The Inside Story of Gmail On Its Tenth Anniversary

harrymcc (1641347) writes "Google officially — and mischievously — unveiled Gmail on April Fools' Day 2004. That makes this its tenth birthday, which I celebrated by talking to a bunch of the people who created the service for TIME.com. It's an amazing story: The service was in the works for almost three years before the announcement, and faced so much opposition from within Google that it wasn't clear it would ever reach consumers." Update: 04/01 13:37 GMT by T : We've introduced a lot of new features lately; some readers may note that with this story we are slowly rolling out one we hope you enjoy -- an audio version of each Slashdot story. If you are one of the readers in our testing pool, you'll hear the story just by clicking on it from the home page as if to read the comments; if you're driving, we hope you'll use your mobile devices responsibly.

TL;DR

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Early use by a major company of Javascript consuming XML-based web services. Successfully leveraged Google's search engine. Design conflicted with the all-on-one-page "portal" paradigm of the time. Text ads instead of banner ads, and controversial because they were tied to the content of the messages. Original cluster was 300 servers.

Auto play audio?

[Enry]

Screw you. If this is an April Fools joke, go back to OMG PWNIES. If you're rolling this out for good, seeya.

Autoplay audio or my account. Choose one.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Admins, this is the line I have drawn in sand. I have put up with all kinds of crap. I did not complain too much about Beta. But once more time you put up an auto playing audio, you will be banished. All the 2^7 days read continuously or 31 achievements will be discarded and the account abandoned if it is done again.

Re:I hate gmail.

[jader3rd]

Yes. If I use IMAP, then why use gmail at all?

Storage and Spam filter.