面对面对话Gmail先生(双语)

Google's Todd Jackson carries the weight of the web on his shoulders. As the product manager for Gmail, it's his responsibility to make sure your inbox experience is fast, secure and always available. Jackson is also the product manager for Buzz, Google's real-time social sharing system that launched in February and was promptly criticized over privacy issues and its "noise" problem. Talk about a tough gig. We got the chance to ask Jackson about the inner workings of the Gmail team, what's ahead for Buzz as far as user controls, and what it feels like to bear the collective rage of Gmail's 140-million-plus users when the system takes a dive.

Webmonkey: Do you think we're going to see the death of the desktop e-mail client anytime soon?

Todd Jackson: We don't like to think of it that way (laughs). No comment! Seriously, though, we think deploying an app in the browser is something that easily makes sense to users now. They can log in on any computer, all their stuff is in the cloud. It's just easier. And for us, we can push frequent updates and improve the product iteratively. At Google, we run our own business on Gmail — we call this "eating our own dog food."

Webmonkey: So do you suffer the same service outages as the general public?

Jackson: We do. When Gmail goes down, it goes down for us. That's one of our first alerts.

Webmonkey: What happens in your office at Google when Gmail goes down?

Jackson: Everybody freaks out (laughs). Our Site Reliability Engineers — SREs, whose job it is to keep the servers alive — have extensive monitoring systems. They have this giant wall of dashboards that chart the system health. They also carry pagers. Even in a very small outage that only affects 0.01 percent of users, the SRE guys will get paged. They run to the dashboards and figure out what's gone wrong. In a larger outage, we all switch to an alternate communications channel like IRC. We also use the bug reporting system inside Google to communicate during outages.

Our response time has gotten much better. But we definitely feel the pain. When Gmail goes down, that's one of the worst feelings in the world.

Webmonkey: I completely agree.

Jackson: The outages we've had, we've learned from, and it's made the system better as a result. For example, we changed things so one component going down can't bring down the system as a whole. Gmail used to be reliant on the Contacts system, so when Conacts was unavailable, Gmail would be unavailable. We changed it so that won't happen anymore.

We've also gotten better at communicating with users. We built something called the Google Apps Status dashboard. Every day, we log anything that went wrong with the system. It answers that question, "Is Gmail down for me or is it down for everyone?"

Webmonkey: How much effort do you put into improving Gmail's speed and performance?

Jackson: Performance is huge. We think of it as a feature. Speed is the best feature your product can have.

Last year Google introduced these performance enhancements to Picasa to make flipping through photos faster, and the usage more than doubled. When a site gets twice as fast, it often gets more than twice as much usage.