Google's Sergey Brin Talks on Gmail's Future 203
de la mettrie writes "Sergey Brin of Google has been discussing the future of GMail in a recent eWeek article. He says that the ongoing beta test will likely take about six months, and that the implementation of mail forwarding, POP access, mail encryption and even RSS feeds is being considered."
Six months? (Score:2, Interesting)
Best thing since 1998 Hotmail (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's User Interface (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Six months? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's beta tests for search, groups, Froogle all took closer to a year.
Assuming that they have completed internal testing six months is a very very long period to do beta tests.
The problem with internal testing is that you can never account for the wide variety of things that users will do to your site. Your QA team may come up with a great set of tests, but for every functional part of your site, your users will be able to make it break in a dozen different ways.
Re:Six months? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they're building a product that they hope will dislodge MSN Hotmail from its dominant position. Hotmail gets at least 145 million visitors [microsoft.com] per month, and Microsoft poured money into Hotmail for eight years before it became profitable.
Microsoft can afford to pour money down a hole until something becomes profitable. Google can't. So Google has to get it right the first time and make Gmail a much better product right out of the gate in order to combat Microsoft's built-in advantages as the owner of the OS and the browser that most people use.
Re:Six months? (Score:2, Interesting)
Give me a break. Good software companies spend time to test their product: user testing, functionality testing. Google is very careful to test features before the roll out to the world. Given the size and breadth of the GMail product, this isn't that long.
It makes me think of The Simpsons episode where Moe turns his bar into a family restaurant, and he buys a surplus Navy deepfryer that he says can flash fry a buffalo in 40 seconds. Home responds, "Forty seconds? But I want it now."
I expect that if you want to use such a thing, it will be worth the wait.
How did they pick beta testers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Messenger? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google's User Interface (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article [eweek.com]:
Steve Gillmor: It also compares favorably to my corporate e-mail.
Sergey Brin: Well, thank you. There are some things that it is currently missing as compared to corporate e-mail--for example, disconnected operation--though we do plan to provide things like POP3 and IMAP support, which should help that.
If they implement IM I hope they go the Jabber [jabber.org] route.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:POP? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Six months? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
as a general rule with reguards to email, as long as you have an established policy that states what is kept and for how long, one is safe from anybody who asks for stuff that is older than the retention policy. (but if you are caught changing that policy as a reaction to a request, one is in deep trouble).
There are exceptions, mostly in the financial industry (all written communications must be kept for 3 years, that includes email, im, etc, etc). Those rules do not apply to us (we have our own list of things that we must keep, but none of them are in email).
Re:I love google but (Score:3, Interesting)
mightbe freeshell.org
non-profit company provides email (pop, webmail, pine) access.
all it cost is $1 for 20MB....they also give webspace, and general ssh and telnet access.
amazing shit...
but your right non-profit indexing of the web is needed
Everything and a bag of chips (Score:3, Interesting)
Google looks to be doing the same thing. They're not just emulating what's already out there but going way above and beyond. They've already got all the basic features that people expect implemented and a few toys. 6 Months gives them plenty of time to go further to give people that last push they needed to move over to GMail vs whatever they're currently using.
One can expect that MS is already at work figuring out a battle plan to counter this. Or maybe they're just expecting GMail to fail financially because they think they're overselling themselves into debt.
MS knows how much it costs to run their service which offers significantly less and has a number of caps in place. Not just storage but also the number of e-mails you can send per day. Hotmail is also ad supported.
I can imagine that MS has something cooking but they're not going to do anything until they see what happens to Google. If Google becomes too popular they may be forced to sell premium accounts that have the extra bells and whistles.
Ben
Re:Encryption support... (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead, you could run an agent on your local machine that manages your private key. GMail could request decryption and signing from your agent over a secure network connection; the agent in turn could confirm with you before using your private key (so that you don't sign anything you don't mean to). You must still trust GMail to protect your decrypted messages, e.g., to scrub them from its memory when your session expires.
The problem with the agent approach is you can only use GPG from machines that hold your private key. What might be best is a combined approach: keep two private keys, one offline, and another on GMail. Your offline key is the one people trust. Use your offline key to authorize your GMail key for some limited period of time (say, one year). Then, if your GMail key is lost or compromised, you can just create a new one.
Regarding searching encrypted mail, you might allow GMail to index a message when it is first decrypted, but not to store the decrypted message itself. Then, you can still search for that message by the words it contains. An attacker who gains access to your account can use the search determine whether an encrypted message contains a specific word or phrase, but this is probably an acceptable risk for most people (this assumes access to your account does not imply access to your private key, though!). An attacker might be able to reconstruct your message if they gain access to Google's entire index for that message, but this seems unlikely.
Re:Best thing since 1998 Hotmail (Score:4, Interesting)
It simply works, it doesn't have any flashy ads to bother you, and it's FAST!
I'm also lucky enough to have an account, and one interesting thing is their heavy usage of Javascript to generate the pages. Your inbox is basically an HTML page linking to a Javascript file and containing one block of Javascript code used to generate all the elements on the screen, and assuming the Javascript file is cached, checking your email should be blazing fast. It works perfectly fine with Firefox too!
Re:I switched over to using Gmail exclusively (Score:1, Interesting)
Scott
Re:About the "ad" concern (Score:3, Interesting)
I signed up for my GMail account on yesterday and there certainly are VERY unobtrusive text ads (similar to the ones used on Google Search) on the right hand side of the page. Perhaps older GMail accounts don't have this though. Either way, they are extremely unobtrusive and don't effect the experience at all. I wish all of the email providers (like they'll be there long once GMail launches) would do this with their ads.
For anyone interested, I've posted a brief review of the GMail service in my blog [blogspot.com]. I'll be honest, this is a mindblowing service. Absolutely world-class all the way.
Re:Why always Hotmail? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe your browser "disguises" as Internet Explorer? Or they're especially proud of their IE, Mac Version (which is stuck at version 5.2)...
Re:i dont understand (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Google is run by people who, not only love technology, but actually understand technology. These guys are technologists first and businesspeople second. They've created a geek playground, set their geeks free, and watched them play. The result of that play is what we love about Google.
That might all change once they go public. I hope that it doesn't but pouring buckets of money at people tends to oftentimes have a negative effect. I suppose we shall wait and see.
If only it was IMAP, you wouldn't need ...... (Score:4, Interesting)
Since 1990 IMAP had a "search unseen" feature (See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1176.html [faqs.org] which enabled clients to easily broaden and narrow searches easily (see Pine for a good implementation).
I currently have about 1GB across a few IMAP folders at my ISP; and can search the hole think quickly and efficiently using '90's technology.
I don't see the big deal.