached at latoya.allen@temple.edu.