And then he shares news that doesn’t sound all that thrilling to me: Google has discontinued reMail and yanked it off the iPhone App Store. Previously-downloaded copies will still work, and users of the free version can get all the features of the paid edition. But Google will stop supporting the app at the end of next month, and there will never be another update. Starting today, reMail is a Dead App Walking.

Oddly enough, Cselle says all this on a blog with a profile that says that (A) reMail exists to radically improve mobile e-mail; and (B) it hasn’t launched yet. That’s out of date on both fronts: It did launch–in beta form, at least, to an enthusiastic reception–and it won’t be improving e-mail from here on out.

Cselle doesn’t explain why Google is killing reMail. It’s possible that the company remained impressed by Cselle and wasn’t interested in reMail itself. But it’s also conceivable that it sees reMail as the foundation of an ambitious Gmail app, and that everything that was cool about reMail will reappear at some point in a new form. We just don’t know, and Google doesn’t seem to be dropping hints.

The search-engine behemoth has acquired an infinite number of interesting startups over the years. In certain cases, that’s been good news for fans of the products those companies made–Google Earth (nee Keyhole 3D Earth Viewer) and Picasa spring to mind. (Oh, and YouTube.) And Google says that the neat Q&A service Aardvark, which it bought last week, will live on as a Google Labs project.

Unfortunately, though, what’s good news for Google and startup founders is often a bummer–at least in the short term–for everyone else who cared about the startup in question.

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“I think this whole thing could be an electronic noose…The more defined you are, the more definable you are, the more you’re exposed [to possible security problems].”–analyst Roger Kay as quoted in a Washington Post article

“The interplay between the creation of an inalienable right to privacy and the application of this right to the private sector is important. It requires Google to obtain the affirmative consent of individuals before violating their privacy.”–an open letter to the California Attorney General signed by privacy advocates

What do the above three comments have in common? Nope, it’s not that they’re expressing angst over Google Buzz’s privacy issues. They all date from almost six years ago, when Gmail was brand new and plenty of intelligent people were freaked out over the idea of an e-mail service scanning messages for keywords and displaying relevant advertising. As far as I can remember, it was the biggest privacy-related furor Google had encountered until this week.

Today, I don’t know of anybody who’s terrified of Gmail. (Okay, there are probably people who still don’t like the idea, but–this may shock you–they probably solved the problem by deciding not to become Gmail users.)

In retrospect, the original Gmail kerfuffle seems silly, and Google’s response back in 2004–which was to pretty much hunker down and deploy the service without changes–feels like the right one. The company was doing something new and inventive, and it took the world a while to get its head around it.

So can Google draw any lessons from the Mother of All Gmail-Related Controversies as it figures out what to do about Buzz? Yes, but I worry that it might draw the wrong ones. The concern over Gmail and the concern over Buzz’s conversion of e-mail contacts into public lists of who Buzz users are following don’t have much in common with each other. With Buzz, the hubbub has nothing to do with fear of the unknown. It’s just that lots of people consider information about who they converse with via e-mail to be a private matter, and that a company that has access to that info should treat it gingerly.

I think that Google can make some fairly minor (additional) changes to Buzz that would instantly satisfy almost everybody. And I hope it does, rather than trying to ride this out. Because the people who are upset now are fundamentally different from the 2004 alarmists in one important way: They have a good point.

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On Friday, Moglen was the guest speaker at a seminar at New York University that was sponsored by local technology organizations. Moglen criticized the hierarchical nature of the Web today, and called for a return to peer-to-peer communications.

“The underlying architecture of the Net is meant to be about peerage,” Moglen said. “…There was nothing on the technical side to prevent it, but there was a software problem.”

The client/server architecture has been locked in over the past two decades by Microsoft Windows, Moglen claimed. “Servers were given a lot of power, and clients had very little.”

Control has been moved even further away from the client (people) by cloud services, which can be physically located anywhere in the world where the provider chooses to operate, Moglen said. Privacy laws vary widely from country to country.

There was no discussion of social consequences on the part of computer sciences as they created technologies that comprise the Web, Moglen said. “The architecture is begging to be misused.” Cloud providers are the biggest offenders, in Moglen’s view.

Privacy Obscured by Clouds

Cloud-based services range from simple offerings that could easily be duplicated to complex services that require clusters of computation and are administratively complex, Moglen added.

That affords providers a level of control that enables them to remain one step ahead of laws and regulations that meant to safeguard privacy, Moglen said. All server logs belong to the platform and service provider, he added.

