Editor’s note: Guest author Adam Rifkin

is a Silicon Valley veteran who organizes a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers called 106 Miles.

In this post he argues that Gmail is perhaps not the best vessel for Google’s social ambitions.

Last week was marred for me by a temporary but super-painful Gmail failure, and the software’s behavior points to why a “more social” Gmail would be a PERMANENT FAILURE

. It pains me to write this because I actually believe the Gmail team has been the best web application team long-term in the entire company, and they come way closer than anyone else inside Google to understanding how normal people work and think.

So it’s telling that even within the Gmail team, there is a basic, fundamental, deep-seeded inability to put things together in a contextually graceful way that makes sense to actual (non-Googler) users—in other words, to deliver a great user experience.

Let me explain with a personal experience. I have been a devoted Gmail user for six years, receiving up to 600 emails a day, so Google makes me pay for extra storage. When I failed to understand the procedure for the annual renewal, Google shut off my extra storage and summarily bounced all incoming mail with a “PERMANENT FAILURE” header (contrary to spec

, because “full inbox” is a transient fail

) until I paid a paltry $5 in extra storage fees.

The worst part is that once I realized that Gmail was failing, I quickly paid, but Gmail took a full 21 hours to restore my service, bouncing me off scores of social networks and mailing lists, and denying my inbox’s existence to all of my friends and professional connections on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and email itself.

The awesome thing about this incident is that it showcases all of Google’s weakest points

as a creator of user-facing applications.

1) Google policy was designed to treat their best users the worst. This Gmail punishment reminds me of the way Google’s cold mechanical cops treated me and my friends during the “Orkut jail

” months of 2004 (when users were randomly banned), stripping us of our humanity by labeling us prisoners for no good reason… I understand why heavy users are an inconvenience to Gmail’s scalability—how many people get so much email they exceed the quota?—but for any normal business, the biggest users are the best customers

.

2) Google screwed me over five bucks! Google takes in more than $2.3 billion in revenue each month, or $75 million every single day, so my five dollars and 21 hours of pain represent less than one millisecond of revenue. In other words, selling extra storage is not a significant money stream for Google, and it’s an inconvenience for the biggest users. Which is a self-fulfilling tragedy: because it’s not a real revenue center, what incentive does Google have to fix the user experience?

3) No user understands the relationship between Google services, and they aren’t explained in a way that makes sense to an actual human being. Why does my Gmail fail depend on a different product called “Google Paid Storage”

? Yahoo! Mail, for which I have also paid for premium services, sends me clear, concise, annual big splashy HTML emails like this:

Your annual subscription to Yahoo! Email is due in a month and your credit card has expired. CLICK HERE NOW [big red button] and pay us $19.95, or you will lose your email storage!

By contrast, Google’s idea of ample warning was this masterpiece of mumbling minutiae:

You’re nearing the end of your year subscription of Google Paid Storage, which gives you extra quota in Google services like Picasa Web Albums and Gmail. Since you’ve chosen to disable auto-renewal for your account, you’ll need to renew your account by visiting the account management page if you want to continue using Google Paid Storage at the current level. If you do not act, your current plan will expire on Aug 24, 2010 and you will be downgraded to the Basic Plan at that time.

Really?! Come on! I did what any normal, busy person with a full email inbox would do in this situation: I ignored the message, because it utterly failed to convey to me that I had a relationship with the sender (Google Paid Storage, whodat?) which led to an immediately actionable item (account management page, ker-wha?) for which the consequences would be extremely dire (downgraded to blah blah what’s for lunch?) . . . Okay, so I wasn’t as vigilant as I should have been, but I submit that no human could easily understand from the message above that all email was going to bounce for 24 hours.

4) There was no customer support whatsoever during the incident, just a message on the receipt for my payment telling me to expect a 24 hour turnaround time. And seriously, what is “turnaround time” about? Is Google telling me that the best technical company on the web can turn off my storage automatically, but cannot restore it automatically? Are human sysadmins provisioning Google Paid Storage by hand??? Does not compute! Yes, I’m ranting now, but stay with me. I have a point.

