Thinkcorps

David Pogue gives the Gmail beta a hummer this morning in the NYT. Given that he’s had this much time to put his story together, and that the wave of online discussion has already crested, I am surprised how wrong he is. Now, I am not a Google-basher, but I’m not a blind fanatic either. Google’s a company, they make tools. And we’re all entering new territory here—where a company owns parts of your personal data stream (in the case of Gmail) in perpetuity. We all thought Worldcom was cool once too, you know.

Those reactions, as it turns out, are a tad overblown. In fact, no human ever looks at the Gmail e-mail. Computers do the scanning – dumbly, robotically and with no understanding the words – just the way your current e-mail provider scans your messages for spam and viruses. The same kind of software also reads every word you type into Google or any other search page, tracks your shopping on Amazon, and so on.

But don’t people create ads that leverage these computer scans? And isn’t that the same thing? I am not actually typing these letters right now, either. I am banging on my keyboard.

Besides, if you’re that kind of private, Gmail is the least of your worries. You’d better make sure that the people at credit-card companies, mail-order outfits and phone companies aren’t sitting in back rooms giggling at your monthly statements. Heck, how do you know that your current e-mail providers – or the administrators of the Internet computers that pass mail along – aren’t taking an occasional peek?

Everybody’s doing it, so it must feel fine.

Still, you feel what you feel. If Gmail creeps you out, just don’t sign up.

This is not the point. The point is that WITHOUT signing up, any email “conversation” you have with a Gmail user is archived without your explicit consent. Didn’t we all go over this a few weeks ago?

That would be a shame, though, because you’d be missing a wonderful thing. Even in its current, early state, available only to a few thousand testers, Gmail appears destined to become one of the most useful Internet services since Google itself.

Blow, baby, blow.

But otherwise, you wouldn’t even peg Gmail as being from the same planet as Yahoo and Hotmail. The most important difference is the amount of storage: one gigabyte. That’s 250 times the amount you get on a free Yahoo account, 500 times the amount on Hotmail.

Gmail only does text email presently. If your average text message is 4 KB, then that’s 250,000 messages. If you get 50 non-spam messages a day, then Gmail will store more than 13 years worth of email. Overkill much? Point: it’s a marketing gimmick, you won’t actually use it.

In fact, Google argues that with so much storage, you should get out of the habit of deleting messages. Why risk throwing away something that you might need again someday? An Archive button moves a message out of the in-box, but it remains searchable. Actually deleting a message involves fussing with a pop-up menu.

Why doesn’t Google want you to delete email? Why? Hmm, let’s think about this for a minute. Hmm. Still thinking here.

Of course, if you’re going to keep all your e-mail around forever, you’d better have some pretty good tools for managing it. Fortunately, if anyone can tame a vast pile of data, it’s Google. Its famous search command works brilliantly on your own e-mail, plucking one message out of 5,000 in a fraction of a second.

Give it to me, baby!

Gmail doesn’t have the usual mail folders. Instead, you can flag messages with labels of your own choosing. The advantage here is that you can apply different labels to a single message, in effect filing it under several categories at once. An extremely easy-to-use filter feature lets you flag incoming messages with certain labels automatically according to who sends them, what’s in their subject line and so on.

I spend a lot of time working with email actually – I help design and improve ATPmail, a friend’s webmail program. I love ATPmail, and Gmail has some of ATPmail’s features. We have spent much time talking about features, search included. Boolean text search is great for unstructured data. Email is very structured, however. You have senders and recipients, time, size, subject, body, attachments. All these can be used to sort and filter. And filtering into multiple categories? How is that not confusing?

[Ads] turn out to be a maximum of three text-only four-line affairs, clearly labeled and way off the to the right, just as on Google itself. In my e-mail, a message about Earth Day contained an ad for a computer-recycling company. A question about music players had two ads for stores selling the Apple iPod. In a press release for a computer show, a Linuxworld link appeared.

Google just announced that’s it’s doing image ads now. So, stop shovelling. Things change, especially in business.

The automatic spam-removal feature is adequate for the moment, but once thousands of people begin to use the Report Spam button, Google plans to harness the cumulative intelligence of its customers to refine its spam filters in innovative ways.

This might work, and it might not. A lowest common denominator approach isn’t the most effective way to deal with spam. As more people report spam, you have to raise the threshold of what constitutes spam, since more false-positives will be reported.

Finally, Google promises that it won’t shut down your account until you go nine months without using it. (Hotmail and Yahoo delete all your mail and recycle your address after only 30 days). Now that’s not being evil.

Google likes data, it needs data. Why would it ever want to decrease its own ability to compete?

The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are those still uncomfortable with those computer-generated ads. Those people are free to ignore or even bad-mouth Gmail, but they shouldn’t try to stop Google from offering Gmail to the rest of us. We know a good thing when we see it.

There are lots of reasons why you should be concerned about Gmail. The mantra “don’t be evil” is cute and works well on a press release or a NYT article, but it’s a slippery slope. To whom doesn’t Google want to be evil? What’s the missing object of this phrase? Us users? Or the stockholders?

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

Just in case you get a notion.