by J. Butler, Content Development Specialist
Wishing Gmail a happy birthday may seem like whispering into the wind tunnel: with all the accomplishments Google had racked up in the past few years, why stop to pay attention to any one anniversary? But looking back and how and why Gmail came about tells us a lot about how far we’ve come in such a short span of time.
When Gmail was first introduced, a typical webmail account could only store about five megabytes of mail. I can vouch for this firsthand: my old Hotmail account was perpetually full, and I had to resort to saving treasured emails in a file on my hard drive. It was hardly time effective, and made managing mail a chore. Then came Gmail, offering a full gigabyte of space; for some hardcore users, this was barely an upgrade, but for the typical email user, even one gig opened up a whole new world of storage—it’s five happy years later for me, and I’ve barely cracked 4%. And I delete nothing.
Gmail was designed with one group in mind: the people who racked up a lot of email, and thus, needed a lot of space. Much of common email interface were frustrating to the designers, so they started essentially with nothing, building their new intuitive interface from scratch. Their site architecture was a hybrid of HTML and JavaScript (this later became known as AJAX), which was smoother and faster. This becomes important when you keep in mind that broadband connections and 56k modems were still the norm.
In the years following, Google has developed any number of additions for the basic Gmail structure that ranged from the practical (an ‘Undo Send’ app, ‘To Do’ task lists) to the personal (design themes, custom date formats) to the funny (Google Goggles, anyone?). But by any rate, Goggle’s worked hard to improve an by all accounts stellar service, paving the way for even bigger improvements to personal email in the near future.
Here’s one stat that can’t escape highlighting: today, thanks in large part to Google, it’s almost commonplace to a 20 megabyte attachment—making that one email four times the size of an entire webmail account in 2004.
Photo from Official Google Blog entry.
Posts
