Sparrow acquired by Google

Full text of the announcement:

    We're excited to announce that Sparrow has been acquired        
    by Google!

    We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did
    our best to provide you with the most intuitive and      
    pleasurable mailing experience.

    Now we're joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger   
    vision — one that we think we can better achieve with
    Google.

    We’d like to extend a special thanks to all of our users
    who have supported us, advised us, given us priceless
    feedback and allowed us to build a better mail
    application. While we’ll be working on new things at 
    Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and
    provide support for our users.

    We had an amazing ride and can't thank you enough.

    Full speed ahead!

    Dom Leca
    CEO
    Sparrow

Ah, just bought Sparrow for iOS. Expecting it to go freeware shortly.

edit: Ah, and they're not going to be adding any new features.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/20/3172222/google-buys-sparro...

I bloody well hope they continue development, and it becomes the official desktop/iPhone client. I love Sparrow, and would hate to see it vanish into the "acquired company" ether.

It's name will just be changed to "Gmail" in the next release, I suspect.

Wow. Hopefully this will give Gmail the kick in the pants it needs ... the interface really hasn't changed that much since the early days.

(Well, of course it's been prettified a bit, but besides a few things like Priority Inbox there have been scant few changes to the interaction. And I always liked that using Sparrow felt different to using the Gmail web interface.)