3 Email Chiefs Come to Dinner

Carl Bialik writes "The heads of email from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all recently went over to Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes's house for dinner and conversation. Gomes has an interesting writeup of the conversation that transpired. The meal started as a lovefest for Gmail and Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond 'agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail.' But Gomes adds, 'Whatever early lead Gmail may have had in creating a next-generation email program, both Microsoft and Yahoo have more than caught up. I wondered out loud to Mr. Buchheit if Gmail, the pioneer, might now be falling behind. "There is a lot more we want to build," he responded.'"

Comments

so what....

[dummkopf]

they met for dinner. they chatted. they smiled, and they hated each other. and? nothing will change. they are just little cranks in big machines. and these machines have their own agendas. whatever. don't you have better news? like michael jackson going broke?

Re:so what....

[Anonymous Coward]

Today i let a couple of mistakes get through to the homepage. I got a ton of hate mail. I'm feeling really good about myself- especially because my email is lagged by about 45 minutes, so I'm getting the bug reports about 30 minutes after the story goes live. I'm usually quite prompt about correcting stuff that needs it... but SMTP latency is killing me today.

I make mistakes. I'm only human. But i really hate when the feedback mechanism breaks down. And it really is depressing getting 100 messages pop into your box telling you how much you suck for a mistake that was totally honest.

Usually i'm pretty good at letting the water roll off my back when people are mean in email. But the last few weeks has seen my inbox take a turn for the viscious. I'm used to hate mail. I'm used to name calling. But lately it just seems like it's getting worse. Or maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to it.

There are a handful of things that people just flat out don't understand about what we do... the main one is the difference between reading "The Bin" and "The Homepage". On a typical day I might read a few hundred story submissions. I might read another hundred pages that are potentially Slashdot material. And during a typical daddy pants shift, I might post a half a dozen.

This occurs day after day. I might delete a submission that 12 hours later is posted by another editor (maybe there is less to choose from at 11pm than there was at 11am... or maybe a better URL came along to a story that was rejected earlier).

So I kind of see the Slashdot Index differently than others. Some days, like when I'm wearing the pants I'm looking at every story very closely. I concern myself with timing, mix, spelling, quality. Other days the stories aren't mine. I see them differently: I see a story i left in the bin with a note saying "Maybe later?" or a story i rejected because it had a crappy URL. I see several stories I've never seen before. I enjoy those the most.

The problem is that over 8 years of submissions, my posts, and other people's posts start blurring together. I've posted over 10,000 stories. I've rejected hundreds of thousands of submissions. Sometimes I'm simply not going to remember a story from 3 days ago posted by someone else. It's not that I didn't read it- it's that I might have read it 30 times in different places.

There are technical solutions that go a long ways... we have a bunch of keyword searching things in the back end that alerts me if a story with similiar words came up in the last week. But that works spottily at best. The real fall back is the fact that most stories are posted 30 minutes early and screened before subscribers. And this works GREAT. Readers let me know about typos or URL problems in advance. Many articles get fixed, updated, and occasionally deleted during this window. Which unfortunately doesn't work if my SMTP server decides to make me wait 45 minutes for my mail. Stupid protocol. I posted a story for 15:14 GMT. At 15:36 I get a ping saying I have mail. I check the window and see dozens of emails telling me, in increasing hostility, about my error. Those emails were sent as early as 15:00. Bah.

We've discussed using IM and such for disseminating time critical information, but the real issue is GETTING the information. By using email, we raise the bar high enough that people don't arbitrarily spam it. If we put a text field right next to the index, we get so much junk it becomes a meaningless stream of worthless data. To much to keep track of. (Yes, we tried). Email works well for this purpose most of the time since it requires at least a tiny bit more effort than filling in a text field and clicking a button. I think it's a psychological thing- a web form is disposable.. and e-mail is more tangible.

And then the conspiracy theories: Submittor X is paying me to post his stories. Submittor Y is being rejected because I hate him. Advertiser Z gets all their stuff submitted because they are paying us Google is paying me to post their stuff. Yes

Wow! eMail

[gelfling]

Holy.fucking.shit. eMail. It's like mail but it's electronic and shit and brings you a zillion times more useless shit than regular mail.

As I said. Holy muthafucking celestial shit. eMail. They should erect a 1000 foot tall gold statue to these guys.

Ok we can all give up and stop all human progress. eMail is here. Which is better than God.

Wow I am blown away. e fucking mail.