Face-to-face with Gmail

Google's Todd Jackson is a heavy-duty man. He is the product manager of Gmail, and people call him Gmail.
Sir. His role is to ensure that the email system with 0.1 billion million users has a good experience, fast, secure, and reliable. Jackson is also a real-time Google social sharing system buzz.
Product Manager, the system was once hidden
Private questions
Criticized. This document is about webmonkey.
An interview with Todd Jackson.

Webmonkey:

In your opinion, will the email Desktop client soon die out?

Todd Jackson:

We don't want to think that way (Laugh), there is nothing to say. Strictly speaking, distributing applications via browsers is reasonable for today's users. They only need to log on and everything is on the cloud.
This is easier. For us, we hope to continuously improve this product through regular updates.

Google also uses Gmail, which is called "eating dog food ".

Webmonkey:

So you are also suffering from downtime like the public users?

JACKSON:

Yes, we are also tired of Gmail downtime.

Webmonkey:

What does Google look like when Gmail goes down?

JACKSON:

Everyone crashes (laughs ). Our site maintenance engineers have a very expensive monitoring system with a wall-mounted instrumentation that shows the health of the entire system. They also wear paging devices, even if
A very small range of downtime, even if only 0.01% of users are affected, they will also receive messages. They ran to the monitoring wall to see where something went wrong, so we temporarily used other communication channels, such
In irc chat, we also use the bug reporting system for communication.

We had a good time to respond, but we were able to feel the pain for ourselves, so Gmail crashed just like the sky.

Webmonkey:

Fully agree.

JACKSON:

We feel the pain of downtime, which makes the system better and better. For example, when a component fails, the entire system is not affected.
I used to rely on our contact system. If the contact system goes down and Gmail goes down, I
We have made adjustments to this.
.

We have also improved our communication with users. We have designed a Google Apps status
Dashboard
(Google Application Status dashboard) every day, we record the problematic things so that we know Gmail
Whether it is a single downtime or an overall downtime.

Webmonkey:

How much effort have you made to improve Gmail speed and performance?

JACKSON:

The performance investment is huge. We regard speed as a function, and speed is the best function of your product.

Last year, we named Picasa
After performance optimization, the user's browsing speed doubled, and the user doubled. When a website doubled faster, the user volume increased by more than this.

Webmonkey:

Gmail is one of Google's most important products. It has a large number of users. Should you be very careful when you want to adjust a certain function of Google?

JACKSON:

This is a very strict product. We are very careful about everything. Before we launch any new things, we will think that this will affect the large number of users. Therefore, we will perform a rigorous test first.
Try.

Every time we launch new things, Google employees will immediately use them and give us feedback. They are the most active and any new things in Gmail labs will be tested first.

Webmonkey:

Do you personally like the Gmail labs experiments?

JACKSON:

Undoubtedly, the mail return function is my favorite. I have been using it all the time, avoiding a lot of embarrassment. Another favorite feature is
Just concluded the test
. We are all superusers internally, and I use Gmail almost all rely on shortcuts and searches.

The number of users of shortcut keys is less than 2%. This function is not very flattering. How can you explain it to others?

Webmonkey:

Do you often use buckets ZZ?

JACKSON:

It is often used. Google has a very complex set of internal networks. We can see everything, which is our second communication channel. We can be consistent with everyone's work.
Email and chat tools are impossible, and the transparency of our communication has been greatly improved.

Webmonkey:

After Buzz was released, Gmail users felt that Inbox's privacy was threatened and some noise was felt. What was your reaction?

JACKSON:

We will soon know. We have added some buzz functions to inbox. When people leave a comment on your post or post, or when someone gives you a reply.

In one aspect, these functions work well, because in many cases, you do not know when your post is posted. However, when we publish this function, we find that, for those with a large number of posts
User, this function seems a little out of control.

To solve this problem
Two new functions are provided.
: The first function is to set the buckets that can enter your inbox. The second function is to use a banner to explain these buckets to users.
You can also close the dialog.

The most explicit feedback we get is that the buzz function in the inbox is cool, but it is too messy.

Webmonkey:

I personally think it is very troublesome. When I leave a message on the Internet or use tweet, this is a thing outside. Back to Gmail, it should be my private space, but buzz
After the release, my private space is full of people I don't know.

JACKSON:

This is what we need to improve. We hope that users can join sessions they like to join and block sessions they don't like. We have done some work recently, so we are close to that goal, but we haven't implemented it yet.
Now. We not only hope that you can control what you want to go into a private space, but also hope that you do not have to worry about it.

International Source: Making
Contact with mr. Gmail

Chinese compiling Source:Ruishang enterprise CMS
Website content management system
Official Website