One of the first appearances of the Cloud is really in the host of email programs that sprang up in the late 90s, with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail being the biggest and best examples. Prior to that, your email client was just another program on your desktop, most likely Outlook. You had to configure it to hit a mail server somewhere, which was a rather painful experience of religiously following a list of arcane instructions dotted with references to smtp and mail servers, and where things would mysteriously go wrong. Very painful.
The first I became aware of an alternative was when some of the ISPs and hosting services I tapped into started allowing webmail - basically a website that you could call up anywhere and tap into your email account. Most of them were pretty plain and didn't work all too well. And they didn't get around the basic problem of sucking down your emails onto your desktop; if you were at work and wanted to look up a personal email you had gotten three months ago - sorry, no go; you had to be at your home desktop to do that.
But Hotmail and Yahoo! started changing the game. The web interface for both of them was fast, appealing, and - best of all - you could access your email from anywhere you had an Internet connection. Not a lot of capacity, but you could store them in folders, keep them around for awhile, search through them, etc. As internet connectivity became ubiquitous, these gained in popularity; by the mid-2000s, if you were on a computer, you were connected - and it didn't make sense to deal with Microsoft's Outlook to lock all of your email in one place.
Cloud-wise, there's not a lot of difference between Yahoo!, Hotmail, and GMail. And I'll confess - I switched from using both Yahoo! (for most of my mail) and Hotmail (for really personal mail) a few years ago. So Yahoo! and Hotmail may have matured some in the meantime. I, however, am hooked on GMail - for the way it tackles the Cloud.
Good Stuff
So, what's so good about GMail, and why won't I ever consider going back? Initially, I believe I got hooked because of the storage - which at the time was a robust 1G and then 2G and the promise that you would never have to throw anything away. It pretty much kicked everyone's ass at the time. In response, it seems as though Yahoo! created unlimited email storage, and Hotmail upped their limit to 5G, and GMail responded with 6G for everyone "and counting." I, however, bought space a couple of years ago for Picasa, with the result that the extra Google storage didn't apply just to Picasa, but also other Google apps - notably GMail. So, let's see.... I currently have 1.4G in GMail (and I've been keeping damn near all my email for something like three or four years now), which is 8% of my 17.1G capacity - for which I pay like $5 a year or something.
But storage was just "the hook." The reasons I stay or much greater.
Threading
Threading is the single biggest reason to stay with GMail, because GMail's threading kicks everyone's butt. Outlook says it has threading, but when I tried Outlook 2003 a few years ago, it was so horrible as to not really qualify as threading. Thunderbird has threading, but.... it just wasn't as good. It looks like Yahoo! and Hotmail still don't have threading.....
What is threading? Well, you know the situation where you send three friends an email (Subject: What's Uuuuupppp???) asking what they want to do this weekend. Friend A replies back to you that they want to go out drinking Friday. You reply back that Friday you have to shave the cats, but your band-aided and iodined self should be up for heading out around 9:00 or so. Friend B laughs at the joke. Friend X, who you haven't seen in year's, sends you an email (Subject: Long time, no ears) to check and see how you're doing. Friend C says they can't do Friday night; have fun; but they're going to see a movie on Saturday - who's up for tagging along. Friend B says they'd love to go. Business Associate W asks when you're going to be done reviewing that document he sent (Subject: Re: Document for your review). You gently remind Friend B that they haven't committed to the pub crawl Friday night. Friend D chirps in that they have strep, so won't be doing anything.
How that whole series of events is translated is vastly different in GMail versus just about everyone else. Regular email programs/services just spit out one email after the other, and often place your replies in the Sent folder.
Friend D; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???
Business Associate W; Re: Document for your review
Friend B; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???
Friend C; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???
Friend X; Long time, no ears
Friend B; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???
Friend A; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???
7 emails, not including the three emails that you sent which are sitting in the Sent Mail box/folder. It takes up a lot of screen real estate, and jumbles these things all together.
GMail attacks the problem completely differently:
me, Friend A, Friend B, Friend C, Friend D; What's Uuuuupppp???
Business Associate W, me; Re: Document for your review
Friend X; Long time, no ears
If you were to open that first email, you'd see the whole threaded email conversation, your original email, and the other 7 subsequent replies to it, including your replies, in chronological order; the ones you've read would be collapsed into just the author and first line. Along with Associate W's recent email, their initial email from three weeks ago floats up to the top, along with your initial reply asking for more info - which they never got back to you. It works very much like an internet forum thread, but even better.
Occasionally - and seemingly only from one particular person whose emails are delivered through a Yahoo! group - the threading gets a little screwed up. But by and large, this just works. It's revolutionary; and once you try it, you won't be able to go back to using normal email. It's painful for me to use the iPhone's mail app hooked to GMail. I use it, mostly because GMail's iPhone webapp version isn't great, either - but boy do I miss the full-on GMail experience, and for a lot of email processing, I need to be at a full-blown browser.
Labels
The second revolutionary email innovation is GMail's use of labels rather than folders. Labels are a much more fluid, better way to work than folders. I can tag an email thread (sorry, not individual emails) with one or two or several different labels. If my wife sends me something, it gets tagged with 'Beth.' If she's talking about something to do with the house, I will also tag it 'House'. And if it happens to be an email asking our family to come paint the house, I'll maybe label it 'Family' as well.
Why is this important? Well, it gives me a really handy way to look up those emails later. I know there was an email thread that was sent out about painting the house, so I look at emails with the House label. Generally, you can design a label system that's fine-grained enough to narrow your search, so it makes it relatively easy to find, and voila - because of threading, I have the original email and all the replies from everybody making excuses as to why they can't be there.
But isn't that just like folders, you ask? No, and the reason is - I can put multiple tags on the thread. That way I can go searching for it from different angles. Maybe I just remember that Beth wrote the initial email, so I can look for all those emails tagged Beth. Or maybe I remember that I asked my family, so I look up family. You can't do that with folders without making lots of copies all over the place. And how do you update all those copies when people email you back? Not to mention the fact that all subsequent replies get separated from their antecedents, and you have to file each and every one; I label the thread, and every email in that thread gets pulled together and labeled the same. Folders also tend to be for storage: you move an email into a folder, and out of your inbox. Not so in GMail; I can label an email and keep it in my inbox for further action.
Additionally, you can star email threads - which is really just a very specialized label. Don't remember a damned thing about the email other than you had to do something with it? Look under Starred. And with the newest Google Labs innovations, you can star it with different symbols. I label emails with some neat information that I'll want to reference later with a blue 'i' "star." One click - and there it is.
Search
What would a Google service be without Search? And the GMail search works very well. As initially touted, GMail allowed you to "never throw anything away." That gets you a lot of emails very fast, and it would be a problem if Google wasn't synonymous with Search.
Case in point. Last night there was a horrible ice storm. We don't get these days too often here in the Mid-Atlantic, and when we do - well, I never know where to look to find out if there's a delay or cancellation or what. Unfortunately, this morning, I managed to lock myself out of my email and Citrix accounts, so I couldn't find the policy or the number to call to figure out whether we had work. I made it into work to find that my boss had emailed the inclement weather policy - with the weather line number - at about 6:30 AM. Which of course I couldn't get to because I was closed out of work email. SO.... I forwarded the email to my GMail account, tagged it with my 'Work' label, and archived it. In two years when we have another ice storm that threatens to shut down the city, I can easily type in the search box 'inclement weather' or 'weather policy' or even just 'weather' and I should have a much reduced list of emails to sort through. (8 emails show up in the Search of 'inclement weather' - including the email I want and this draft; I can see the message I sent out 2 and half years ago explaining what we would do for my outdoor wedding in case of inclement weather....)
It's a powerful way to find emails, and so easy that you do it without even thinking about it.
Archive
The amount of storage space, use of labels, and great Search functionality allow you to archive emails. Press the button and they zip to a place out of your way. You access them by calling up their labels or searching. In essence, this is not that different from filing in a folder, but it feels different - it's a different way of thinking about it. It essentially separates categorizing an email from filing it away, so you can categorize an email the first time you read it, and hold it in the inbox or star it for later action. Later replies are also tagged with the same label. When you're done with the email - then you file it, not exactly getting rid of it - but getting it out of your sight.
Spam & other nasties
Spam sucks. But GMail has the best spam filters I have seen. Very little gets through. I currently have 588 spam messages isolated, with at least 150 in the last week. And I haven't seen one of them. Every once in awhile there will be a spate of spam that creeps through. I mark it as spam, and after a day or two the epidemic goes away. I seriously do not worry about spam, and I never have to configure anti-spam software on my computer. Additionally, GMail does a good job of catching and alerting you to phishing emails. Viruses? I don't worry about anti-virus software on my email (which is admittedly true of most on-line email services), either, because GMail gets rid of that, too. (I do have it on my computer.)
Integration with other services
Google isn't alone; I understand that Yahoo! has a particularly strong calendar, contacts, and RSS. And there are other surprisingly robust application suites out there - like Zoho, which I've used with my Box.net account (more on that one day). There are others out there that a Google search will turn up - things like 37Signals' BaseCamp and Backpack, or Scrybe. Even aspects of Apple's iWork and MobileMe, and Microsoft's Windows Live. Another that I came at by shank's corners is Zenbe - again, more on that soon.
But Google's "suite" of apps is nice. The contacts is really just an add on to GMail, and while it has made some strides, is still not the most robust out there, but it works (and I have it synching with my iPhone now). Google has a very nice integration with Google Chat - which pops up in the corner; conversations are archived and searchable like email.
