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Google's Sergey Brin Talks on Gmail's Future
de la mettrie writes "Sergey Brin of Google has been discussing the future of GMail in a recent eWeek article. He says that the ongoing beta test will likely take about six months, and that the implementation of mail forwarding, POP access, mail encryption and even RSS feeds is being considered."
you can always reach him at sergey_brin@hotmail.com
Je t'aime Stéphanie
already slashdotted, here's the text:
Steve Gillmor
Sergey Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
Brin
Gillmor
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Trolling is a art,
They also mention various privacy concerns. The only thing they ever meant by not guaranteeing immediate deletion has to do with proper backups. I think the geek/media bridge failed yet again and something was blown out of proportion. I can't wait to see that you're using 99% of your available 1gb for email tho.
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I really hope they implement support for GnuPG in an easy manner. As it is, having a public key doesn't mean much for email, since people sending you email need to do the work for you to receive encrypted email, and you can't send encrypted email unless the other person has a key. GMail could go a long way towards making GnuPG prolific...
What are they building a space shuttle?
No, they're building a massive, wide area distributed email system with vast amounts of storage. I doubt they'd want to tarnish their name, especially with an IPO pending, by going live with a buggy system. If you can shave a few months off that, I'm sure you could have a good career at Google.
Trolling is a art,
I am lucky enough to have an early account at Gmail. Before I had it, I was the screenshots and I was not impressed, but once I tried it out... it is amazing. This will be one of the biggest things to hit the internet. It simply works, it doesn't have any flashy ads to bother you, and it's FAST! Not to mention the "conversation" style e-mailing, and everything being so dynamic. Now if they only make a Google Messenger, we're all set!
I have seen several reviews of Google's user interface (here, here, and here), as well as google's screenshots of the inbox and conversation view. and it seems that a lot of them are really unique, especially in a web application. Apparently it "autocompletes" from your address book. It looks like Google will be raising the bar of the standard for web applications. I sure hope they open up an API for accesing it. (as well as POP / IMAP access).
Google's backend is more complex then you think.
Google's beta tests for search, groups, Froogle all took closer to a year.
Assuming that they have completed internal testing six months is a very very long period to do beta tests.
The problem with internal testing is that you can never account for the wide variety of things that users will do to your site. Your QA team may come up with a great set of tests, but for every functional part of your site, your users will be able to make it break in a dozen different ways.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
They're playing for big stakes, and a lot of things have to go right. Since they're offering 1GB, and are doubtless counting on the user not being able to use up all of that immediately, their rate throttling measures had better be really good. If spammers/warez doodz find a way to exploit the system and automate the client interface, then google will probably have to retract their offer, which will be enormous bad publicity. And few people have realized it, but gmail is actually a whole desktop email app written in javascript. Several hundred KB of javascript. Or atleast a cross between webmail and a desktop app. Such attempts have never worked in the past. (I remember some horrors like html editors written in java on web hosting sites, before the dot.bust). But google thinks they're on to something here. Indeed, beta testers have reported that after a few days of using gmail they find it to be a whole new paradigm and don't want to go back to the folder based approach. So there's a lot of testing that google have to do, since they're breaking new ground. Google's known for not releasing stuff until they're really sure they've ironed out the wrinkles.
No, they're building a product that they hope will dislodge MSN Hotmail from its dominant position. Hotmail gets at least 145 million visitors per month, and Microsoft poured money into Hotmail for eight years before it became profitable.
Microsoft can afford to pour money down a hole until something becomes profitable. Google can't. So Google has to get it right the first time and make Gmail a much better product right out of the gate in order to combat Microsoft's built-in advantages as the owner of the OS and the browser that most people use.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
People want something free (a GB of free mailbox space in this case) at someone else's expense and then criticises about the possible tradeoffs involved? If you want content privacy, you shouldn't be using a free web account to begin with.