The Inside Story of Gmail On Its Tenth Anniversary 142
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.
Sort It. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ten years, perhaps they'll be able to enable name/subject 'sort' soon.
All they've done is make the UI completely unintuitive, I haven't seen any useful changes over the last ten years, just adverts and the continuous nagging and coercion to use Google-plus.
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I agree. It seems to be the new trend in software and business in general. "Innovation" and "the way forward" seems to be forcing users into the choices made by designers and approved by CxOs and marketers. I see the same issue at the company where I work. I am on the management team and attend various off-site team building brainstorming sessions. I play along to keep my job but believe it is 90% BS. They are essentially teaching the CxOs to ignore reason and go with their gut instincts. To innovate and fo
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Re:Sort It. (Score:1)
bring back the anti-beta protest I say, the comments on /. were so much better the week they were all away consoling themselves!
Re:Sort It. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's funny is the nagging only gets worse when you actually use Google+
It's so bad I don't even log into Google+ if I can help it. I follow some people on there, and I post stuff but the pop-up nagging for me to invite everyone I know constantly is very annoying. Now they have a "Selfie" popup encouraging me to take pictures of myself and post them... wtf?
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I'm not sure whether to interpret that selfie thing as an April Fools joke or not...if not, it's one of the most narcissistic and completely pointless things I've heard of in a long time.
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Not a joke at all. GIANT window in the middle of the screen talking about how great "Selfies" are and I should upload some right away.
Googles ruining their social media platform. I don't want to go anywhere near it anymore. The selfie thing was the final straw.
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Googles ruining their social media platform. I don't want to go anywhere near it anymore. The selfie thing was the final straw.
Shit, shelfies aren't even on their social media platform! This is Gmail we're talking about. WTF
I'm still waiting to see if they'll ever get the hint when every time they ask me to associate a phone number with the account, I tell them to go fuck themselves.
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Lol, I got that today, what better way to ID you better, perhaps it was the NSA's idea.
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This is exactly right. Gmail was pretty innovative when it came out (most mailreaders couldn't handle conversation threading then, and tagging is much more useful than folders), but what have they done since then? Nothing really, other that slap an uglier UI on it.
The other responder is correct: this seems to be the new trend in software. Nothing really innovative or better is done much any more, instead features are removed and things are dumbed down, and on top of that UIs have gotten much uglier.
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(most mailreaders couldn't handle conversation threading then, and tagging is much more useful than folders)
Literally every mailreader I've used in the many years before gmail existed did conversation threading just as gmail does. What they didn't tend to do is enable it by default, which is just as reasonable as enabling it by default (some people don't like mail threading, so either way you go with the default you're going to force some people to change a setting.)
Tagging was not a common feature, but it wasn't totally unheard of. Neither of those things are exampels of gmail being innovative.
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Offline mailreaders are not the same as webmail services. Did any other webmail services offer conversation threading when Gmail started? I don't believe so.
Same goes for tagging. When Gmail came out, the other webmail services didn't have any of this stuff, and they didn't have any storage space either. Gmail had these features plus 1GB of space, a huge amount for the time when limits of 25MB were common.
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Offline mailreaders are not the same as webmail services.
True. I suppose that I just don't see that as a meaningful distinction.
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There is a a web UI? I think gmail works great in Thunderbird via IMAP. It has full sorting and folders, everything you could ever want. The Android app is pretty good on my phone as well (although no sorting). I have never seen a web based email UI that I liked or used unless I absolutely had to.
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I sort like this frequently (I use a real mailreader, not gmail). My use case is that I find it useful to bunch together all of the emails from a certain person or with a certain subject, in chronological order. It often makes it much easier to find the exact email I'm looking for.
I know that I just said that my use case is that I find it useful. But, really, that's plenty enough justification.
Externally commissioned product? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure they created it for Google, not for TIME.com.
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Despite writing for Time.com, it looks like Harry McCracken has problems with clarity in writing. It should read something like:
"That makes this its tenth birthday, which I celebrated for TIME.com by talking to a bunch of the people who created the service"
Or something.
TL;DR (Score:4, Informative)
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.
conversational format (Score:5, Interesting)
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It was several personal firsts for me:
1) First conversational layout for email
2) First AJAX web application
3) First cloud backed app
4) 2nd single-box-search app, no filing required by the user (1st I saw was iTunes)
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It most certainly was not the first AJAX web application, as the whole XmlHttpRequest object was originally conceived by Microsoft for the Outlook Web Access portal four whole years before Gmail launched, and Oddpost was the first public webmail system to be AJAX based.
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Perhaps you missed "personal" and "for me"?
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If they weren't the first with conversational layout, they were the ones that popularised it.