5) They could have just quietly saved my incoming mail during the outage. Every hard bounce

on a social network labeled PERMANENT FAILURE removed me from that social network—goodbye Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the others. Every hard bounce on a mailing list labeled PERMANENT FAILURE instantly unsubscribed me from said list. Every hard bounce to a human labeled PERMANENT FAILURE resulted in multiple voice mails and text messages from said human asking me, “What the dilly?” I lost several days of productivity due to my inability to communicate cascading failures because, well, my email was down and Google’s servers instructed the senders not to re-send, so I had to re-establish all those connections and apologize to people manually.

Much of this inconvenience to me could have been averted with vacation messages . . . or soft bounces

. . . or better yet, by silently saving all of my email messages for me while we waited for the new storage to be provisioned. Is it really so hard to understand why a human would want a humane solution to a coldly mechanical problem?

Instead Google deliberately chose the technical path (hard bounces) that would be most convenient for them in the short term, while causing me the maximum embarrassment, trouble, anger, frustration, and distress. These emotions of rage and humiliation are likely unfamiliar to the machine that builds Google’s applications.

Essentially my conclusion from this incident is that Google is simply incapable of creating user-facing applications, for the simple reason that only humans can build software for humans. Like Soylent Green

, the best social software is made of people. Consider how ex-Googler Bret Taylor found “great user experience” religion when he embraced Facebook:

Taylor noted that he had been “brainwashed by Silicon Valley” before he saw and understood the power of Facebook Photos (he was likely working at Google at the time). He had been thinking like an engineer about the best way to organize photos on the web. But he quickly realized that “the best possible organization of photos is around people,” Taylor said.

“There are ten other industries waiting to have this type of disruption,” Taylor said noting the travel industry, e-commerce, and music as a few of them. Earlier, Zuckerberg agreed. Because of the social element, “every single vertical will be transformed.“

Software is not just a matter of technical capabilities. A tremendous amount of hard work, skill, and taste goes into making software products efficient and comfortable to use:

Understanding how users want to navigate around the application, which tasks to show as buttons versus which to hide in menus, which features should be left out completely, and so on . . . those seemingly minor decisions are often the difference between good software and great software, and the reason great product managers and interaction designers are always in demand.

Even the tone of a product’s error messages—compare “Flickr is having a massage”

or the Twitter fail whale, with an eye-glazing Java stack-trace

or cryptic Android error message—can change a person’s feeling about the software she or he is using. Feeling is what user experience is all about, and why it is so hard to get right.

What truly scares me is the feeling that Gmail.com is evolving into an increasingly comfortable, warm chamber with a never-ending feeding tube that encourages we, its human inhabitants, to consume and click without surcease. Gmail could very well be the computer-generated dream world that sucks the life out of us

, millisecond by millisecond.

What started off as simple, fast, threaded, practical web-based email now resembles a kitchen sink with a hundred settings, dozens of lab extensions, labels and filters and stars (oh my!), calendars, maps, task manager, contact manager, document manager, RSS reader, in-email video player, web clips, instant messaging, video chat, and “Buzz”, all bundled. This past week alone saw Gmail smoosh in more new features, from Skype-like inbox Voice (success or disaster?) to a myriad of magical pixies that learn Inbox Priorities from consumption and clicking behavior.

Friends of mine who follow Google closely believe their next attempt at social software will involve adding far more complexity

and functionality to Gmail, making the job of delivering a great user experience that much more difficult. Recent history has demonstrated that Google cannot resist the urge to cram new features into Gmail with alarming velocity. Where does it go from here?

I have nightmares about round-the-clock Googlers on lockdown like at Facebook

, busily grafting feature after feature into the mix . . .

1. Why not add Wall, Profile Info, Photos, and Home, and really make Gmail ever more like Facebook?
2. Why not add Games? (Ok, seriously, no. Can I get a “hell no

   “?

