Eitan Burcat › Comments

how'd we do - MG Siegler

hey it's like risk :) - MG Siegler

It's a small world playing - MG Siegler

LOTS of countries - MG Siegler

people clapping along to song - MG Siegler

yes Latvia! - MG Siegler

is that the annoying small world song? - Frederic

I can has iPhone nao? - Andre Heinrichs

35 and counting - MG Siegler

44 - MG Siegler

50 - MG Siegler

Lalala. Something to hear... - Andre Heinrichs

everywhere? - Frederic

so many african countries - MG Siegler

can anyone see if Colombia is in the list? - felix

cheers for india australia - MG Siegler

Please, people don't scream that loud. - Andre Heinrichs

70 countries - huge - MG Siegler

@felix - I've already seen a bunch in Colombia :) - Frederic

I'm SOO waiting for September when this baby launches in India! - Parth Awasthi from twhirl

Did I hear 70 countries? - Andre Heinrichs

@Frederic, ahh nice! When I went last year wasn't so good... Glad it'll be better next time! Hopefully AT&T makes some deals with them. :) - felix

Crap, not yet in Israel... At least not here: http://www.apple.com/iphone... - Eitan Burcat

@Subhasish Vodafone's press statement a couple of months back was generic w.r.t. SE Asia which was assumed to include India. Bharati made an official press release with Tim Cook that they will be launching in India in partnership. What puzzles me is the speeds that they will be able to support on their networks. popular high speed 3G technologies are CDMA based, UMTS & HSDPA: http://www.apple.com/pr... Though this was in the print edition of yesterdays BS, I can't find it online. - Parth Awasthi

From the FriendFeed office. - Amit Patel

With CloudFront, but in reverse? - Eitan Burcat

FedEx your disk to Seattle. - no name

Wow, I never knew Pennsylvania had a downtown! - Steve and 4 other people

In case anyone is confused: PA == "Palo Alto, CA". Comcast == "slow internet uploads" - no name

This always irritates me a lot: "We're making offline Gmail available to everyone who uses Gmail in US or UK English over the next couple of days, so if you don't see it under the Labs tab yet, it should be there soon." You guys need to change your push process so things are available when they are announced or at a predictable time so I don't need to keep checking back for 48 hours... - Bret Taylor

Long time coming! Sweet. - Shawn Farner

Woo-hoo! Way cool. But yeah, very disappointing to not have it *right now*. - Richard Chen

@Bret are you suggesting that they roll it out silently, then tell people about it, then switch the feature on for everybody all at once? - Adewale Oshineye

Let's see if Bret still says that once there are 100 gazillion FriendFeed users each with 100 gazillion gigabytes of data. ; ) - DeWitt Clinton

Yes, more or less. (I think it should be available "imminently" or announced after it is actually available - that is what we did for most consumer products at Google). It is really weird to tell your users a feature has "launched" when it is not available to them, and there is no predictable path or timeline to use it. It seems like one could get the feature-turning-on process down below 30 mins or so. - Bret Taylor

DeWitt: I am not saying it is easy, just saying it is worthwhile. - Bret Taylor

I'm going to guess -- with no inside knowledge -- that flipping the bit on the accounts is easy compared with the scaling problem of having those millions of people all downloading all of their email at exactly the same time. But I could be wrong. - DeWitt Clinton

But more to the point: holy crap, offline gmail launched! - DeWitt Clinton

Has Google Reader always had offline support as well? Just noticed the little green online/offline toggle in the upper right menu... - Ken Sheppardson

@Ken: yah, Reader launched with Offline support the day we launched Gears at the fist Google developer conference a year and a half ago. - Bret Taylor

