Last week I was browsing the goodies available in the GMail Labs and came across Web Clips. It seems to display a highlighted line of text above your mailbox taken from RSS headlines. They list a number of popular sites (CNN, Engadget, etc.) or you can add a custom feed.

I noticed its fatal flaw instantly: 75%+ of the clips it displayed were Sponsored Links. You can skip by them and browse real headlines (as well as additional Sponsored ones) via little left/right arrows, but the value of this is in effortless headlines that may or may not be something useful. If I wanted to browse through RSS feeds, I'd use a real RSS reader. Before disabling, however, I did a quick search to see why anyone would be using this (or if my experience was atypical). I abandoned that curiosity when I found this: Gmail Disable Sponsored Links.

It's a GreaseMonkey script (a great add-on for FireFox that allows you to run bits of JavaScript on user-defined URLs) that seems like it just looks for "sponsored" and, when found, executes the code that simulates clicking the right arrow, effectively skipping by all the ads.

Now I'm a Web Clips fan.