3. Why not add things not even Facebook has, from Skype-like Voice, to Inbox Priorities?
4. Why not add Slide’s Top Friends

   and ability to Throw Sheep

   , Aardvark’s Ask-Any-Questions

   , and Angstro’s news alerts

   ? Heck, let’s dream big: Google says they’re continuing to look at “ways to continue and extend Wave technology in other Google products“, and where better to reincarnate Pulp Fiction

   than in our Gmail. Anyone? Bueller

   ?

5. Why stop with copies and acquisitions? Embrace and extend, too! Xanadu’s pleasure dome will have us consuming our Facebook and Twitter statuses, comments, likes, links, photos, and videos through that Gmail Inbox intravenous drip…

Here’s the question I dread asking out loud: does Google think Gmail is The One Ring To Bind Them All? Are we supposed to trust Google with all of these deeply personal communications when we can’t even count on Gmail not to hard bounce a human who hits his storage quota? Maybe PERMANENT FAILURE was a declaration, not an error.

Meanwhile, if Facebook lets Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit

turnFacebook Inbox into a product as fast, simple, and useful as the original Gmail, I could see myself migrating to Facebook as my primary email. But as of Labor Day 2010 approaches, that’s just a fantasy, and my fate is still tied to Gmail’s destiny.

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CrunchBase Information

Gmail

Company:	Google
Website:	gmail.com
Launch Date:	April 1, 2004

Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free email service with innovative features like “conversation view” email threads, search-oriented interface and plenty of free storage (almost 7.7GB). Gmail opened… Learn More

Adam Rifkin

Companies:

Renkoo, Worldly Developments, Angstro, AppDiscover, Angstro, KnowNow, Speak With Me

Adam Rifkin is an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who oversees a monthly gathering of startup engineers called 106 miles.

Adam is presently retired or funemployed (depending on your perspective). As a result, he gets roped into giving free advice… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

Use Google Storage as a One-Time Cost, Lifetime Backup Solution

You can get extra Gmail storage pretty cheaply from Google, but eagle-eyed reader gthing lets us know that you have read access to that storage even after you cancel your subscription.

You have read and write access to your storage for an entire year after paying, but if you choose not to renew, you still have access to your data for as long as you want—you just can’t add more stuff. From Google’s policy:

No matter when you cancel your storage subscription, your extra storage will be available for the entire year you’ve purchased. After your plan expires, your storage will be limited to each individual product’s free storage quota. Under our current policy, any content over the free storage quota will still be accessible, however you will not be able to add new content until your storage balance falls below the free storage limit.

It won’t work as a continuous backup solution, but it works great as a one-time data dump. So, while you wouldn’t want to necessarily store important data there (since most important data gets outdated quickly), I could see it being useful for, say, TV seasons that you bought on iTunes but already watched, or other similar space hogs—essentially, things that you don’t want to delete but don’t have the hard drive space to let them sit around and collect dust.

[via #tips]

Send an email to Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com.

http://artists.gawker.com/5076934/billi-kid” target=”_blank” />

‘);

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glave 01:24 AM

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This doesn’t seem worth the effort. I can buy a 2TB hard drive from newegg for $110 right now. That’s more space per dollar, and I don’t have to spend eternity syncing it to a server. Reply

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gthing 09/02/10

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Sweet, do I get a star for this? Reply

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wjglenn 09/02/10

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I would not trust this tip, since they can change their policy at any time and potentially wipe out your archives. Also note Mxx’s comment above about how not being able to add new content includes getting new e-mail.

That said, I’m very tempted to just pay for a bunch of space every year because it’s pretty cheap storage.

Anyone know if there are tools that can actually let you use it for automated backup? Or is there something that will let you create a virtual drive out of the space?

