If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.
Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before: Here’s John Markoff of the New York Times reporting on it at the time. But the idea of the search kingpin doing email was still startling, and the alleged storage capacity of 1GB—500 times what Microsoft’s Hotmail offered—seemed downright implausible. So when Google issued a press release date-stamped April 1, an awful lot of people briefly took it to be a really good hoax. (Including me.)
Gmail turned out to be real, and revolutionary. And a decade’s worth of perspective only makes it look more momentous.
The first true landmark service to emerge from Google since its search engine debuted in 1998, Gmail didn’t just blow away Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the dominant free webmail services of the day. With its vast storage, zippy interface, instant search and other advanced features, it may have been the first major cloud-based app that was capable of replacing conventional PC software, not just complementing it.
Even the things about Gmail that ticked off some people presaged the web to come: Its scanning of messages to find keywords that could be used for advertising purposes kicked off a conversation about online privacy that continues on to this day.
Within Google, Gmail was also regarded as a huge, improbable deal. It was in the works for nearly three years before it reached consumers; during that time, skeptical Googlers ripped into the concept on multiple grounds, from the technical to the philosophical. It’s not hard to envision an alternate universe in which the effort fell apart along the way, or at least resulted in something a whole lot less interesting.
“It was a pretty big moment for the Internet,” says Georges Harik, who was responsible for most of Google’s new products when Gmail was hatched. (The company called such efforts “Googlettes” at the time.) “Taking something that hadn’t been worked on for years but was central, and fixing it.”
It All Began With Search
Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.”
He began his work in August 2001. But the service was a sequel of sorts to a failed effort that dated from several years before he joined Google in 1999, becoming its 23rd employee.
I had started to make an email program before in, probably, 1996,” he explains. “I had this idea I wanted to build web-based email. I worked on it for a couple of weeks and then got bored. One of the lessons I learned from that was just in terms of my own psychology, that it was important that I always have a working product. The first thing I do on day one is build something useful, then just keep improving it.”
With Gmail–which was originally code-named Caribou, borrowing the name of a mysterious corporate project occasionally alluded to in Dilbert–the first useful thing Buchheit built was a search engine for his own email. And it did indeed take only a day to accomplish. His previous project had been Google Groups, which indexed the Internet’s venerable Usenet discussion groups: All he had to do was hack Groups’ lightning-fast search feature to point it at his mail rather than Usenet.
At first, Buchheit’s email search engine ran on a server at his own desk. When he sought feedback from other engineers, their main input was that it should search their mail, too. Soon, it did.
The fact that Gmail began with a search feature that was far better than anything offered by the major email services profoundly shaped its character. If it had merely matched Hotmail’s capacity, it wouldn’t have needed industrial-strength search. It’s tough, after all, to lose anything when all you’ve got is a couple of megabytes of space.
But serious search practically begged for serious storage: It opened up the possibility of keeping all of your email, forever, rather than deleting it frantically to stay under your limit. That led to the eventual decision to give each user 1GB of space, a figure Google settled on after considering capacities that were generous but not preposterous, such as 100MB.
What Does Google Email Look Like?
Even in August of 2003, two years into the effort, Gmail had only the most rudimentary of front ends. That’s when another new Google recruit, Kevin Fox, was assigned to design the service’s interface. (After leaving Google, he reuinited with Buchheit and Singh at FriendFeed.)
Fox knew that Gmail needed to look Googley; the challenge was that it wasn’t entirely clear what that meant. The company didn’t yet offer an array of services: Other than the company’s eponymous search engine, one of the few other precedents Fox could draw inspiration from was Google News, which had debuted in September of 2002. But search and News were both websites. Gmail was going to be a web app.
“It was a fundamentally different kind of product,” he says. “Fortunately, they gave me lots of latitude to explore different design directions.” Fox aimed for something that took cues from both websites and desktop applications without mindlessly mimicking either. After three major passes on the design, he settled on the look that’s still very much recognizable in today’s version of Gmail.
Thinking of Gmail as an app rather than a site had technical implications, too. Hotmail and Yahoo Mail had originally been devised in the mid-1990s; they sported dog-slow interfaces written in plain HTML. Almost every action you took required the service to reload the entire web page, resulting in an experience that had none of the snappy responsiveness of a Windows or Mac program.
With Gmail, Buchheit worked around HTML’s limitations by using highly interactive JavaScript code. That made it feel more like software than a sequence of web pages. Before long, the approach would get the moniker AJAX, which stood for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML; today, it’s how all web apps are built. But when Gmail was pioneering the technique, it wasn’t clear that it was going to work.
The ambitious use of JavaScript “was another thing most people thought was a pretty bad idea,” Buchheit says. “One of the problems we had was that the web browsers weren’t very good back then…We were afraid we’d crash browsers and nobody would want to use it.”
The more JavaScript that Gmail used, the more sophisticated it could get. One of its flagship features ended up being that the messages in your inbox weren’t strictly sequential. Instead, with the aim of making it easier to follow discussion threads, all the messages in a given back-and-forth string were collected into a cluster called a conversation, with any duplicated text automatically concealed. From a design perspective, says Fox, “trying to make it so that conversations were obvious to the user and intuitive was the largest challenge.”
