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Gmail Marks Five Years In Beta

Posted by timothy on from the total-up-5-years-of-unread-messages dept.

TrekkieTechie writes "Though in fact the big day was April 1st, Google celebrated the five-year anniversary of the popular online email service Gmail with a post on the service's blog, saying 'we want to give a big thank you to all of you who use Gmail every day, to those who've been around since the beginning, to those who were using an AJAX app before the term AJAX was popular, to those who started chatting right in your email ... we couldn't have gotten here without you.' The milestone has also prompted speculation about when, if ever, Gmail will lose its beta status, and Ars Technica recently sat down with Todd Jackson, Gmail's Project Manager, to discuss the reasoning behind that nagging beta label."

12 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Beta? by Bored+Grammar+Nazi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The milestone has also prompted speculation about when, if ever, Gmail will lose its beta status, and Ars Technica recently sat down with Todd Jackson, Gmail's Project Manager, to discuss the reasoning behind that nagging beta label.

    Whatever the reason, it certainly is making people talk about it.

    1. Re:Beta? by AvitarX · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Witht he changes they have been making I actually feel the quality is degrading.

      It has a lot of nice new features, but it feels like it is hanging a lot more often too.

      It actually now feels more, not less like a beta to me.

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
  2. Still in beta? by Kuroji · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, despite that a lot of Google's products seem to still have the beta tag, it also means that they aren't necessarily going to be held to the same standard. For example, when Gmail decides to up and die for a few hours while they upgrade.

    1. Re:Still in beta? by v1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      GMail has imap, though you have to deliberately turn it on (it's off by default) and the switch isn't exactly glaringly obvious.

      I believe the reason it's still "beta" is right now a LOT of people are using it as NON beta, for business, other important uses, or perhaps it's their only email address. Google probably knows that there's always that 1-in-1000 chance that something they do will break it in a way that causes data loss, or scrambles things badly enough for a few users that there won't be any reasonable way to fix it short of reset their mailboxes. When this happens, having the "beta" tag still on it will soften the public backlash a lot.

      There's a couple ISPs in this area that have horrid email systems. One of them (Qwest) farmed out their email to MSN Live last year, and that has been an unrelenting nightmare for their customers. Whenever they approach us to help with their email, we convert them to gmail, and all of their problems instantly go away. That was after spending TWO hours on the phone being bounced between MSN and Qwest, each telling us that all the issues were the other's problem. We're very thankful to have GMail as an alternative to give to our customers.

      GMail also happens to be the only imap email account I have, which is probably unusual since I have six of them, but that makes it something I can access from my ipod touch, which is a nice bonus. (yes it does pop too but you can't do concurrent pop on multiple computers without headaches)

      I really do hope they keep it going, though I could personally care less if it never loses the "beta" tag.

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
  3. Why? by Jurily · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does it matter if it's beta when it's still the best and most reliable free email service around?

    1. Re:Why? by Thanshin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Does it matter if it's beta when it's still the best and most reliable free email service around?

      Quite the opposite.

      When a friend told me he was closing a beta phase my first question was "Is it more stable than gmail?"

    2. Re:Why? by dirk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It matters because it weakens the meaning of being in beta and confuses users. It used to be that beta was for testing. If you downloaded and installed a beta product, it was understood that there would be bugs and problems and they should be reported. With Google using beta as a constant tag (I remember ICQ used to do this back in the day to), users don't have a clear understanding of what a beta is anymore. They think beta is just a new product and don't expect bugs and don't report them. Open beta is a much harder thing to get useful information from if people judge your beta product just like they would a finished product, which is what is beginning to happen with places like Google tagging regular released like beta releases.

      --

      "Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
    3. Re:Why? by Jurily · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I had a longer post written, but then I realized you've got a gmail.com address obfuscated up there. Clearly you think the benefits are worth any real or imagined loss of privacy.

      My internet persona is not a company.

  4. Tag by daniduclos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A Beta tag only makes sense if there is a "final" release planned at some point in the future. If it's going to be forever in Beta, it becomes meaningless, just like those web pages of 1999 with an eternal "under construction" gif.

  5. Gmail is Effective . by ajay_walia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Beta no Beta it has been a Good experience using Gmail . Moreover it changed the Market freeing us of Quota's . . . .

    --
    AJ
  6. Beta is meaningless by krou · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Generally, any usage of the Beta tag is meaningless in the world of web-based applications. In fact, it's meaningless for most web-pages. The reason is very simple: a site should be constantly working to improve and change. The change that happens is not bound by the traditional software version release, either. All websites are, by default, in a perpetual beta, whether its users know it or not, which makes the label itself meaningless.

    --
    'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
  7. Wash your hands clean of it... by greedom · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google is notorious for keeping most of it's apps in the Beta stages because if it works, it's considered a fantastic app and when some hacker finds a huge security flaw in it or something of that nature, Google can just throw up their hands and say "Hey, it's still in Beta".