What will Google come up with next?

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When I was in college, there was a guy on our floor who refused to wake up. He'd slap off his alarm clock and snore through nearly every 7:40 AM session of Econ 51. He'd spend the rest of his day complaining how his alarm clock had failed him. We all knew the truth because we heard him hit the "snooze" button about five times before finally shutting the whole thing off. An electronics engineering major on the floor finally built Frank an alarm clock that refused to shut off until he punched in his Social Security number on an old AT&T telephone keypad.Frank's grade-point average was saved and I was forever impressed by people with soldering irons and plastic bins of spare parts.I was impressed again last month when Google launched "Goggles," another amazing feature that reminds me of Frank's old alarm clock. Goggles is a cool free add-on to Google's mail service, Gmail, that is designed to stop you from making a fool of yourself when you're too drunk to send a coherent e-mail. (Yes, you read that correctly.) It does this by refusing to send your mail until you are able to answer five math questions in less than one minute. If you can't complete the questions, the e-mail sits in the outbox until you can. This gives you time to sober up and reconsider the missive you may have fired off to your boss, friends or your entire contact list. (See also: Jerry Maguire)Consider this a Breathalyzer for your e-mail.It's actually a pretty clever idea and pretty brilliantly implemented. If you're one of Gmail's 26 million e-mail users (yes, you read that right, 26 million) you set up a "lab" feature in your e-mail account by clicking on the "Settings" link. You can configure Goggles to turn on automatically day or night and configure how long it stays on. In the "how drunk do you think you're going to be" category, you also can adjust how hard you want the math questions to be.You can leave it on all the time and use it to bone up on your elementary school math too.Also from Google Labs, Google also launched free SMS mail for Gmail, allowing Gmail users to send and receive SMS messages (which usually come from cell phones.) Each Gmail user is assigned a faux phone number and the service uses it to send and receive messages using the Gmail chat window. This allows cell phone users to easily send text messages to Gmail users.If you want to keep an eye on what is being developed in the Google Lab (even before the cool stuff is released) you can take a peek and play with the cool stuff at "labs.google.com." I like stopping in every few weeks and see what is coming down the road. (The stuff that has been released is on the right, the more experimental stuff is on the left.)Let me know what you find that you think is the next cool thing. (James Derk is owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and a tech columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim(at)cyberdads.com)