Essentially, I’m looking to turn it into gDrive. Reply

thinkerer 09/02/10

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I didn’t read the fine print – is this like everything else Google where they’ll paw through it and add ads etc. based on content? Reply

rcocchiararo 09/02/10

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if i read it correctly, unless you do this on a secondary account, once the subscription ends, the account remains locked until your data gous below the allowed quota for free accounts ? (locked, in the sense that ALL the account is read only) Reply

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Mxx 09/02/10

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That’s a bad tip/suggestion.
Read what happens when you don’t pay up for your additional storage [techcrunch.com] Reply

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foolish-rain 09/02/10

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Seems like an incredible crap shot for anything truly important. I assume there’s language buried in there somewhere which allows them to change the policy at any time, even if it does evil… Reply

srothroc 09/02/10

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It’s worth noting that the quote says “under our CURRENT policy,” emphasis mine. If people start abusing it, I don’t think it’s strange to think that they would change it to curb said abuse. Reply

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AtomFury 09/02/10

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That’s pretty sweet. I got the extra 20GB storage for $5/year but didn’t realize that. Reply

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This is the third post in a three-part series. The first part was Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. The second part was Money changes everything.

Nick Carr, like the rest of the “Web rots our brains” contingent, views links as primarily subtractive and destructive. Links direct us away from where we are to somewhere else on the Web. They impede our concentration, degrade our comprehension, and erode our attention spans.

It’s important, first, to understand that every single one of these criticisms of links has been raised against every single new media form for the past 2500 years. (Rather than rehash this hoary tale, I’ll point you to Vaughan Bell’s excellent summary in Slate. For a full and fascinating account of the earliest episode in this saga — Socrates’ denunciation of the written word — I recommend the elaboration of it in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid.)

Throughout history, the info-panic critique has been one size fits all. The media being criticized may change, but the indictments are remarkably similar. That tells us we’re in the presence of some ancestral predilection or prejudice. We involuntarily defend the media forms we grew up with as bastions of civilization, and denounce newcomers as barbaric threats to our children and our way of life.

That’s a lot to hang on the humble link, which — in today’s Flash-addled, widget-laden, real-time-streaming environment — seems more like an anchor of stability than a force for subversion. But even if we grant Carr his premise that links slow reading and hamper understanding (which I don’t believe his evidence proves at all), I’ll still take the linked version of an article over the unlinked.

I do so because I see links as primarily additive and creative. Even if it took me a little longer to read the text-with-links, even if I had to work a bit harder to get through it, I’d come out the other side with more meat and more juice.

Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders. Links, properly used, don’t just pile one “And now this!” upon another. They tell us, “This relates to this, which relates to that.”

Links announce our presence. They show a writer’s work. They are badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work. They demonstrate fairness. They can be simple gestures of communication; they can be complex signifiers of meaning. They make connections between things. They add coherence. They build context.

If I can get all that in return, why would I begrudge the link-wielding writer a few more seconds of my time, a little more of my mental effort?

Let’s take these positive aspects of linking in ascending order of importance.

Links say “hello.”

A link to another site can serve as a way of telling that site, “I just said something about you.” This invites spammy abuse, of course. But it remains an elegantly simple device. Many bloggers still check their referrers today as they did a decade ago in the early days of weblogging. High-traffic sites can’t and won’t bother paying much attention to this, but out in the middle and nether reaches of the Web-traffic curve, this kind of link remains a valid and valuable social gesture.

Links show a writer’s work.

Any post or page with hand-selected links provides a record of the writer’s research, reading and sourcing. Some people are happier with this stuff collected at the end, as we did for centuries in print. But linking in situ gives the reader the information right where it’s needed. (If reading a link adds to “cognitive load,” surely the effort of scanning down to a footnote or, even worse, flipping back to an endnote piles on even heftier brain-freight.)

Links keep us honest and fair.

If you’re quoting someone and you link to the original, you’re saying to the reader, “Check my work — see if I’ve presented the other person’s point of view accurately and fairly.” This provides a powerful check on bullying and misrepresentation. It’s the rant without links, the disconnected diatribe, that’s suspect.

