Rethinking Gmail as a Personal Nerve Center
9:19 am March 2nd, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
About a week ago, Steve Rubel posted about how to Turn Gmail into Your Personal Nerve Center. It got mass amounts of well deserved attention from all around the web and I can honestly say that it and (to a lesser extent) its follow up were two of the most helpful blog posts I have ever read. I am a long time Gmail user, and I would even consider myself a power user, but it was clear to me that I was only scratching the surface.
As it turns out the timing of the Nerve Center posts was less than fortunate. Gmail was down for a lot of users almost all day yesterday and only this morning became fully operational. Not everyone was affected, but I was, Mr. Rubel was, and so were a lot of other people- even paying Google Apps users. We are still all awaiting an official response from Google, but the only word on their blog was something about widgets and feeling lazy.
Clearly, this has many of us calling into question the use of a Gmail as a personal nerve central. Data centralization is great, but if Gmail goes down, as we observed yesterday, you’re in trouble. The more central Gmail becomes to your work life and data storage, let alone your communications, the more of an inconvenience outages are.
Much of the posting on the official discussion thread had to do with how much one should rely on a free service. There were questions about if Gmail actually is a free service or not- it is ad supported- but those missed the point. What matters is this- how much can you rely on something that is still in beta, has no guarantee, offers you almost no way to get in touch with a support person, has a history of deleting accounts, offers no transparency, and is big enough that a few thousand users here or there don’t really matter? It seemed like Google Apps Premium was going to be the start of a solution to this but apparently Apps users had interruptions of service yesterday as well. It would be interesting to know how the phone support handled things…
What’s the next step? Well it is going to be different for everyone. Personally I believe that Google has a lot invested in Gmail, especially now that Apps Premier is out, and that this is something they will learn from and do their best to prevent from happening again. Many posts on the discussion board pointed out how this does not happen with Hotmail or Yahoo mail and also that the outage is causing them to rethink using Google Apps for their business. I am sure both of these really resonate the people at Google.
For many of us, our lack of control over my Gmail account remains problematic. While having Google handle everything (servers, hosting, security, administration, etc.) was what attracted to me Gmail, it is now worrisome. All Google account holders at some point have decided that they trust Google to hold on to their personal information, whether its RSS feeds or emails or server analytics, and now we are all having to deal with that decision. The other option would have been private hosting which would be much more expensive, had questionable security, and used a comparatively worse webmail program. I think Gmail is still a great choice for a personal nerve center but we should all be diligent about redundantly saving data and backing up Gmail locally.
[...] not been a good week for the web - on Thursday google mail was down for most of the day, also Digg and a few other sites also experienced outages. Is this the end of [...]