GMail review and notes

As with everything else Google, people are talking about its new GMail Web-based messaging service:

Sean Palmer has been beta testing it and likes it:

"... I'll just say that unlike Segway it's nowhere near disappointing, and if folders and convenience issues make you as frustrated as they used to make me, you're going to love it."

Skrenta says GMail is proof that what Google is really doing is building a Web-wide operating system:

"... Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup. ... "

Dan Gillmor wouldn't use GMail if you paid him:

"The 'privacy policy' for the not-yet-available Google 'GMail' e-mail service is nothing short of chilling. The reassuring chatter on this page can't disguise the fact that the service is made to order for the most intrusive kind of spying on users. ... "