In case you were hiking the Appalachian trail today, Gmail had a meeting with the fail whale. Again. The internets were astir, and it doesn't take a quick perusal of trending topics on Twitter to know how incredibly valuable this email service is to folks and how inexplicably heart-wrenching it is when it's down.
For one, I love Gmail, and can certainly understand people's frustrations with the downtime. Gmail has been my go-to email service since I received my invite five years ago (give or take - does that make me old?). I read some responses to the service interruption today that were downright livid - aggravation leveled at a payment-free service (It is certainly not totally free - there's opportunity cost involved, like the storage and cataloging of your personal correspondence, for instance.) that in my recent memory has been nothing but rock solid. Why get so worked up about an interruption that amounted to a few hours?
This downtime and subsequent grousing speaks to the ubiquity of being connected in today's culture and how quickly our expectations have shifted. It wasn't all that long ago that we didn't have email period, and now email is virtually inescapable. There's email on our desktop computers, email on the web, email on our cell phones, inboxes for our social networks, direct Twitter messages. We are never not connected, and kids (Ha! I'm 28. I feel like a grumpy old man.) growing up right now can't conceive of a world where they are not persistently connected. Many of us now couldn't not be persistently connected, even if we wanted to be - work requires us to carry Blackberries and cell phones and pagers so that we are constantly contactable. We carry laptops on vacation.
Think about that for a second. What an odd sensation to never be able to shut down.
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