Gmail for genz

Good morning and happy Monday.

Those who are not on TikTok, or maybe just anyone who isn’t perpetually online… may not be familiar with sludge content.

Typically, sludge content is 2 to 4 (or more) unrelated videos stitched together in one chaotic loop. These videos have flooded TikTok and for some reason many find them soothing or “relaxing” to watch. I don’t understand, but I stopped trying to understand a few years ago. A staple of sludge content is a persistent loop of someone playing the mobile game Subway Surfers.

The idea of porting video content as a mechanism to retain users attention is fascinating to me. This is particularly true in a text heavy application like Gmail. What if we ported a Subway Surfers loop into the app to keep people’s attention while they respond to boring emails?

It might feel like a stretch (it probably is), but given I’ve caught myself responding to things while also having a video playing in the corner of my screen, this future does not feel that far off.

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