Google's email breakthrough was almost three years in the making. But it wasn't a given that it would reach the public at all.
If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the
modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday,
April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.
#
#
Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had
leaked out the day before: Here’s John Markoff of the New York Times reporting on it at the time. But the idea of the search kingpin doing email was still startling, and the alleged storage capacity of 1GB—500 times what Microsoft’s Hotmail offered—seemed downright implausible. So when Google issued a press release date-stamped April 1, an awful lot of people briefly took it to be a really good hoax. (Including me.).
Gmail turned out to be real, and revolutionary. And a decade’s worth of perspective only makes it look more momentous.
The first true landmark service to emerge from Google since its
search engine debuted in 1998, Gmail didn’t just blow away Hotmail and
Yahoo Mail, the dominant free webmail services of the day. With its vast
storage, zippy interface, instant search and other advanced features,
it may have been the first major cloud-based app that was capable of
replacing conventional PC software, not just complementing it.
Even the things about Gmail that ticked off some people presaged the
web to come: Its scanning of messages to find keywords that could be
used for advertising purposes kicked off a conversation about online
privacy that continues on to this day.
Within Google, Gmail was also regarded as a huge, improbable deal. It
was in the works for nearly three years before it reached consumers;
during that time, skeptical Googlers ripped into the concept on multiple
grounds, from the technical to the philosophical. It’s not hard to
envision an alternate universe in which the effort fell apart along the
way, or at least resulted in something a whole lot less interesting.
“It was a pretty big moment for the Internet,” says Georges Harik,
who was responsible for most of Google’s new products when Gmail was
hatched. (The company called such efforts “Googlettes” at the time.) “Taking something that hadn’t been worked on for years but was central, and fixing it.”.
It All Began With Search
Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time,
its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their
work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator,
disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an
official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.”
He began his work in August 2001. But the service was a sequel of
sorts to a failed effort that dated from several years before he joined
Google in 1999, becoming its 23rd employee.
“I had started to make an email program before in, probably, 1996,” he
explains. “I had this idea I wanted to build web-based email. I worked
on it for a couple of weeks and then got bored. One of the lessons I
learned from that was just in terms of my own psychology, that it was
important that I always have a working product. The first thing I do on
day one is build something useful, then just keep improving it.”.
#
Gmail’s creator, Paul Buchheit, at his desk at Google in 1999 Courtesy
Paul Buchheit
#
With Gmail–which was originally code-named Caribou, borrowing the name of a mysterious corporate project occasionally alluded to in Dilbert–the
first useful thing Buchheit built was a search engine for his own
email. And it did indeed take only a day to accomplish. His previous
project had been Google Groups,
which indexed the Internet’s venerable Usenet discussion groups: All he
had to do was hack Groups’ lightning-fast search feature to point it at
his mail rather than Usenet.
At first, Buchheit’s email search engine ran on a server at his own
desk. When he sought feedback from other engineers, their main input was
that it should search their mail, too. Soon, it did.
The fact that Gmail began with a search feature that was far better
than anything offered by the major email services profoundly shaped its
character. If it had merely matched Hotmail’s capacity, it wouldn’t have
needed industrial-strength search. It’s tough, after all, to lose
anything when all you’ve got is a couple of megabytes of space.
But serious search practically begged for serious storage: It opened
up the possibility of keeping all of your email, forever, rather than
deleting it frantically to stay under your limit. That led to the
eventual decision to give each user 1GB of space, a figure Google
settled on after considering capacities that were generous but not
preposterous, such as 100MB.
Still, long before Google chose to give Gmail users 1GB of space, it
had to decide that Gmail would be a commercial product at all. That
wasn’t the no-brainer it might seem, even though Google had a maniacally
email-centric culture itself.
In its early years, one of the defining things about the company was
its obsessive focus on its search engine; that set it apart from Yahoo,
Excite, Lycos and other search pioneers that had recast themselves as
“portals,” expanding their ambitions to encompass everything from
weather to sports to games to, yes, email. Portals had a reputation for
doing many things, but not necessarily doing them all that well.
“A lot of people thought it was a very bad idea, from both a product
and a strategic standpoint,” says Buchheit of his email project. “The
concern was this didn’t have anything to do with web search.
Some were
also concerned that this would cause other companies such as Microsoft
to kill us.”
Fortunately, the doubters didn’t include Google’s founders. “Larry
[Page] and Sergey [Brin] were always supportive,” Buchheit says. “A lot
of other people were much less supportive.”
Buchheit had been working on his project for a month or two when he
was joined by another engineer, Sanjeev Singh, with whom he’d found
social-networking startup FriendFeed after leaving Google in 2006.
(FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook in 2009.) The Gmail team grew over
time, but not exponentially; even when the service launched in 2004,
only a dozen or so people were working on it.
Gmail’s first product manager, Brian Rakowski, learned about the
service from his boss, Marissa Mayer, on his first day at Google in
2002, fresh out of college. (He’s still at Google today, where he
currently works on Android.) What he saw got him excited, but it was
still an exceptionally rough draft.
“It didn’t look anything like what Gmail does now or even what it
looked like when it launched,” he says. “I was just graduated from
school and was indoctrinated in usability tests and target users. I was
pretty paranoid that Google engineers would love it and it wouldn’t
appeal to the mass market. I agonized over it a lot.”
All along, though, Gmail’s creators were building something to please
themselves, figuring that their email problems would eventually be
everybody’s problems. “Larry said normal users would look more like us
in 10 years’ time,” Rakowski says.
What Does Google Email Look Like?
Even in August of 2003, two years into the effort, Gmail had only the
most rudimentary of front ends. That’s when another new Google recruit,
Kevin Fox, was assigned to design the service’s interface. (After
leaving Google, he reuinited with Buchheit and Singh at FriendFeed.)
Fox knew that Gmail needed to look Googley; the challenge was that it
wasn’t entirely clear what that meant. The company didn’t yet offer an
array of services: Other than the company’s eponymous search engine, one
of the few other precedents Fox could draw inspiration from was Google
News, which had debuted in September of 2002. But search and News were
both websites. Gmail was going to be a web app.
“It was a fundamentally different kind of product,” he says.
“Fortunately, they gave me lots of latitude to explore different design
directions.” Fox aimed for something that took cues from both websites
and desktop applications without mindlessly mimicking either. After
three major passes on the design, he settled on the look that’s still
very much recognizable in today’s version of Gmail.
#
Thinking of Gmail as an app rather than a site had technical
implications, too. Hotmail and Yahoo Mail had originally been devised in
the mid-1990s; they sported dog-slow interfaces written in plain HTML.
Almost every action you took required the service to reload the entire
web page, resulting in an experience that had none of the snappy
responsiveness of a Windows or Mac program.
With Gmail, Buchheit worked around HTML’s limitations by using highly
interactive JavaScript code. That made it feel more like software than a
sequence of web pages. Before long, the approach would get the moniker
AJAX, which stood for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML; today, it’s how
all web apps are built. But when Gmail was pioneering the technique, it
wasn’t clear that it was going to work.
The ambitious use of JavaScript “was another thing most people
thought was a pretty bad idea,” Buchheit says. “One of the problems we
had was that the web browsers weren’t very good back then…We were afraid
we’d crash browsers and nobody would want to use it.”
The more JavaScript that Gmail used, the more sophisticated it could
get. One of its flagship features ended up being that the messages in
your inbox weren’t strictly sequential. Instead, with the aim of making
it easier to follow discussion threads, all the messages in a given
back-and-forth string were collected into a cluster called a
conversation, with any duplicated text automatically concealed. From a
design perspective, says Fox, “trying to make it so that conversations
were obvious to the user and intuitive was the largest challenge”.
Then there was Gmail’s business model. Some within Google advocated
for it being a paid service, but Buchheit and others wanted the service
to reach as many people as possible, which was an argument for it being
free and supported by advertising. With other free email offerings of
the time, that meant flashy graphical banner ads–the antithesis of the
unobtrusive little text ads which, then as now, accompanied Google
search results.
“We weren’t going to plaster [Gmail] with banners,” says Rakowski.
“We committed to that from pretty early on.” Instead, Gmail got little
text ads of its own, automatically keyed to words in the text of a
user’s email. In an example Google used early on to explain the system,
two ads for ticket agencies were displayed alongside a conversation that
mentioned a Beach Boys concert.
As with other aspects of Gmail, it wasn’t a given that the plan to
monetize it through text ads would work. “I remember trying to model out
how valuable each user would be in terms of advertising,” remembers
Rakowski. “We had no idea.”
Advertising wasn’t just a math problem. Other email services already
scanned the text of incoming messages, to check for spam and viruses,
for instance. But doing the same thing for advertising purposes was
something new, and Google knew that some people might be creeped out by
any tangible evidence that their messages had been read, even if the one
doing the reading was a machine.