They didn't get Ajax right. They just based their user interface around it, which none of the other major webmail providers were doing. This made things a lot faster, which most users appreciated. In fact, their use of Ajax was pretty lousy. You couldn't even open an email in a new window because instead of using proper links and hooking into them with Ajax, they concocted fake links based on spans that could
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Gmail was an early pioneer in using the URL hash to track state, so that eg, the Back button worked properly with Ajax. They deserve credit for that.
And yes, I remember being annoyed about not being able to open links in a new window... for about 10 seconds, before discovering the "Open in new window" function they provided, which rendered that pretty moot.
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Email services had been including the previous emails below the reply, indented, for ages. With Gmail, when non-Gmail people email you, you now have that pointlessly duplicated across the conversation view still, don't you? Although they fold it or something. I don't know; I disabled it awhile back.
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Not quite, Microsoft Outlook had conversational layout [microsoft.com] in 2003. There are probably other programs that had it even earlier than that, but Outlook was probably one of the most mainstream.
The improvement that Google made was that the conversation included the emails you sent, not just the ones you received. Sadly, it took another 7 ye
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Outlook also had AJAX first. GMail was the among the first free webmail to use AJAX.
Re:conversational format (Score:5, Funny)
What? Are you using a potato for RAM or something?
memories (Score:4, Interesting)
"Bidding for invites on eBay sent prices shooting up to $150 and beyond"
Things cooled down quickly. My first sent message was to my dad, on June 27, telling him that I bought an invite on eBay for $1.50.
Also fun to read Slashdot's original coverage of the launch. [slashdot.org]
"It is a joke, it's going to have to go down in history as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled... both the AP and Reuters have put out wire stories which means it's going to be in hundreds of newspapers tomorrow morning."
Good stuff, Google. Though I wish you'd learn that "sort" is as useful as "search".
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That's not receiving an invitation, that's buying a ticket.
Some of us actually received invitations.
gmail is a gamma now (Score:2)
Is it finally out of Beta also?
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Only if you don't run the add-in which puts "Beta" back in the corner.
Why I never created a Gmail account (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in the days, Google was still seen as a benevolent company that innovated for the sake of innovation - and not to sell your data to the highest biddest and monetize your entire life, as everybody now knows. Yet I didn't want a Gmail account.
Why? Because at the beginning, Gmail was invite-only. And that my friends is a classic sales tactic to generate a false impression of privilege, the desire to be allowed in, and when a vendor has to rely on such tactics to drive up sales, something doesn't smell right.
That was my first hint that Google's interest wasn't the user'.
Re:Why I never created a Gmail account (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the article, that was because they didn't have the resources to support an unlimited user roll out.
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They did that again when they created Google Wave, and it made some sense as Wave was complex and resource intensive, but they never opened it fully up. And again when they created G+ they did the same... which went a long way towards keeping it from being any real kind of success.
It may have sense for Gmail. but they've kept to the same pattern.
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Back in the days, Google was still seen as a benevolent company that innovated for the sake of innovation - and not to sell your data to the highest biddest and monetize your entire life, as everybody now knows.
This might be nitpicking, but Google does not sell your data, they sell access to you based on the data. Google selling your data would be like selling a gold mine, making a quick buck but totally unsustainable. They're far better off to keep the data in house and be able to sell ads targeted based upon it.
No way. (Score:2)
I don't believe that gmail is 10 years old today. This must be a hoax!
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Everyone knows that GMail was created last Tuesday as is. It only seems to be 10 years old to those who don't have the faith to see through the deception.
I hate gmail. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't actually like to read my gmail. Its a horrid interface. No folders (no, I'm not going to search, TYVM) and the "folder" work around is a kludge doesn't cut it for me. Yahoo up until recently had the most powerful interface. But no SSL after login. Then they started limiting page sizes rather than continuous.
I'm thinking Horde Mail/GroupWare on a reliable cloud provider would be the way to go. But you can't leave google behind because of the drive, docs and all that stuff.
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I don't actually like to read my gmail. Its a horrid interface.
You actually use Gmail via the website and not via IMAP?
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Yes. If I use IMAP, then why use gmail at all?
Re:I hate gmail. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. If I use IMAP, then why use gmail at all?
Storage and Spam filter.
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I'm no fan of the new Yahoo Mail interface, either, but on the plus side, they are all-HTTPS now, no longer just the login page. Plus, you can access Yahoo Mail using any old IMAP/SMTP client (also over SSL in both directions), so you can avoid the web interface altogether if you prefer.
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I was a longtime (going on 10 years) user of Yahoo Mail, but when they finally crammed the new interface down my throat, after the fourth time they silently dropped all my incoming emails for days at a time, I had to call it quits.
I mean, for fuck's sake, if your email provider can't even deliver email properly, what the hell is the point? And I KNOW I was getting emails over these periods since I had notification emails coming in daily otherwise.
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and the "folder" work around is a kludge doesn't cut it for me.
Labels. It's not a work-around, it's a deliberate design decision, and a good one. You can emulate folders with labels - simply don't attach more than one label to a given email.
WTF would you think we would enjoy an "audio ver"? (Score:5, Insightful)
>> 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.
Er...no thanks. There's a reason video tanked on this site too - your readership is too damn busy to wait for the talky-talk. So, we skim (and type) like crazy, and value text-heavy sites like Slashdot and Reddit. (OK, 15 seconds - time up - back to work!)
Re:WTF would you think we would enjoy an "audio ve (Score:5, Funny)
Woosh!
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This must be how they're solving the age-old dilemma of getting people to read the summary before replying.
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Wouldn't care if it didn't auto-play. Blech.
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If this is a joke, it's not very funny. Could have been made funny by robotic voice saying funny things. I would have done an NSA agent conversation accidentally bleeding through.
If not a joke, well, I don't know how to express the superlative of jumping the shark, but this is it.
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I think it's an April Fool's joke. I hope. Dear god, please let it be an April Fool's joke.
Auto play audio? (Score:5, Informative)
Screw you. If this is an April Fools joke, go back to OMG PWNIES. If you're rolling this out for good, seeya.
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Re:Auto play audio? (Score:4, Insightful)
just a joke, bro. if you listen to it, you would notice that it's actually a person reading the article as if they were a basic text-to-speech program. they could have made it better by excitedly yelling, "OH MY GOD, PONIES!" in the middle and then "oh uhh, the summary, right..." and finish reading the summary like the text-to-speech program.
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But do they have to do it on all stories? I wished there was a HTML5 media player blocker like FlashBlocker.
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I'm guessing joke, too. However, given all the nonsense we're seeing in the beta, this seems entirely plausible as a serious thing. Poe's law may be at work here.
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--I'm with you 99%. Autoplay audio on /. is hella annoying.
/ ponies!
Isn't it still just a Beta? (Score:2)
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Google's gmail April Fool's prank today (Score:1)
was to block the email I forward from my domain MX – again. I guess they thought it was such a good prank they delivered it early.
WTF Google? How many times do we have to go through this?
If you want to advertise to me, you're going to have to accept the approx 3% of the spam that gets through my up-to-date spamassassin, DNSBL, and procmail. You let tons of spam sent directly to my gmail account come in, usually, but not always filtered to my spam folder; so why is the small amount of spam that gets f
I guess you are looking for the illiterate crowd. (Score:5)
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What about the hearing impaired, you ableist shitlord.
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Make it NOT AUTOPLAY. One click is not going to break their arms.
Autoplay audio or my account. Choose one. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Autoplay audio or my account. Choose one. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is with you folks? The rule has always been: if you don't like Slashdot on April first, don't come.
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You're getting morse code? I'm getting a robotic voice reading the stories. I'm hoping this is their April Fool's joke because if this is a serious new feature then it's idiotic.
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I'm getting a robotic voice reading the stories. I'm hoping this is their April Fool's joke because if this is a serious new feature then it's idiotic.
Well, I wouldn't call it idiotic. It could be the start of a useful feature for the visually impaired. What seems to be missing is a way to disable it. I've poked around a bit, and didn't find any controls. It has the usual sound level widget, which works for the current window, but when I refresh or open a new discussion window/tab, the sound is back up where it was.
Anyone know how to turn it off?
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I can go at the end of the from-the-fuck-you-slashdot-idiots-dept.conf config file.
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Flashblock.
You still get the flash icon on the page, but you have to click on it before it will actually execute. It does this on all web pages, not just Slashdot.
Second best (after Adblock Plus) of all the Firefox extensions I install.
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My bad. Flashblock doesn't help. No luck blocking it with the ad blocker either....
Text to speech configuration (Score:3)
Is there a facility to adjust this? I listen to doctors dictating notes all day long so I'm used to very quick speech rates. I find the rate at which the TTS engine is dropping output is driving me nuts.
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AutoPlay Audio is EVIL (Score:2)
i would say that 85% of the NEW COOL %Framework%! features are garbage. Please have an option to turn that audio OFF.
Gmail also has similar problems (Why does the "hangouts" thing freeze Gmail for several seconds during loading??)
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Please have an option to turn that audio OFF.
I added a filter to my Proxomitron proxy to strip out the "autoplay" tag from the audio element on /. pages. (Am considering stripping out the audio element all together.) Regardless of whether this is an April Fools day joke or not, the person who decided to use the "autoplay" tag should be taken out back and beaten into unconsciousness.
