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It's hard to remember a time when Google was not monitoring, organizing, and not exploiting every aspect of our lives, but in 2004, its new messaging service seemed so powerful that It could not be real anymore.
The features announced by Gmail were mind-blowing: a storage capacity of one gigabyte that deleted 100 times the other services. And it would be searchable! Like Google!
This ability does not seem like much now. But in 2004, Hotmail and Yahoo proposed a relatively tiny email storage of two or four megabytes – barely enough to contain Myspace password reset links and your uncle's flat earth conspiracy theory.
A storage equivalent to 50,000 emails seemed a bit far-fetched.
But there were also some other problems. On April 1, 2004, Google announced the limited execution of Gmail tests.
And the press release was, in the jargon of our time 2019, about the brand for the cute and informal culture of Google. "Heck, yeah" makes an appearance. There is mention of M & Ms.
Then there is the folkloric history of the origin of the complaint of a user regarding the existing messaging platforms, originally the genesis of the messaging platform dominant in the world.
"She explained that she spent all her time sorting messages or trying to find them," said co-founder Larry Page. "And when she does not do that, she has to erase the emails like crazy to stay under the mandatory limit of four megabytes." She then asked, "Can not you fix that? ""
Many people wonder: is it a joke?
The Washington Post Mike Musgrove wondered about this at the time and he spoke with experts who compared the launch date to the curious date compared to what made Google unique among a multitude of other engines of research.
"Yahoo lost its lead in the search by becoming a portal," Nate Elliott, an Internet advertising analyst at Jupiter Research, said at the time. The post office. "So much [Google’s] the reputation is built on [having] a clean and white site without distractions ".
Elliott added, "I'm still not convinced that it's not a joke."
Musgrove noted that there had been other clear jokes the same day, such as the news that Google would open an office on the moon.
CNN reported that day that the initiative was a bit at once what many suspected – a real service, at the right time.
If Gmail was looking towards a more and more connected world in the future, it was the same for technology companies that managed private data and sold them to companies in exchange for a so-called free service. .
When it was launched, Gmail described its advertising platform as a "discount coupon at the grocery store" printed based on your goal. This sounds trivial, but Google does this by flagging the keywords in the messages and presenting this data to third parties, asking questions about the location of the data, their access, and their degree of security.
"See the contents of your email without going through email," said Kevin Bankston, then a consumer rights lawyer, told Musgrove.
Now, the Congress is employing to contain tech companies for their role in spreading misinformation, triggering deadly violence and improperly processing private data of millions of people.
The capabilities that Google has produced, and Gmail by extension, have led to these serious problems.
In 2004, only months after Mark Zuckerberg launched his Facebook website, this other giant celebrated the hard work that Silicon Valley had done to protect personal data.
"Millions of M & M's later, Gmail is born," Google writes in its press release.
2019 © The Washington Post
This article was originally published by The Washington Post.
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