OK, so I partially felt bad for the anti-Google sentiment in the last post, but I’ve also been thinking about this topic for quite a while. So what better way to handle both issues at once than to talk about what I like about GMail.

While there’s a lot of things that I think they’re doing right (and maybe some things that I’m not a huge fan of), the best element behind GMail is the conversation view. If you aren’t using GMail (seriously? Are there people like that out there? Cuz I have 99 invites), the notion is that each email thread is represented as one email with multiple messages. Here’s an example from a conversation from HCI Methods class…

I got pretty used to this format in grad school, but now that I’m working and using Outlook every day, I really appreciate the notion of a conversation much more. The reasons are numerous:

1. Fewer Emails. As a matter of productivity, you move faster with fewer emails. There are many instances of email threads with 10, 20, or even as much as 50 replies that I get every day. Handling one message is much faster than handling all 50 separately.
2. Faster Reading. If there’s a thread that I really want to follow, I usually want to read the emails in order to make sure that I understand them all. In Outlook, I end up putting them all in a folder, essentially creating a conversation view manually (but with more time and effort).
3. Easier Saving. What if I want to save the thread? Previous messages tend to be listed below the current message (Gmail also does that), so maybe I save the most recent one. But then tomorrow I get a new message on that thread with more good information. So now I have two emails to save, unless I want to take time to find the old one and trash it. Again, a time waster.
4. Fewer Search Results. Hey, someone sent out an email about the great sushi restaurants in Seattle. I’m craving sushi, maybe I’ll search for it. Oh, but there were actually 5 threads, each with 20+ replies. So now I have 100 emails to deal with. In GMail, it would only be 5 results, and you could quickly find the one you want (and ensure all of the information from that thread would be there).
5. Ensures Your Voice! This is a new pet peeve of mine - having a conversation carry on without your input!!! When you send mail to 20 people, suddenly 20 people are vying for attention off of one thread. It seems that whenever I spend time to write my reply, someone inevitably replies to a different message in the thread, and the conversation moves in a different direction. With GMail, all replies are part of the same conversation, so nobody’s opinion is getting left out.

So at this point, I’m a little confused. Did Google copyright the notion of conversations in email? Is that why they’re the only ones who have it? While I was skeptical at first, now it seems like such an obvious productivity benefit that I’m baffled that others haven’t rushed to implement something similar.

In Microsoft’s case, however, I suppose they are currently trying to fix the server error on Windows Live Mail that’s been there for a week now. I would switch over… if it worked.