Using mobile devices responsibly (Score:1)
How am I supposed to hold both the bong and the iPod at the same time? I've had to stow the MP-5 in the gun rack and it's still difficult to drive.
FFS.
My favorite part of the Autoplay TTS (Score:1)
Hope this is April fools! (Score:3)
Websites should be seen AND NOT HEARD.
I've got no problem with there being an audio version of the story. However, I do have a problem with it being an AUTOPLAYING audio version of the story. Due to autoplaying audio and video (one an ad a while back on Slashdot which would periodically make the sound of a slamming door!), the audio is permanently muted on my work workstation.
I hope the autoplaying sound was just an April fool's joke. If not it's incredibly badly thought out, given the number of people who read Slashdot where they don't want suddenly a bunch of sound coming out their computer.
Really regret the migration (Score:2)
At the time my go-to Yahoo account was getting swamped with about 300 spam emails a day and I was looking for a low-hanging solution (didn't want to get in bed with Microsoft, though). And, I never had a real personal email plan. If I could start all over again, I'd have 3 accounts:
1.) Garbage account when I have to provide an email address and don't care to see anything but an ephemoral conversation.
2.) Public correspondence for long-term email relationships e.g. billing accounts and on-line purchases.
Autoplay is a tool of the Devil! (Score:2)
GARRG! (Score:2)
Auto play by default is bad, mkay. Makes me want to pull my hair out.
This should not happen, by default. Put it in a config option for those who want it, but don't make it default. Using it while driving or anything else is a terrible idea. You still have to navigate to the page and touch the right story.
Meanwhile, Pipedot has workng UTF-8. Which feature is more useful in expanding your audience? I'll take UTF-8 myself.
Re:NSA mail (Score:4, Funny)
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The moment I read it would place ads by scanning my email contents I swore to stay away. Never touched it. Tho is is why I always had a mac.com address, even though it was $99/yr. At least I knew how much I was paying. And don't fool yourself, whether a service is paid or ad-supported, you pay either way.
The only sad part is that google is still indexing all the mail that I send to a gmail address, and adding that to a dossier about me.
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Re:NSA mail (Score:5, Funny)
Naw, we do it every day now...
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yeah didn't they do that last year? but at least now they have audio to read the page to you...
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Put on your headphones....
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Audio Clip? What Audio Clip? (Score:2)
Yes, there's a Javascript slider widget moving itself next to the article. I don't have speakers connected to my office computer, and since it's April 1 I assume that if I do turn on the sound, I'll find that Slashdot is just playing a short audio clip of Rick Astley....
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I'm going to have to stop you there.
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He's right you know, back when Gmail first came out I was amazed at how it was not much better than hotmail and the email provided by my ISP and Outlook Express.
Oh wait, no, that's no right is it? That's not right at all!
Everybody used hotmail or their ISPs email servers.
They accessed it with POP and all their mail resided on a windows 98 machine which kept losing it all.
To my memory It's the first example of a web-application with cloud backed storage.
At the time it blew my mind.
It was also the 2nd example
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Gmail certainly allowed you to file things, in fact I've been using it that way since the beginning. Gmail did it better, too, since it had tagging instead of regular folders (many times, an email or conversation will apply to more than one of my tags; you can't do that with folders).
The main "killer features" of Gmail when it came out were:
1) tagging instead of folders
2) extremely fast search (keyword here is "fast")
3) message threading/conversations
4) lots of storage space, far far more than competing se
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Correct, they are not the same thing.
Tagging can contain the structure of a folder system with inherant deduplication of data. 1 tag per foldername contained in path. Done. Then you can add the file to another "folder" by adding a tag. Search for your regular foldername and you have your "folder" without browsing an entire hierarchy of foldernames.
That being said I don't really tag my files - I use folder hierarchies and don't worry about dupes (this is /. after all). I can see the expanded utility of tags
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Folders are a subset of tagging. You can replicate folder functionality with tagging, but not vice versa. Gmail even has folder hierarchies built-in, using the "/" separator: you can create tags like "Personal/PersonA" and "Personal/PersonB", giving you a "Personal" folder with two sub-folders "PersonA" and "PersonB", and you can expand or collapse that "Person" folder. Of course, it's not really a folder, but you can't tell the difference, except that one email thread can be tagged with both "Personal/P
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It was also the 2nd example of the single-text-box-searched-all-meta-data paradigm that treats the the backing store as a blackbox db type affair.
A paradigm that has reached its inevitable irritating conclusion in the Chrome Unified All Things Box that you type an URL slightly wrong in and it searches instead.
Firefox: Because if I want to search, I'll use the search bar, god damn it! (although I had to figure out how to disable it when FF turned on the same exact thing in *their* address bar for some weird reason)