During the Behind the Scenes of Gmail panel today at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, team member Jonathan Perlow made a revelation that will be a huge relief to power Gmail users: things will soon get a lot faster.
When addressing the question, “why is Gmail slow?,” Perlow asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Gmail was too slow. A solid number of people raised their hands. Perlow said that the reason everyone didn’t is because slowness is really only an issue for power users of the service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages. As someone approaching 100% usage of my Gmail inbox, I know this problem well.
The good news is that not only is Google well aware of the problem, they are have a solution. While he didn’t elaborate on the backend changes that will be the solution, Perlow was confident enough to say, “we are fixing it.”
Gmail currently has hundreds of millions of users (Google wouldn’t give the exact number), and it ranks as the number three email service in the world (behind Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail, both of which have been around longer than Gmail).
Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free email service provided by Google which has innovative features such as “conversation view” email threads, search-oriented interface, and plenty of free storage (almost 7.7GB). Gmail opened in private beta mode in April 2004 by invitation only. At first, invites were hard to come by and were spotted up for sale on auction sites like eBay. The email service is now open to everyone and is part of Google Apps. ...
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