Consequently, the public (and government) has lost ability to use legal regulation or to leverage the physical architecture of the network to prevent abuse when a cloud provider that might “fall from innocence,” Moglen said. He considers Facebook to be one of those bad actors.

Facebook, Moglen quipped, has turned into a “structure for denigrating the integrity of human integrity.” Joking aside, he called it a poor deal for users who receive a smattering of Web hosting, “PHP doodads,” and “all the spying that you can get for free all the time… It’s grossly overpriced.”

“The human race is susceptible to harm,” Moglen said. “[Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg] has the distinction of having done more harm to the human race than anyone else his age.”

Facebook has recently taken steps to improve its privacy policies, and to give its users more rights to determine what other users and third party applications may see about them.

“Facebook knows who is going to have a love affair before we do,” Moglen said. Through accessing server logs, it can see whom “obsessively checks profiles,” he explained. People may also be telling others more about themselves than they realize.

In a dramatic example of that notion, a group of graduate students working with Moglen were able to use data from Facebook to identify homosexuals by examining their social mesh, pictures, and other information posted to the site.

“It’s not what they had in mind, and it’s not what we had in mind for them,” Moglen said. The biggest privacy problem, he noted, may be that people do not realize what is and isn’t discoverable about them.

Regardless of what steps Facebook has taken to address privacy concerns, Moglen believes that its business model is itself misuse. “It’s bad; it should be obsolete–not illegal. We are technologists, and we should fix it,” he told attendees.

The underlying social process that forces Facebook along is nothing more than perceived convenience, Moglen said. “Convenience is said to dictate you need Facebook in return to spying all the time, because web servers are so terrible to run.”

The “Freedom Box”

Running our own servers and keeping our logs is the solution to the problem, Moglen said. He proposed creating a “freedom box” device that is pocket-sized and portable, with a built-in Web server.

“If someone wants to know what is happening on your server, they can get a search warrant,” Moglen said. “Your home is your castle, and the place where your fourth amendment rights sort of exist…when the Supreme Court is not in session.”

The freedom box would come pre-loaded with social networking software, use dynamic DNS, and replicate itself on trusted peers so that users still maintain a permanent online presence, Moglen explained. Existing open-source software would be up to the task, he suggested.

Moglen pitched a business model for the freedom box: end users pay $29.99 for a lifetime of use, get “great social networking,” “strong software,” and “no spying for free.” The idea is to create an economy of scale with many hundreds of thousands of users.

Attendees at the event seemed skeptical about the freedom box concept–their questions about it ranged from issues surrounding configuration and maintenance, and ISPs terms and use, to the perceived difficulty of building distributed systems. Me, I’m intrigued by the idea of the freedom box in theory, but I’m not convinced that it could easily become a viable alternative to Facebook. Why? Because, “all my friends use it,” and people may not understand the value of peer-to-peer computing.

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Gears still doesn’t work in Safari under Snow Leopard, and Chrome for OS X lacks the built-in Gears that’s one of the benefit of Chrome for Windows. And the future of Gears is still murky at best. But if you use Snow Leopard and Firefox, you should be able to get access to Gmail’s offline features and other Gears-enabled offline tools in Google Docs, Zoho, Remember the Milk, and other services. Soon, I hope.

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Gmail’s extremely useful offline access feature has graduated from Labs and is now “a regular part of Gmail.” Users of Google’s mail service can now read, compose, and manage mail even when they don’t have a working Internet connection. Well, many folks can–but not Mac users who are running the current version of Apple’s operating system, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Offline Gmail depends on Google’s Gears framework, and Gears doesn’t work in Snow Leopard.

I was hoping that Google’s announcement of offline Gmail’s formal debut would clarify the status of Gears in general and Gears on Snow Leopard in particular, ideally with an “Offline Gmail doesn’t work on Snow Leopard, but we’re working on it,” or at least with a “Sorry, Snow Leopard users, offline Gmail doesn’t work with your OS.” But nope–Snow Leopard isn’t mentioned.

Actually, Gears isn’t mentioned either. Which is kind of peculiar given that the blog post with the news explains how to enable offline Gmail. When I try to turn it on, I’m immediately told that Gears is a necessity.

That’s in Firefox–but when I try to install Gears, I get dumped at a page at the Gears page that explains the technology but doesn’t tell me I can’t install it on my OS. If I didn’t know about the compatibility issue, I’d still be staring bemusedly at my screen and wondering what was wrong. (In Safari, Gmail tells me that my browser doesn’t support offline access.)

I don’t think it’s paranoid to take this as the latest sign that Google is giving up on Gears in favor of HTML 5, which will (eventually) enable similar capabilities. I hope I’m wrong, though. I’d love to see a post at the Gears blog (which hasn’t been updated since May) serve as a definitive update on the state of Gears. Even if its state is…moribund.

