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The Inside Story of Gmail On Its Tenth Anniversary

Posted by timothy on from the waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop dept.

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.

8 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Sort It. by MrL0G1C · · Score: 4, 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.

    --
    Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
    1. Re:Sort It. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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 force change through the organization. I believe that bad change meets resistance, but good change does not. Whenever something new and great comes along people will move to it in droves. When something bad comes along people resist and complain. CxOs are being taught that the resistance to change is hurting their company and goals and they must plow forward and force the change. In the process they are pushing the company over the cliff.

    2. Re:Sort It. by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, 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?

  2. I hate gmail. by scorp1us · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
  3. WTF would you think we would enjoy an "audio ver"? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · 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!)

  4. Re:Why I never created a Gmail account by JackieBrown · · Score: 4, Insightful

    According to the article, that was because they didn't have the resources to support an unlimited user roll out.

  5. Re:Auto play audio? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  6. Re:Autoplay audio or my account. Choose one. by guises · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Okay, this is ridiculous. I know that complaining is just one of the things that we do here, but it's April first and they announce a ridiculous new "feature" about reading stories out loud which turns out to be in morse code. I'd say that you all aren't getting the joke, but that would imply that you aren't hearing it, which would mean that you have no reason to complain in the first place.

    What is with you folks? The rule has always been: if you don't like Slashdot on April first, don't come.