Bret: Nice. I completely missed that. Just installed Gears earlier today to use RTM offline, next thing you know... heh. - Ken Sheppardson

arf... still waiting for it in my labs. - Justin Hart

WARNING: Anyone with access to your computer will be able to read your offline emails, due to the lack of encryption in Gears databases - lautaro

lautaro, true but presumably you should put some kind of protection on your computer in general, lest someone be able to read/delete all the files on your computer. Only use Offline Gmail on computers you can secure or in trusted environments. Treat it like files on your computer. - Kevin Fox

I has it! Woo!! - Nick Humphries

Everyone should have it; if you don't, reload Gmail and it should appear. (That's generally true of everything we do for Labs, fwiw. The fact that you have to turn it on manually counts as a 'slow rollout'.) - Ryan Anderson

@Ryan Anderson Actually not the case. Neither refreshing nor logging out and logging back in again brings the offline feature into my labs choices. - Ben Greenberg

@Ben, sorry, I appear to have misread some mail earlier today, ignore me. - Ryan Anderson

@bret -- it's tough to manage a large number of users enabling offline simultaneously, each downloading thousands of messages/attachments on initial sync. We could do as you suggest, and only announce the feature after the rollout was complete, but that's problematic too (it still wouldn't do much to stagger the initial load, plus the press would break the news before we did, which is confusing for users...). Any ideas? :-) - Todd Jackson

@todd Boarding a long flight at 2pm EST tomorrow and hoping I get the tab to go offline before then. Hint... hint.... :) - Christopher Sacca

Todd: Re "Any ideas", absolutely... let users know when they can expect to have the functionality enabled on their account. You could either use the Cable Installer Method ("sometime between 8AM and Noon on Tuesday"), or the Rolling Blackout Method ("you're in block 4. We're on block 2 right now"), Alphabetical Order ("you're an M, we're on E")... Time Zones... State... whatever... - Ken Sheppardson

Also, maybe you could find out how many users actually use the Labs features and how frequently they use Gmail. These users would be the most likely to appreciate the new features. For instance, my roomate has the new feature and didn't even know about it, so he wouldn't have missed it. (I guess it's hard to determine who reads the Google Blog though :P) - Brandon Titus

What you *could* roll out to everbody is a little button in Gmail Labs so that a user could indicate they've heard about the feature and would like to be added to a queue such that if you explicitly ask to use the feature, it moves you up to the head of the line... or the tail of the list of other people who've specifically requested the feature. - Ken Sheppardson

I agree with Ken on this. I feel like people who aren't really interested get the feature first and this irritates me. - Brandon Titus

Anyone have any guesses as to how this will work if you have multiple Gmail accounts being used on a single computer? Or if I have a Gmail account and an App account that I’d like to have both run offline on the same computer? - Chris Stevenson

Good question Chris. Looks like there is a bug with using it with multiple accounts anyway (not exactly what you were looking for, but interesting. http://groups.google.com/group... - Brandon Titus

Can't wait for it to work outside of the US & UK... - Eitan Burcat

Can't wait for it to actually get to my account...another friend of mine just got it. Too bad he uses Mail to manage his Gmail account instead of actually using the web interface. There needs to be a way to opt-in to get priority position on the role out. - Brandon Titus

Instead of these "offline web apps" I rather use real desktop apps, thank you... - Jemm

@Brandon Titus - Thanks for the link! Reads like I should avoid this if I have more than one account used on a computer to be safe. - Chris Stevenson

Options to limit the time for which messages are downloaded, the disk space used, and ESPECIALLY TO NOT DOWNLOAD LARGE ATTACHMENTS would be a plus. 500+ attachments were downloaded from my gmail account. No options to avoid it. http://tinyurl.com/t3hsUk - iSteeve

what's the difference between gmail off-line with thunderbird/outlook? I prefer thunderbird, which works both offiline and online. - xia

Take a bow Gmail. You have done a wonderful job. It was delayed but after using I know why it was delayed. :-) - Sidharth Dassani

I left them just because they didn't let me out. And GMail looked a bit better... - Eitan Burcat

I left Yahoo Mail because its spam system is CRAP. Totally worthless. - Clay Newton