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> Gmail was a success from the beginning Interestingly, I don't think that was obvious from inside the company. Maybe some day this will be declassified by on

• viraptor 7y ago
  Interesting. The amount of invite code sharing / trading was huge from the moment I learned about gmail. I'd love to hear the story of the issues!
  • smrq 7y ago
    I remember a lot of buzz around invites for Google+, too.
    • p_l 7y ago
      And early on, despite a lot of anti-marketing that I still suspect was simply bought by FB, it was really great and vibrant. In its most original implementation, even. Later on, the campaign of "complaints" about how empty it was got them to change bits of it, pushing "follow those people" on you that was filled with brain-numbing celebs and the like, and the magic was gone. Whoever orchestrated that campaign should get a raise (and shouldn't meet me, as G+ was last web-based social media that I could earnestly use)
  • johannes1234321 7y ago
    Some thing driving the invites was the promise of some GB of free storage, which some people abused in creative ways via their APIs (I remember a fuse driver storing files as mail attachments ...)
• buttersbrian 7y ago
  I believe it was an internal product before it was ever a publicly available one. IIRC it was successful inside and was public dogfooding at that point. Maybe I am mis-remembering.