What the Gmail Team Is Working On

Developers and product managers from the Gmail team hosted a jam-packed panel at SXSW Interactive yesterday, and talked in a refreshingly honest manner about what they've done and what's coming next—including speed improvements, new features, Buzz, better Contacts, and more.

Here's the quick hits of what else was mentioned during the Gmail team's panel:

    * The team was asked if anything was being done for users struggling with switching between personal Gmail accounts and Google Apps accounts for work, and missing out on great features. Braden Kowitz, a user experience designer at Google, said that Google employees feel the same disconnect between their own Gmail and Google.com acounts, and that a "long and complicated process to fix that exact case" was in the works.
    * There are plans to improve the "Contacts experience," and, for at least one panel member, the missing features and ease of use issues "keeps me up at night" and "needs to get better." That same panelist said they couldn't get into details of the fixes, though.
    * Gmail has experimented with placing "fewer, but better ads" inside the web interface, Arielle Reinstein, Gmail product marketing manager, told the crowd. On the whole, Gmail does "a pretty reasonable job of covering (its) costs," Jackson said, despite being one of Google's more expensive services to run, due to the free storage provided and multiple server backups offered.
    * When determining which types of users and Gmail uses to develop features and fixes for, Gmail now tends toward "Five of seven-day users"—those frequent, devoted users who access their Gmail accounts five of seven days of the week.
    * Asked whether Gmail would ever open up an API for developers to code add-ons and plug-ins with more official support and stability, Kowitz suggested it was unlikely. Gmail is based on "hundreds of thousands" of lines of JavaScript, Kowitz said, and it's a code base that "changes so quickly." That said, Jackson said the Gmail team "loves" to see third-party functionality being developed, and the team tries to make developers aware of changes they know will affect those products.
    * Asked why Google Wave wasn't built into Gmail, and if it might one day offer competition for Gmail itself, Jackson said that "We'd much rather cannibalize our own services than have other people do it." Google tries to keep a hand in developing both improvements for its current products and "leap-frog projects." Wave, Jackson said, could be such a leap-frog that "people will be using three, four years down the road."
    * Gmail adoption is growing faster internationally than in the U.S., Reinstein said, and holds the top spot in email usage in India at the moment, and the number three slot in the U.S., behind Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Gmail also changes up its feature list in different countries, so that in Ghana, for example, free SMS through Gmail chat is enabled by default, because text messages are more popular than email in that African nation for text communication.
    * "People complain when we add features, and people complain if we remove features. If we don't do anything to a product, people will complain, after a year or two, that nothing is improving." That was Jackson's smiling response to Gmail's position in adding or taking away Labs or mainstream features. The answer, he said, was developing features that "do the greatest good for the greatest number of users."
    * Gmail team member Jonathan Perlow, capping off the discussion about Gmail's speed with a laugh-getter: "People thought Gmail got faster when we changed the color. That was awesome."

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