Google launches Gmail and everyone thinks of an April Fool

On April 1, 2004, Google launches Gmail and everyone is thinking of April Fool’s Day. After all, for some years now it has become a practice to use that date to launch technological jokes. At Google in particular they are masters. There is also one planned in 2004 of course: the construction of a new center to go to the Moon: the Google Copernicus Center which would open its doors in 2007 and meanwhile was looking for candidates “in excellent physical condition and able to survive with access limited to the comforts of modern life such as skimmed soy milk, the TV series the Sopranos and a constant supply of oxygen “.

In fact, rereading that text today, it was immediately clear that it was an April Fool. But many thought that the real April fool was the news that Google had launched a new email service offering everyone 1 gig of archive (here the original press release). At the time, the most popular services, such as Yahoo! and Hotmail, they had low storage capacity and we spent our time cleaning up, deleting useless emails. One gig was a whopping, it was 500 times the storage capacity of Hotmail. They say that Sergey Brin was very excited about the double joke: the real April Fool, they said in Mountain View, “was to launch something crazy on April 1 and leave it running on April 2”.

The project had started three years earlier: it was part of those experiments also allowed by the fact that a substantial part of Google’s working time (20 percent) could be dedicated to doing something different. These projects called them Googlettes. In the beginning, the project to create a Google webmail was the Googlette of Paul Bucheit, an engineer who was just 19 when he joined Google (employee number 23). However, it soon became a serious project – codenamed Caribou, like the mysterious project of a famous comic strip – even if not everyone believed it: meanwhile, many feared that by doing something other than the search engine, Google would also take an early avenue of the sunset like Yahoo !. Then there was the theme of doing something that still had the light and cheerful style of Google. And the storage capacity had to be decided. And the business model: free or paid? We opted for the free but developing algorithms capable of scanning our e-mail messages to allow advertising profiled with respect to our interests. It was practically the first mail service with a built-in search engine. An enormously invasive choice of privacy that, as soon as it became clear that Gmail was not a joke, attracted the protests of the various groups that are involved in defending our digital rights.

In short, in 2004 Gmail was ready to launch but a problem remained to be solved: there were not enough servers to open the service to everyone, offering a gig of space to everyone. So they opted for an invitation-only service, and the invitations soon became so coveted that they could be bought on Ebay at substantial prices.

Ten years later, TIME will say that the launch of Gmail marked the beginning of the modern age of the web.