Several people have asked my opinion of Google's Priority Inbox, the newly announced Gmail feature that promises to help users "identify your important email and separate it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters." (See Google's explanation.)

I haven't used the feature yet, so I have to offer a grain of salt along with my comments. But I understand the gist of the thing: Gmail watches who you email, which message threads you reply to, and allows you to flag certain threads or senders as important - and then shows those important messages more prominently in the inbox.

So - what do I think of Priority Inbox? My short answer is what I tell people a lot for any feature: if it works for you, if it actually makes you more productive and less stressed, then great, go for it.

My longer answer, though, is that I don't understand the need for an inbox feature like this. The inbox should be a temporary holding location only, before emails are spirited off to a better place: an archive, a folder, a todo list, the trash, anywhere but sticking around in the inbox.

Here's a thought experiment. If you were hired to design a subway platform for the best user experience, what kinds of features would you make available? The train comes every few minutes and the platform is already clean and well-lighted. What else would be helpful - perhaps some bench seating? A vendor selling quick things like water and candy? All good ideas.

Now how about this proposal. Someone is offering to bring in a sit-down restaurant and a yoga studio, right there on the platform. Interesting ideas, but are they necessary?

The inbox - at least for people who empty it at least once a day - is like the train platform. Messages are headed out soon, so beyond a few basic features, there's no need for shiny new tools that offer to keep things under control. The solution to email overload is already available, for free, without any extra technology. (I've been teaching an easy solution for over ten years - here's a quick description I wrote recently.)

But Priority Inbox, if it's implemented well, will probably do just fine. This is because of the reality of users and Google's business goals:

• The user reality is that most people don't practice bit literacy. Instead they maintain an inbox of hundreds, or thousands, of messages, a jumble of personal notes, meeting invites, attached photos, long-term action items, reminders, spam, and urgent todos, all constantly competing for the user's attention in one chaotic mosh pit of a pile. For users who have to endure this day to day while still holding down a job, a feature like Priority Inbox might make their overload slightly less stressful. Priority Inbox doesn't offer a cure - just a patch for some of the symptoms - but as I say: If it works for you, go for it.

• The business reality is that Google benefits from this feature by (a) making it more difficult for users to leave Gmail, once they've set up their Priority Inbox filters (because who's going to switch to Yahoo Mail if they have Gmail calibrated just how they like it?)... and (b) encouraging users yet again not to delete their email but to store everything on Google's servers... and the more of your data that Google stores, the more intelligently they can serve you up to advertisers. (But then Gmail is free. As the Blues Brothers would say, whaddya want for nothin'?)

Personally I won't have much opportunity to even try out Priority Inbox, since my inbox frequently has no messages at all inside. I won't be able to mark any of them important. (If you'd like to solve email overload for yourself, once again here's my quick post on how to do so.)

Still, I can't help but think that Google is missing an important opportunity with this kind of mail feature. Yes, lots of users might get some incremental value out of Priority Inbox. And Google certainly gets immediate business value out of it. But imagine if Google actually tried to eliminate email overload for all Gmail users, regardless of the alignment with their short-term business goals. This might yield some very different features: for example, a prominent display of how long it's been since the inbox was empty; or a graph of the lowest message count in each 24-hour period in the past month; easier ways to get action items out of the inbox and onto a todo list; sorting features to allow for bulk-selection and delete (Gmail still doesn't allow sorting by sender or subject!); and so on.

So far, Google has opted not to develop those types of features, and that has opened an opportunity in the marketplace. Plenty of entrepreneurs are surely paying attention. I hope Google is, too.

Seeing an empty inbox for the first time is "incredibly liberating" and "exhilarating," says Rachel Reuben.

As the digital vanguard goes, the rest of the online users eventually follow. Consider this example: noted designer Khoi Vinh wrote a few days ago...

I have access to Netflix, DVDs and torrents for everything I could ever want to watch and yet no time to watch them. #torture

If you're not there, you probably will be soon: infinite bitstreams beckoning from every corner of life and work. The question, then, is what sources will you not dive into? Or to put it in more practical terms...

• Work: You have plenty of ways of tracking the 1,000 things you need to get done. But which are the three most important tasks for today?

• Music: You can listen to any song (via Youtube), any genre (via Pandora), any radio station (via its online stream), and any music you've ever bought (via iTunes). But which is right music for this moment?

• Movies: You could easily have a to-watch list spanning Roku, DVDs, iPad, TiVo, Boxee, and so on... but which one do you want to try to watch this week?

• Books: You can download any book you want, to join the 100 others you have on the kindle/iPad/iPhone you have now. But which one should you read now? Will it keep your interest for more than a page?

Will anything keep our interest for more than a page, a kilobyte, a second? The only way to answer "yes" is to say "no" to the thousand other available options.

P.S. #1: The New York Times today reports that overuse of digital devices may lead to brain fatigue. In other words, it's important to say "no" to everything digital once in awhile. (This was the key message of Bit Literacy and its mantra of "let the bits go.")

P.S. #2: One might consider "water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink" as an analogy for information overload. But keep in mind that this flood of information isn't really a problem, comparatively. A real problem, from a real flood, is what's going on in Pakistan. See a list of organizations helping with relief, Big Picture photos from the flood zone, ontheground.pk displaying messages support for flood victims.... and here's a map showing how big, really, the flood area is.

The front page story in the New York Times earlier this week - above the fold, top and center, big photo - told the story of five professors who went on a camping in Utah, without email access, for a full week. This was big news, apparently: a few Blackberry users avoided email for seven whole days. (I'm exaggerating a bit, of course - the professors happen to be neuroscientists, so the story explores the cognitive effects of always-on connectivity. Another popular story on this topic was Is Google Making Us Stupid? two years ago in The Atlantic.)

Still, I find the placement of the NYT article interesting. Someone unplugs for a few days and it's literally front-page news. Is it really that uncommon for people to have the basic skills to disconnect? As I said in my review of "Hamlet's Blackberry", there's plenty of writing about the problem - information is everywhere, overload affects us in lots of negative ways - but almost no mentions of a solution.

Information overload is, at root, a problem of distraction. The solution, then, must grant you the ability to focus. As I said in Bit Literacy, the first step is separating action items from everything else - then focusing only on what you have to accomplish today. And then you're done.

Here's a nugget worth reflecting on:

We must instead take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green.

Well said.

Now the fun part. Can you guess who wrote it?

The author is hardly a smash-the-machines luddite. It's Jaron Lanier, in his recent NYT op-ed. Lanier is the technologist who coined the term "virtual reality." (See his speaking bio.)

Lanier argues that the technology elite in Silicon Valley are forming "a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture." Believe enough in technology - or anything, I suppose - and it's inevitable for a religion to form around it. Not a religion expressing divine powers, necessarily, but a religion as in a framework that explains the universe around us.

That raises an interesting question about what our "religious beliefs" are around technology. Is the machine at the center, or the user? I'd say the human should be fully responsible for their decisions and the outcomes.