Monday evening, Gmail announced the latest evolution of their Gmail labeling system: color coding. The prior labeling system was just a black font with whatever label you came up with. The problem was that since the label went right next to the subject, it got lost when scanning through the inbox.

I’ve craved something to help organize the crush of emails—personal, professional, list-serve, automated calendar reminders (courtesy of Google Calendar), etc.—that flood my inbox. Help has arrived in the form two types of labels: colored text and colored boxes. To the hyper-organized, Google has taken the weakest Gmail feature and converted it into its best! I’ll be using the the Red-Yellow-Green method, with red being time-sensitive and green being “get-to-later” with a mix of various one-word labels. Dave Cohen, Google software engineer, has a much more exotic approach:

I get so much mail from my lists, I filter and archive most of it right away but I add labels just in case I need to find it again later. Those labels are my chameleons draped in subtle tones of green and blue. They’re there doing their job, but I barely notice them. Every once in a while I get mail that’s really important. These emails get my monarch butterfly labels, sporting bright red and yellow.

Dave Cohen summed up why this is now the most important Gmail feature: “Thanks to colored labels, it’s easy to scan my inbox and immediately find all the emails that are really important to me.”

No doubt the increasingly dominant Internet impulse.

I recently read in a health magazine that the carambola, or star fruit, has one of the highest concentrations of vitamin C. With the winter season fast upon us, I grabbed a handful of them at my local grocer and confidently paid for my exotic cure for winter maladies.

However, when it came time to enjoy the star fruit, I was at a loss on how to consume it. Do I eat the skin? How should I cut it?

I turned to the Internet, and About.com had the answers I sought—plus pictures for all 5 steps. In a matter of minutes I was enjoying my new star fruit.

After the star fruit was finished, I reflected on the path I chose.

I had two chances to ask for advice from another person. The first was at the grocery store where I could have asked a clerk. The second was to call my aunt, who served us star fruit on her Thanksgiving salad, for advice. Yet I opted for immediate feedback via the cold, indifferent Internet.

Is that wrong? Is the Internet truly replacing the verbal passing of knowledge from generation to generation? In this case, I doubt it. I doubt the produce clerk, or any clerk at my grocery, was familiar with preparing a star fruit. Since my aunt was at work, the question would have to wait until the evening when she returned home. And I wanted my star fruit now.

So what if I was influenced by a lifeless publication and sought the advice of the soulless Internet—at least I ate something healthy.