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Gmail’s Quirks
By sparky | September 16, 2008
I logged onto my gmail this morning, and chuckled a bit when I saw my ‘Spam’ count:
Spam: 404. Yes, hopefully you understand where the humour lies in that, if not – visit wiki.
On another note: I wonder when gmail will no longer be in “beta”.
I don’t remember the google search engine ever being in beta; seems strange that their second most popular web-product would still be. Unless it’s a way to explain why things may not work at times.
Edit: Funnily enough, this post was made explaining google’s “beta” tag, stating [from google]:
“We have very high internal metrics our consumer products have to meet before coming out of beta. Our teams continue to work to improve these products and provide users with an even better experience. We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product. On the Web, you don’t have to wait for the next version to be on the shelf or an update to become available. Improvements are rolled out as they’re developed. Rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of regular updates and constant feature refinement where applications live in the cloud.”
That would explain it 
Topics: General | 4 Comments »
September 17th, 2008 at 6:39 am
I remember Google Australia being in Beta. It was in Beta for something like 5 years. It was only officially removed from Beta status about 2 years ago or something, if my memory serves correctly.
You’ll notice that Beta products are released for wide public consuption regularly these days. Its basically an easy way of saying two things:
1) This site is constantly undergoing changes and it may be different from one day to the next
2) If we break anything or loose any of your data, it’s not our problem, because you’re the ones using a beta service
September 20th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
I don’t mind beta too much. It does get a bit tedious when stuff never comes out of beta though. But that’s the way things are going. In many cases (like GMail in my experience) you can basically assume it’s a fully-fledged product without much trouble. The web is becoming a place where the sheer volume of users means it’s pretty hard for something like GMail to have any sort of guaranteed account-by-account stability and support. Hmm.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
In somewhat uninteresting news, my spam mail count has been hovering around 1337 lately.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I s’pose that makes your spam folder cooler than mine :\ or at the very least – geekier!