[Gmail] The September 1 Outage

All companies have outages here and there and we've all gotten a little used to that. Twitter has it's share of fail whale sightings while Multiply has it's unexpected maintenance windows and even Facebook Apps like Mafia Wars have their periods of unavailability. Then you get the big boys like Google and such outages tend to attract a lot more media attention given the high profile nature of the company.

Gmail went down earlier sometime after midnight locally but pretty much early morning in the US. Given I don't have install rights at the office, I was unable to access the offline mode of Gmail via Google Gears and was left staring at a default message stating Gmail was temporarily unavailable. I know, the horror of no access to Gmail.

The Official Gmail Blog now reports that it was apparently caused by overloaded request routers, and I can certainly see how that might have happened. Naturally this has lead to a renewed series of posts about the viability of cloud computing and how secure such data is but frankly I'm pretty sick and tired of that kind of talk and wish that they'd just appreciate how quickly Google turned things around.

Tips for the future for all you geeky readers include (1) ensuring you have offline Gmail enabled so you can still access your email, (2) activating IMAP / POP access so you can try to connect to Gmail in alternate ways (given IMAP / POP access was still relatively working during the outage) and (3) keeping regular tabs on the status of all Google Apps so you know whether it's an offiial outage or not.

[Google] Offline Gmail

When Google first launched Google Gears, it was a pretty exciting product - a way to address the reliance on the internet for all web applications at the time. The initial kick-off with Google Gears was certainly promising and soon other providers decided to follow suit. Initially it seemed like other providers like Zoho were taking better advantage of Google Gears by providing offline access for their web applications but in time Google started to catch up by enabling it in Google Docs (albeit, to a limited degree) but that didn't stop the clamor for offline access in one of their most famous web applications - Gmail.

Finally, it seems that Google engineers have heeded the call with the announcement of offline access for Gmail as a Gmail Labs feature. Like all Labs-realated announcements, it'll take some time before all users (especially ones outside the US like me) get access to his new feature but I'm willing to wait a little more. Given the quality of my internet connection as of late, having offline access to my Gmail account even just when my internet connection is acting up a bit without fully disconnecting is a god send and I'm really excited.

Actual reviews of the new service to follow once I've had a chance to test it out.


Offline Gmail (in Gmail Labs)

[Google] Graduates of Labs and the New Google Docs

Google has been pretty this week, and we've seen a lot of changes.

First came the announcements that both Google Reader and GOOG-411 are now officially graduates of Google Labs! Thus gone are the Google Labs beaker icons and hello to unique icons for each service.

Of course the bigger news is better captured in this video:


#3 - Google Docs in Plain English

I know, that video tends to mostly explain how Google Docs works but at the end you'll catch the fact that they mention you can now edit presentations with Google Docs and not just documents and spreadsheets anymore.

While the functions for the presentation aspect are somewhat limited, still it certainly helps round out Google's online tools for now in what people tend to call "Google Office" but it's far from becoming any kind of "MS Office killer" no matter how much people speculate about it.

Things should certainly do a lot better once they allow Google Docs to work offline, most likely with the help of Google Gears, although why they haven't made progress in this area is beyond me.

Still, it's just another day in the ever-dynamic life of Google, it seems.