“We thought pretty hard before doing what we did,” says Harik. “We
thought, is this thing a perceived privacy violation or a real one? We
decided it would be an issue of perception.”
Going Public
For much of its development, Gmail had been a skunkworks project,
kept secret even from most people within Google. “It wasn’t even
guaranteed to launch–we said that it has to reach a bar before it’s
something we want to get out there,” says Fox.
By early 2004, however, Gmail worked, and almost everybody was using
it to access the company’s internal email system. It was time to settle
on a schedule for a public announcement. The date the company selected
was April 1.
That wasn’t just another random day on the calendar. Google had begun its tradition of April Fools’ mischief in 2000; the company had a hoax in the works for 2004, involving an announcement that it was hiring for a new research center on the moon.
It figured, correctly, that announcing Gmail at the same time would
lead some people to think that the announcement was a prank. Especially
since the 1GB of space was unimaginably ginormous by 2004 standards.
#
“Sergey was most excited about it,” says Rakowski. “The ultimate April
Fools’ joke was to launch something kind of crazy on April 1st and have
it still exist on April 2nd.”
The team had to scamper to make the deadline, and in fact, Gmail
wasn’t really ready to go: Google didn’t have the awesome server
capacity in place to give millions of people reliable email and a
gigabyte of space apiece. “We had a Catch-22 when we launched,” Buchheit
remembers. “We couldn’t get many machines because people thought we
couldn’t launch, but we couldn’t launch because we didn’t have
machines.”
In the end, Gmail ended up running on three hundred old Pentium III
computers nobody else at Google wanted. That was sufficient for the
limited beta rollout the company planned, which involved giving accounts
to a thousand outsiders, allowing them to invite a couple of friends
apiece, and growing slowly from there.
As news about Gmail dribbled out on March 31 and continued into April
Fools’ Day, the reaction did, indeed, include a fair amount of
disbelief. “If you’re far enough ahead that people can’t figure out if
you’re joking, you know you’ve innovated,” says Harik. “Primarily,
journalists would call us and say ‘We need to know if you’re just
kidding, or if this is real.’ That was fun.”
Once it was clear that Gmail was the real deal, the invitations
became a hot property. The limited rollout had been born of necessity,
but “it had a side effect,” says Harik. “Everyone wanted it even more.
It was hailed as one of the best marketing decisions in tech history,
but it was a little bit unintentional.”
#
Gmail’s use of JavaScript made features
like auto-completion of contact names as you typed possible
#
Bidding for invites on eBay sent prices shooting up to $150 and
beyond; sites such as Gmail Swap emerged to match up those with invites
with those who desperately wanted them. Having a Hotmail or Yahoo Mail
email address was slightly embarrassing; having a Gmail one meant that
you were part of a club most people couldn’t get into.
Despite the publicity windfall, Buchheit sounds a tad wistful about
the situation, even a decade later: “I think Gmail could have grown a
lot more in the first year if we’d had more resources.”
The aura of exclusivity and experimentation stuck to Gmail long after
it did grow huge. Google kept increasing the number of invites each
user could issue, but it didn’t open up the service to all comers until
Valentine’s Day, 2007. And Gmail wore its Beta label like a badge of
honor until July of 2009.
(The company finally removed it as a sop to
cautious business customers, who didn’t want to sign up for something
that sounded unfinished.)
Gmail’s use of advertising keyed to the contents of email messages
raised hackles–maybe more so than Google had anticipated. Some critics
thought it invaded the privacy of the sender; others felt that the
recipient was the party whose rights had been violated. Fear of
inappropriate placements—such as pharmaceutical ads next to an email
concerning suicide—was a common theme. And some people had reasonable
questions about what Google would do with the data it collected to serve
the ads, and how long it would preserve it.
Gmail’s limited release—the same thing that had some people giddily
competing for invites on eBay—left others developing an antipathy to the
service based on assumptions rather than reality. “I went to dinner
parties at friends of friends,” says Rakowski. “People would talk about
Gmail, not knowing that I worked on it, understanding it incorrectly
because they hadn’t had a chance to try it.”
#
The annotated screenshot Google used in 2004 to explain how Gmail’s ads worked
#
The reaction from privacy groups got ugly fast. On April 6, 31 organizations and advocates co-signed a letter to Page and Brin,
raising a gaggle of concerns about Gmail, calling it a bad precedent
and asking that the service be suspended until their concerns could be
addressed. “Scanning personal communications in the way Google is
proposing is letting the proverbial genie out of the bottle,” they
warned.
Right in Google’s own backyard, California State Senator Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont) sent Google a letter of her own, calling Gmail a “disaster of enormous proportions, for yourself, and for all of your customers.” She went on to draft a bill
requiring, among other things, that any company that wanted to scan an
email message for advertising purposes get the consent of the person who
sent it. (By the time the California Senate passed the law, cooler
heads prevailed and that obligation had been eliminated.).
Google reacted to the controversy over Gmail’s ads by listening to
the critics, detailing its policies on the Gmail site and spotlighting
the work of journalists who thought the controversy was silly. It didn’t
cave to those who demanded fundamental change to the service, and
pushed back at what it argued was irresponsible behavior by some of the
service’s foes:
When we began the limited test of Gmail, we expected our service would be the subject of intense interest. What we did not anticipate was the reaction from some privacy activists, editorial writers and legislators, many of whom condemned Gmail without first seeing it for themselves. We were surprised to find that some of these activists and organizations refused to even talk to us, or to try first-hand the very service they were criticizing. As we read news stories about Gmail, we have regularly noticed factual errors and out-of-context quotations. Misinformation about Gmail has spread across the web.
That’s unfortunate for Google, but why should you care? Because it may affect your right to make your own decisions about how you read your mail. This misinformation threatens to eliminate legitimate and useful consumer choices by means of legislation aimed at innocuous and privacy-aware aspects of our service, while simultaneously deflecting attention from the real privacy issues inherent to all email systems.
“Ten years from now, we’ll probably look back at the Gmail dust-up with…befuddlement,” wrote Slate’s Paul Boutin,
one of the journalists whose pro-Gmail stances Google linked to in its
response to the privacy flap. Mostly, we do: In 2012, the last time
Google issued an official count, Gmail had 425 million active users,
which suggests that discomfort with its approach to advertising is a
minority view. The issue has never vanished entirely, though. It’s still in the courts, and Microsoft continues to tell consumers that it’s a reason to use Outlook.com, Hotmail’s successor.
A Decade Later
One remarkable thing about Gmail that wasn’t obvious in 2004: Its
creators built it to last. The current incarnations of Outlook.com and
Yahoo Mail have nothing to do with the email services Microsoft and
Yahoo offered 10 years ago. But Gmail–despite having added features more or less continuously and gone through some significant redesigns–is still Gmail.
“I can’t think of another app that has existed so close to its
original form for 10 years,” says Fox. “Someone who had only used Gmail
in its first iteration and suddenly used it today would still understand
Gmail. They’d know how to use it for virtually everything they’d want
to do.”
“What makes the product what it is really comes from the continuous
focus on the types of problems we’re trying to solve for our users,”
says Alex Gawley, Gmail’s current product manager. “If you look back to
2004, the big problems email users were facing were having to delete
messages for lack of storage, not being able to find messages and crazy
amounts of spam.” Today, the big opportunities include making Gmail more
action-oriented–which Google is doing with features such as live flight status information displayed within messages–and
reimagining it for mobile devices such as phones and tablets. Gawley
says challenges like those are enough to keep the Gmail team busy for
the next half-decade.
Of course, no matter how inventive Gmail remains, it’s now the establishment. When newfangled apps and services such as Mailbox and Alto
come along, the experience they’re reimagining is one created by Gmail,
more than any other single email client, over the last decade. The
creators of any new service would be thrilled to do to Google what
Google did to Microsoft and Yahoo in 2004.
#
#
Then again, some of the issues email still has may not lend
themselves to the sort of problem-solving Silicon Valley knows how to
tackle. When I dropped Buchheit a line at his Gmail address asking to
chat with him for this story, I got an automated message explaining that
he was on hiatus from email—checking in, but only sporadically. Did
Gmail’s creator think that email was broken all over again?
”The problem with email now is that the social conventions have
gotten very bad,” Buchheit told me once we’d made contact. “There’s a
24/7 culture, where people expect a response. It doesn’t matter that
it’s Saturday at 2 a.m.–people think you’re responding to email. People
are no longer going on vacation. People have become slaves to email.”
“It’s not a technical problem. It can’t be solved with a computer algorithm. It’s more of a social problem.”
Sounds like the man who fixed email in 2004 is saying that the only
folks who can fix it in 2014 and beyond are those of us who use it–and
sometimes abuse it–it every day.
#Source:
How Gmail Happened: The Inside Story of Its Launch 10 Years Ago
Harry McCracken @harrymccracken
http://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/
April 1, 2014
April 1, 2014
#
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου