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Gmail was down

google.com

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Re: Gmail was down

#321

Post by nfoz »

smacktoward wrote: post #261
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #69

Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? If there were such an alternative, all they would need to do is wait until gmail fouls up, as they did here. Then they'd have a flood of new users. I can imagine a few reasons why there currently isn't an alternative, like network effects stemming from your contact list, or the fact that you'd have to change your email address eve…

The "killer feature" of Gmail that people generally cite is its spam filtering, and that is hard to replicate, because one reason Google's spam filters are so good is because they have an enormous corpus of messages at hand to train them with. This presents would-be competitors with a chicken-and-egg problem: you need lots of users to be able to pull together a corpus like that, but you can't attract lots of users wi…

Honestly, my gmail gets a lot more spam (and I mean into my Inbox) than the self-hosted email that I actually use (I rarely touch my gmail).

Also they seem to engage in very spammer-friendly activities such as notifying spammers if and when you read their spam email (if images are turned on by default). Soooo, I can't imagine that competing against their spam filtering is as impossible as people tend to believe.

Re: Gmail was down

#322

Post by sentenza »

swalsh wrote: post #289
pkfrank wrote: post #170

This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality. How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc... Scary how much faith we put in this free service.

The crazy thing is, the email means less to me than the chat logs. Maybe 60% of the words i've ever said to my wife have been over gchat while we're at work.

Were they the most important words you say to her, though?

Most of humanity has constantly been forgetting most of the conversation they've had with their loved ones. Maybe it is not reasonable to try to hold on to the literal incarnation of daily banalities.

Re: Gmail was down

#323

Post by bsgreenb »

I just realized how you could generate thousands of points of Hacker News karma without ever manually writing a post or comment:

Watch all major status pages (e.g. Google, Facebook, Heroku, etc.) and immediately auto-post the link to that page when anything goes down.

Re: Gmail was down

#325

Post by wc- »

mprogano wrote: post #68

...someones getting fired

Maybe the dynamics change when things get to gmail's scale and customer base, but if this was the result of a single action wouldn't the person responsible have learned one of those "I'll absolutely never do that again" lessons? Also I'd consider it a failure of the system if one person's action could create a result like this with no oversight. Maybe the manager in charge of that would be under more heat?

Then again, maybe everything I said goes out the window when things are at this magnitude.

Re: Gmail was down

#327

Post by IgorPartola »

btilly wrote: post #309
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intensity and speed this thread rose up on HN illustrates a very important principle. People are more likely to leave a review/comment/upvote if something is not working for them. Understanding that is useful when comparing products using reviews.

This is a very important principle. For a time, Target used Amazon's website code. Here is what they found. People leave reviews of books that they like. People only bother reviewing microwave machines when they didn't work. This meant that Amazon's code didn't work out as well for Target as it did for Amazon...

The whole online review thing is thoroughly broken. I am not even talking about people leaving bad reviews for things like "the seller didn't ship it on time", etc. I am talking about the fact that most people that leave a review have nothing to compare the product to. For example, try shopping for a wireless router. You'll find lots of people either praising or bashing it but having no basis for comparison. Star ratings are completely screwed because lots of people give both one and five star ratings based on completely insane criteria. Long written reviews are naturally most informative, but you have to remember that they are also extremely subjective.

On the other hand, you can't trust expert reviews either. The experts spend too little time with each product to form an actual opinion. They often form their opinions based on some very shallow factors. A canonical example of this is mobile phone reviews by sites like Engadget or Gizmodo. They review so many phones that they can spend only a few days with each.

Edit: one of the worst things for this is reviews of hard drives. While there certainly are hard numbers to go off, there are also lots of opinions: "Well I've owned 6 Seagate drives over the past 4 years, and they all ended up dead. Seagate products are crap!" That does not mean that all Seagate drives are crap, maybe just laptop ones. Or maybe your controller is bad and you keep attaching good drives to it. Or maybe you keep sticking these drives into a case with poor ventilation. On top of that your sample size is too small.

Re: Gmail was down

#328

Post by pessimizer »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #282
simonsarris wrote: post #42

Very funny that me and my coworkers at nearly the same time opened our office doors to look into each others eyes and silently confirm that we were having the same issue. Then we all turned around and went back into our offices to check HN to see if it was just us. Very funny that everyone reading this did something similar. 84 points in 4 minutes.

The intensity and speed this thread rose up on HN illustrates a very important principle. People are more likely to leave a review/comment/upvote if something is not working for them. Understanding that is useful when comparing products using reviews.

I think more that people are more likely to communicate when things change rather than when they don't.

"This is your pilot speaking. The engines are currently not on fire and are still attached to the plane. That is all."

Re: Gmail was down

#329

Post by hyperbovine »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #69

Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? If there were such an alternative, all they would need to do is wait until gmail fouls up, as they did here. Then they'd have a flood of new users. I can imagine a few reasons why there currently isn't an alternative, like network effects stemming from your contact list, or the fact that you'd have to change your email address eve…

I suspect in part because Google eats its own dogfood here. GMail evolved out of Google's original internal e-mail system and is still the default mode of communication within the company today. That is in part why it is so fast and responsive: inefficiency equates to Google losing $$ on wasted productivity.

By comparison, I suspect that MS largely uses Outlook internally rather than Hotmail; surprisingly, the same is true of Yahoo (http://goo.gl/82mlql). FB employees, for their part, apparently use their personal accounts for a lot of work-related communication, which strikes me as a little weird.

Re: Gmail was down

#330

Post by hobs »

jalude wrote: post #156
Fauntleroy wrote: post #20

Google Music is also having some trouble. Does this affect other services as well?

Same, weirdly I can listen to radio but cannot load my playlists.

I can load some music from my playlists, but in the same playlist I am seeing it retry a song several times and then skipping it, so I think it is reasonable to assume it is affecting some servers but not others.
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