Tuesday, June 22, 2004

gmail: A new etiquette for email

I finally got my gmail account! So hit me at shashank dot ramaprasad at gmail.com. Now, I am all in awe of gmail's conversation/thread view. Its so intuitive and simple, I wonder why none of the other major players offered it. Maybe some one did, and I missed it? Let me know...

For those of you unaware, gmail groups a post and all subsequent replies to it. It offers this entire thread in one view as a conversation. As a user, you no longer have to look at redundant information. The subject line itself is an example: The entire conversation is simply named with the subject line of the first post in the conversation. gmail also intelligently hides quoted or included text in replies to any post, making it easier to scroll through the entire conversation.

Now, it is convention to include or ``quote'' the entire conversation history when adding to a post. Among parties using gmail this convention becomes un-necessary owing to the conversation view. So, individual posts are shorter. One simply has to take care to not alter the subject line. But I do see people often replying to a thread and changing the subject line while doing so. That, to me is very irritating. It interrrupts the flow of the conversation and puts the persons following the thread off-track.

Here's to gmail! I hope others take notice too, and make the world of email a better place.

No comments: