Looking Back on a Decade of Gmail
What's This?
Gmail is 10 years old. How time flies.
2014-04-02 00:16:19 UTC
This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.
I still remember where I was when I first heard about Gmail. It was April 1, 2004 and I was at my parents house, recovering from having my wisdom teeth removed. At 21, and finishing my third year of college, most of my recovery consisted of listening to my iPod (a 20GB third-generation model) and browsing the Internet. If you replace LiveJournal with Tumblr, Slashdot with Reddit and Hacker News and Gawker with, well, Gawker, the open tabs in my browser (Firefox 0.8 in 2004, Google Chrome today) aren't that different.
Gmail was the news story that day. I remembering discussing it in IMs with friends and on LiveJournal. Google — a company we then only knew as a search engine — was launching its own mail service, and it was going to give 1GB of storage to all users, for free. Because of this extraordinary claim, and because it launched on April 1, many of us thought it might be a hoax.
It's important to remember the state of free webmail as it existed in 2004. Hotmail gave users 2MB of storage. That's not a typo. Yahoo was a little better — offering 4MB or 6MB, depending on when you signed up. Moreover, those services had fairly strict login requirements. If you didn't check your mail within a certain number of days, all of it was deleted and gone forever.
Most serious email users either used whatever account came with their ISP, or hooked their webmail account to client software like Outlook or Apple Mail. That worked fine, but meant that most users could only access email on one machine. I could check my email on my laptop, but unless I had my POP settings configured just right, it wouldn't sync up with my inbox. If you had a smartphone — I had a Treo 600 in 2004 — that was yet another hurdle (or another email address).
Gmail was radically different. Google's mantra was that you would have enough space to never need to delete email ever again. The design of Gmail was different too. Rather than putting stuff in folders, you applied tags. You searched rather than filing things away. Messages were displayed as conversations and threads, rather than individual messages.
This seems obvious now, as good ideas usually do. But in April 2004, it was a brand new way to think about email. As Harry McCracken notes in his history of Gmail, the launch of Gmail marks the birth of the modern web.
The allure of the invite
Everyone in my circle of friends wanted access to Gmail. But to ensure that the product could scale appropriately, Google limited its rollout. To get an account early on, you needed an invite. To get an invite, you needed to be in the technology media or know someone at Google.
As Google knew, one of the side-benefits of scaling in a controlled way was that it created a greater sense of demand.
Just hours after Google issued a press releasing announcing Gmail, invites became the ultimate score for tech aficionados such as myself. Trading forums popped up, invites made their way onto eBay (at least until eBay blocked invite sales), and in an era before Facebook extended past the Ivy League, tech savvy users scoured their networks to try to find a way in.
I knew a few people at Google, but none of them well enough to bug for an invite. Fortunately, my friend Ryan had a good friend at Google, and he managed to score an invite the day Gmail launched. After continuous prodding, Ryan was able to send me an invite a few days later.
On April 3, 2004, I created my account and logged in for the first time.
Gmail message from April 2004.
The age of ads
Ten years later, it would be easy to look back on the Gmail launch as a smashing success. Indeed, in many ways it was. The product itself was remarkably well built. It went on to really define the idea of a web app, proved that AJAX would not only work, but would be the future, and helped define Google as more than just a search company.
Still, Gmail faced criticism as soon as it launched. Gmail launched with ads — but not just any ads, contextual ads generated in part by the contents of your email.
Google released AdSense in 2003. By 2004 it was starting to make itself at home across the web. The genius of Gmail was that it would apply AdSense technology to the content of a user's inbox. Google was quick to point out that humans never read the messages, and the matching of ads to content was "performed entirely by computers; never by people."
Still, privacy advocates were on high alert. Within the first week of Gmail's launch, petitions were written, lawsuits were threatened, and it seemed like the issue might kill Gmail in its crib. Writing for Slate in April 2004, Paul Boutin came out against Gmail critics, arguing that the privacy fears were silly, but he also acknowledged that not handling them correctly could cost the company dearly.
"They may be forced to abandon the best Web mail system yet because of a few well-placed people who've never even tried it," he wrote. "That really would be evil."
It turned out Boutin had nothing to fear. Most users just didn't care. I remember discussing the Gmail privacy issue with friends in the first few weeks the service was available. The algorithmic nature of Gmail's ad platform put many of us at ease. Others were willing to accept a potential lack of privacy in exchange for a free service that was so much better than anything else in web email.
Still, what ultimately reassured all of us — even those with bigger-picture concerns — was the fact that we trusted Google. We trusted Google to do the right thing by its users and to respect our privacy. In April 2004, four months before it went public, Google was the tech company I most admired. In a tech world still battered from the scars of the dotcom crash, Google seemed fresh and clean and futuristic.
It's interesting to see just how long that lasted. For years, I predicted a Google backlash — if only because of the sheer amount of data the company was collecting. And yet it took until 2010, with the bungled launch of Google Buzz, for the narrative around Google to shift.
Even now, in 2014, when Google's mammoth cache of user data and analytics is second only to the NSA, sentiment around the company is largely positive. I no longer see Google as the ideal tech company — frankly, aspects of the company and its products creep me out — but I still use Google services every single day.
A decade later, I don't have the same trust that Google will do the right thing by its users, but I still trust that it won't make decisions out of malice.
Ten years of Gmail
A few fun email facts, by the numbers:
83,998 - The number of emails in my original Gmail account from April 2004
79, 817 - The number of emails in my Mashable Google Apps account since August 24, 2009
48,437 - Number of unread messages in my Mashable inbox
5 - The number of distinct Google Apps accounts I have for various web domains
8 - The Current number of Android devices connected to my Google Play account
2 - Number of Google+ profiles I have
Topics: Apps and Software, gmail, opinion, Tech
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