My Little Review of Gmail
About a month ago I was offered a Gmail account. I have been using it on and off all that time and now I think I’m ready to talk about it. In case you are wondering, I use my Gmail account as a trash account. If I need to use an email address but I don’t want to provide “real” information, I use Gmail. I wonder how many other people use their accounts this way?
I’ve learned enough about Gmail to know that I really like the architecture, or lack of architecture, it offers. It has been reviewed enough times at the surface level so I am going to avoid talking about it that way. Instead, I want to talk about how it has changed my thinking on using email, and interacting with it.
First, Gmail forces you to do a lot of upfront work (e.g., labels) so you can use search later. These labels are really just a clever way to force users to add metatags to their email. They are “teaching” users to think about words, labels, and searching, versus strict categorization that you normally get with folders.
Second, unlike most email systems, Gmail allows for “forget it” gratification. You can take action on emails and forget about them. Once you have thrown the labels on your email (if you even do that) you can just forget about it until you want to find it later. There is almost no need to sift through old emails to categorize them into the right folders because of the metatag effect, and the ability to search. This “tag and bag” approach is great for many users who are not savvy or disciplined enough to use folders regularly. It is also good for folks who don’t have time to burn through their inbox religiously. I think it effectively allows people to be lazy, in good ways, with their email.
Third, Gmail is based much more on the incoming flow of information. I haven’t seen anyone talk about information flow and Gmail, and that bugs me. What I am saying is this. The system is built to handle incoming email, and it is unique, but it doesn’t do anything special with outgoing mail. Not really. Google is good at searching and sifting and helping users find what they need, but Gmail is not revolutionary in terms of how emails are produced and sent. That is a shame because they could have taken email to a new level. For example, what if they allowed something like virtual editing spaces, or multi-user or multidimensional emails? In effect, allow others to interact with outgoing emails as new objects, with new qualities, but secure and limited to certain audiences. I’m just shooting from the hip on this, but you probably see what I mean. Gmail is all about incoming email, not outgoing email. What about having email creation as a new form of content creation, with new characteristics?
July 21st, 2004 at 2:05 pm
You probably know this, but you can insert special characters into the username portion of your address and then assign labels to each. For example, if your username was johndoe, you could create a junk email address as john.doe@gmail.com and assign a label to it. You could also do this multiple times either by moving the character or by using another. For example, let’s say I also wanted to do this for all of my amazon emails, but didn’t want them labeled as “junk”. I’d set up another account as john+doe@gmail.com or johnd.oe@gmail.com and assign another label. Maybe other web based services do this already, but I didn’t think so.