Slashdot Mirror
The Inside Story of Gmail On Its Tenth Anniversary
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.
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.
Enjoy reading my 10 Gb of spam!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
Wasn't Gmail the first to introduce the conversational layout? I remember the first time I saw it I was blown away over how simple the idea was yet how much impact it made on UX. Also, IIRC Gmail was the first to get Ajax right in a mail client, I remember being impressed when they embedded a GTalk client right there in mail. Then I think Google Calendar followed then docs with App Engine in there somewhere too. No matter your feelings on Google the company the software that sprang from Gmail is amazing.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
"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.
"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".
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
Naw, we do it every day now...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
>> 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!)
According to the article, that was because they didn't have the resources to support an unlimited user roll out.
Screw you. If this is an April Fools joke, go back to OMG PWNIES. If you're rolling this out for good, seeya.
Woosh!
I DON'T want my computer to read to me every time I open you page. I can read it myself. I want to read it myself. If I wanted it to be read to me I would go to CNN.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Admins, this is the line I have drawn in sand. I have put up with all kinds of crap. I did not complain too much about Beta. But once more time you put up an auto playing audio, you will be banished. All the 2^7 days read continuously or 31 achievements will be discarded and the account abandoned if it is done again.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact