October 05, 2004
Gmail "beta"
Is Gmail ever going to go public? Hilariously, the New Features! link has July 14, 2004 as its last update, with October 1 announcing "New features coming soon!" That's a time difference of three months. Shouldn't beta projects be moving a little faster than this?
Maybe it's Google's plan to keep Gmail as an invite only service, in much the same way LJ is, but somehow I doubt this.
Oh well, here's me crossing my fingers and hoping that the next round of features include an improved address book with groups.
Ken at October 5, 2004 12:24 PM
You should be seeing a "Contacts" item on your left sidebar appearing soon. It is improved over the last one, though it still doesn't support groups. One cool feature that it adds though is that if you click on the person's name, it shows all the e-mails from that person.
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Ken at October 5, 2004 12:29 PM
Oh, and there's also a new 'forwarding' feature so that you can forward any e-mail sent to your gmail to another account.
As for beta projects moving 'faster', I can appreciate Gmail moving slowly. They need to make sure that they don't deploy anything that causes people to lose their e-mail or is in any other way buggy, given the large number of users and the importance of e-mail to people. That being said, Contacts management is way overdue (as is importing mailboxes from other accounts).
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kenji at October 5, 2004 12:46 PM
I can appreciate the importance of taking it slow to protect people's e-mails, this is also a beta, so people should understand that their e-mail might not be as secure as it would with a public release. I just think it's funny that it seems like there's no end in sight for this beta phase! In fact, I've kind of stopped thinking about it as a beta.
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novak at October 5, 2004 01:00 PM
I have been wondering that myself. I still have 7 invites and no one who wants gmail. Maybe they piqued and no one else is interested?
As an aside, my brother actually got a free livejournal account just by going to the website and following the "join livejournal" tabs. Apparently it is no long invite only.
Screw that place. They'll let anybody in there now ....
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Ken at October 5, 2004 02:08 PM
In Gmail's defense, apparently it was only released when it was b/c someone leaked it to the New York Times. Once Yahoo! and Hotmail caught wind that Google was going to give away 1GB of free e-mail, they had to launch before Y!/Hotmail could up their own storage limits.
Nevertheless, I find the whole invite thing really annoying now. Just give everyone infinite invites so they can invite friends if they want to, but this whole use up your quota, wait a day, get 6 more is kinda annoying by now.
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glynn at October 5, 2004 04:38 PM
It may be worth noting that there have lately been a number of stories noting that googgle news has been in beta for three years. There are legal reasons for that one, but it shows that google isn't going to shy away from long term betas.
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