Steve Gillmor talks with Google's Brin about GMail
More on GMail. At eWeek.com, Steve Gillmor has a fascinating conversation with Google co-founder Sergey Brin about the new e-mail service.
Google's Brin Talks on Gmail Future
Could you give me a quick overview of the goals of this project?
It started as an experiment to see if our search could be used on e-mail. And in fact, it was originally applied to my e-mail. I get a lot of e-mail - I have many gigabytes of it, and it's hard to manage. I have all the same challenges as everybody out there, and I found that having effective search, having large storage, having the kind of threading that we've done here - all those things make me more efficient with my e-mail. And that's what I then decided that we should make available to the entire world.
Threading - is that what you refer to as conversation in the software?
Exactly. Sorry, we rename things to make them clearer, but yeah, it's the conversation.
It was interesting to me that you did finally hit on the word conversation. It seems to me that there's a synergy between the elements of the conversation in the RSS space and what you're doing in the e-mail space.
I think that's very true. Part of the things we've seen why blogs and RSS feeds are such a success is that you can actually read itâ??you don't have to stop, click back and forth, collect bits and pieces here and there - but it is all presented to you as one.
And that's what we've aimed for in the conversations as well, because I don't want to have to hunt and peck around to get the different pieces of the same conversation. I want to be able to see it all at once.