There is some nice integration with Google Calendar (GCal) and Google Docs. GCal is a very nice program - I love it almost as much as GMail, but that's another post. And there are a couple of points of integration between the two. First, if someone sends you an email with date and time information, GMail makes an attempt to create an event out of it. Look over on the right, and there's a link to "Add to calendar." It's not great, and could use some tweaking - a recent "Add to calendar" link picked out a reasonable event title and got the date right, but chose the End Date listed in the email as the start date.
While composing an email you can add an event invitation, as well. And Google has released a nice little Lab add-on that gives you a peek at your calendar. You can configure it to show a mini-calendar, display one or more of your GCal calendars, and can do a quick add of an event from it. Quite handy.
As for Google Docs, there's a similar Lab widget, and if you get a spreadsheet or document or presentation as an email attachment, you are given the option to display (and save) the file in Google Docs.
A series of links at the top of the page allows you to launch GCal, Google Docs, Picasa (Photos), Google Reader, and additional programs (such as a To Do list, through a Lab add-on). Not much of an integration, and it could be more, such as a more seamless way to start a doc in GMail, import a picture from Picasa, save it to Google Docs, and ultimately publish to your Blogger blog. There are Firefox plug ins that allow you to do this - so maybe it's not too far off. Some of this stuff you can do thanks to a Labs add-on (to start a Doc from an email conversation), and Docs now allows you to publish directly to your blog. But it all has the feel of being patched together, not seamless.
Bad Stuff
But, there's some trade off.
Security
The Search capabilities create a problem. If Google indexes your emails so you can find stuff easily, it means anybody can find stuff easily. I personally find this a little overblown. Yahoo! and Hotmail also have this information indexed so it can be readily accessed; the difference is Google does it better. If you have security issues, well, perhaps you shouldn't use Google's services. But as I've mentioned earlier, perhaps you shouldn't use the Cloud at all, including Yahoo! or Hotmail.
Not as tight as it could be
There's a lot of potential here, but it's not fully realized. The bit of research I've done suggests Yahoo! is doing a lot of this stuff, as well; in several cases, doing it better. (Yahoo! bought, within the last year or so, a company called Zimbra that appears to do many of the same things as Google, but as a commercial enterprise product.) Google contacts are a little light. Google has yet to fold Picasa into the group as well as they have Blogger - and even that is a bit of an afterthought (as Lab add-ons, not as a full-blown feature of GMail.) Zenbe comes close to providing an integrated solution, but has some other problems. But, really, not many people are doing as much as Google in this area, and no one is doing it better or doing more.
GMail and the Cloud
So, bottom line, how is this the first really meaty piece of my Cloud investigation?
Gmail is the base of operations
It's my home in the Cloud, more or less. Now, I'm not saying everything is right there. But GMail is where I start every day, and more than likely where I end every day. The first consideration for any new service is, "How well will it integrate with my GMail?" If I can get something that leverages my GMail account, it's as near to in as it can be; if it would replace GMail - well, it's pretty much out. (Xobni held my attention for a little while, until it I realized that it did some similar things to GMail, and some things I'd like to see GMail adopt. But to get that functionality, I had to pass GMail through Outlook, and I just wasn't that into it.) Again, Zenbe gets tantalizingly close to providing an email platform that serves as a home for a variety of other applications, but falls a little short. GMail, on the other hand, supplies great email features and it seems to be gaining extensions and add-ons that allow me to do lots of other stuff, too.
GMail is a good example of Cloud computing
First, all my emails are sitting in the Cloud. I can access them through my computer at work, I can access them through my computer at home, I can access them at the library, on my friend's computer. I can get them on my iPhone.... And I'm not syncing (which I sort of consider cheating). They are stored on a server that I will never see.
And, likewise, the application itself is stored on and operates from a server I will never see. This has implications, as well. Google gets some stick for being in "constant beta," but that's sort of the hallmark of Cloud computing. Commercial Project Portfolio Management packages that are marketing themselves as Software as a Service (i.e., Cloud-based) tout the fact that features - while still dutifully tested - are rolled out as they are developed, and seamlessly. No reinstallations, no upgrades to download and install, the user never recognizes a thing, other than a "New Features!" link.
What GMail doesn't have - and most Web 2.0 services do - is collaboration. But that's as you would expect it; I don't want to share my email with people (that I know). (Though Zenbe allows for email collaboration in a rather interesting way.) Email "collaboration" takes the form of forwarding and replying; and in a way, GMail handles this better than most through its threading. At least, it's easier for you to figure out what's going on. But additionally, the other parts of the Google cloud - GCal, Google Docs, Picasa - do allow for a rather robust collaboration.
So, GMail. It's good. The benefits - especially threading and labeling - far outweigh the security concerns, the underdeveloped add-ons, and the lack of integration (that no one else does any better.) Would I like it to be able to do some of the things that Zenbe or Xobni can do? Sure - they both have some nice features: ZenbePages, a separate tab that collects your attachments, analytics.... But they lack the basic functionality, and - dare I say it - "just works"-ability of GMail.
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