In a media environment where a dwindling number of participants believes that objectivity is either possible or desirable, the best yardstick for fairness we have is this: does a writer present the perspectives of those he disagrees with in a way that they feel is fair? Linking to those perspectives is a way for a writer to say: Go ahead — see if I got you right.

Links enhance trust.

Let me quote Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen, from 1999 (in a text I reread thanks to a link I followed from a discussion of my earlier post at Crooked Timber):

Not being afraid to link to other sites is a sign of confidence, and third-party sites are much more credible than anything you can say yourself. Isolated sites feel like they have something to hide.

Links knit context into the Web.

Most Web critiques includes ritual denunciation of the medium’s disconnected, fragmentary nature. And certainly there are plenty of fragments out there in HTTP-land. But the disconnected ones, by definition, don’t get read much. We read the posts and pages that get widely linked to.

A fragment that gets connected is no longer a fragment. It becomes a working part, a piece of a mosaic, a strand in a web. (There’s a reason these words are embedded in Internet history.)

It always amazes me to hear the complaint that the Web doesn’t provide readers with enough context. Then I realize that this criticism is usually made by print journalists. They are accustomed to having their words acquire a bountiful context on paper. Then, typically, their work is spat onto the Web by an automated content-management system — and served up without a link in sight.

Theirs is an experience of loss of context. But for the rest of us, writing for the Web offers more frequent and potent opportunities to give our words context than we’ve ever had before.

What pages shall we connect our words to? We have the entire rest of the Web to choose from! And the choices we make say worlds about our writing.

The context that links provide comes in two flavors: explicit and implicit. Explicit context is the actual information you need to understand what you’re reading. Here’s what I mean, if I can go all recursive on you for a moment: Let’s say you landed on this article out of nowhere. Someone sent you a link. (Now, right there Carr and the link-skeptics might say, “”There’s the problem! If you were reading a magazine or a book, that would never happen.” To which I can only say, if the opportunity to receive pointers to interesting reading from a network of friends is a problem, it’s one I am very happy to have.)

So you land on my page and you might well have no idea what I’m talking about, since this is part three of a series. Links make it easy for me to show you where to catch up. If you don’t have time for that, links let me orient you more quickly in my first paragraph with reference to Carr’s post. I can do all this without having to slow down those readers who’ve been following from the start with summaries and synopses. Again, even if the links that achieve this do demand a small fee from your working brain (which remains an unproven hypothesis), I’d say that’s a fair price.

By implicit context, I mean something a little more elusive: The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

Links, in other words, transmit meaning, but they also communicate mindset and style. By this, I don’t mean “stylish linking.” There have been fads in linking — the first and best-known was probably the playfully ironic, self-deprecating style pioneered by Suck.com in 1995 (I wrote about it in Salon a long time ago). They come and go, just as catch-phrases and tics in casual writing do. As with other link mannerisms, remnants of the Suck style survive in a few places; but mostly, Web users have rejected the practice of links that obscure or misdirect or joke. We prefer links that clarify.

The history of Web linking has been a long chronicle of controversies we didn’t need to have: irrelevant debates over issues like so-called deep linking (if you really don’t want to be linked to, why are you on the public Web?) or the notion of a power-law-driven A-list in blogging (if you want to become a celebrity, other media are far more efficient). To this list, we can now add the “delinkification” dustup.

It’s hard to imagine the benefit for ourselves, or for the Web, of a general retreat from linking. Writing on the Web without linking is like making a movie without cutting. Sure, it can be done; there might even be a few situations where it makes sense. But most of the time, it’s just head-scratchingly self-limiting. To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.

A long time ago, I wrote a column titled Fear of Links about the then-burgeoning movement of webloggers. I urged professional writers to stop looking down their noses at links and those who make them: “A journalist who today disdains the very notion of providing links to readers may tomorrow find himself without a job.”

That was 1999. Today, we live in that piece’s “tomorrow.”

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