Tuesday June 15, 2004

GMail

Recently, I've got my GMail account. By now, most of people know what it's like, such as providing 1G space freely, searching with Google engine, and the last but not least, the controversial advertisement policy.

But among those, what I like it most is its UI. The first impression of it was just "cool", but as I keep using it, I tend to think that they aim the email paradigm shift to the instant messaging. They don't call it "mail" or "email", but they call it "conversation", which sounds close to the IM.

The other thing I've been impressed was its "label" functionality. Traditional MUAs create so-called "folders" to store emails in, but GMail's "label" has completely blown "folders" away. You can specify as many as different "label"s to a single "conversation", so that searching/managing "conversation" will be much easier and faster.

It seems that Google has decided to increase the number of the beta testers exponentially, maybe to do stress testing. I've got a couple of invitations already. I noticed that their servers were down this morning, so I guess their purpose (to stress the system) may have been achieved :)

BTW, It would be nice if this blog system would adopt GMail's "label" like capability in its "Category".

UPDATE

The reason that GMail site was down this morning may not be the result from the stress testing, but might be due to the following:

The attack caused problems for more than two hours--from 5:30 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. PDT. Many of the world's most popular sites suffered from widespread outages, according to Keynote Systems, which compiles statistics related to Web surfing. On a typical day, the top 40 sites measured by Keynote rarely dip below 99 percent availability. On Tuesday, however, Keynote saw availability drop to 81 percent.

Blackout hits major Web sites