Meanwhile, Gmail Offline Access is pretty darn neat, if you can get it…

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The new pricing starts at $5 a year for 20GB of space, and go up to $4,096 (!) for 16TB (!!). These fees only matter after you’ve used up all the service’s free space–7GB+ for Gmail, and 1GB for Picasa–and there’s no discount as you buy more capacity. No matter which plan you get, you’re paying a quarter a gigabyte. Until yesterday, the company was charging $20 a year for 10GB, or $2 a gigabyte, or eight times as much.

Google had maintained the old price for two years, during which the cost of hard disks has nosedived, so to some extent the new pricing is just catching up with economic reality. The company says that the new cost is similar to what you’d pay per gigabyte for an external drive. But while it’s true that you’ll pay around a quarter a gig for something like a Seagate FreeAgent drive, you’re buying the drive and renting your Google space. Over three years, the FreeAgent’s total cost per gig remains a quarter, while you’ll have paid 75 cents a gig to Google.

(Not that I’m complaining: I remember paying $250 for a 500MB hard drive–or $500 a gigabyte–in the mid 1990s.)

How do the new prices compare with competitive Web services? It’s kind of hard to do the math. Yahoo, for instance, says that Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage for free; unlimited free storage for Flickr is $25 a year. Online storage services such as Box.net and  SugarSync charge way more than Google does, but let you use their space for files of all sorts, and offer lots more features.

Ultimately, the target audience for Google online storage in its current form isn’t gigantic. You gotta think that the percentage of Gmail users who need more than 7GB of space is tiny, and that most Picasa users can make do with 1GB. (Picasa continues to feel like it’s aimed at newbies–the most hardcore photo shares I know tend to use Flickr or SmugMug.) What would really change everything would be Google rolling out the mythical Gdrive–a true hard drive in the sky–at the prices it’s charging for Gmail and Picasa. I’m guessing we will see Gdrive someday, but I don’t have a clue when it’ll show up or how much storage you’ll get, at what price.

(And sorry, but I’m still sitting here slackjawed at Google’s 16TB-for-$4,096 pricing plan. Wonder how big the market is for that?)

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A few of the points he made:

• In response to customer requests for more information after an outage earlier this year, Google introduced the Google Apps Status Dashboard, which indicates whether any of the Google Apps are experiencing services disruptions, and includes information on the nature of any problems and what Google is doing to address them.
• It decided to provide information about what caused service problems to paying Google Apps customers within 48 hours of an incident, and now releases this information to everybody via the Dashboard. (As I write, it hasn’t done so yet for yesterday’s disruption, but it’s still got time to meet its deadline.)
• The company doesn’t want to clog up the Gmail blog with information on each and every malfunction, but will post about serious issues that affect a lot of folks. (It hasn’t done so for yesterday’s outage.)
• When an Apps Status Dashboard said that only “a small subset” of Gmail users were having problems yesterday, Google believed that to be the case. It later learned that more customers were affected, and while it said so in a statement to the press it didn’t update the dashboard.
• Does Google have an official stance on whether Gmail is unusually flaky, or simply operates in a way bigger spotlight than most e-mail providers? “If you look at our reliability compared to on-premises e-mail, we absolutely perform better,” Kovacs said. “We welcome the scrutiny.”

Kovacs told me that the Google search engine is so dependable that many people use it to test whether their Internet connection is working. “For a whole bunch of reasons, it’s hard to make e-mail as reliable,” he said. ”People expect us to be perfect, and our goal is to be near-perfect…In September, we haven’t done as good a job as we want, but the good news is that the team is learning” from technical problems as they occur.

My take? The Google Apps Status Dashboard does most of the things Google should be doing to communicate with the world about Gmail mishaps, but an awful lot of Gmail users don’t seem to be aware it exists. (I know that in part because whenever there’s a Gmail glitch, a lot of them Google for “Is Gmail down” and end up at this old Technologizer post). If there’s any way to get directly from Gmail to the Status Dashboard, I can’t find it, and it’s not easy to find information about it via Gmail’s help system.

Yup, I know that references to the Dashboard at Gmail can only help so much–if Gmail is totally of commission, the pointers will be, too. But it would be in everybody’s interest if Google did everything in its power to alert the millions of folks who rely on Gmail to the fact that there is a place to go for information on disruptions, and for explanations of what happened once the problems are over?

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MediaPost’s story leaves multiple obvious questions unaddressed, so I’m cautious about expressing any opinion at all about this story. The biggest one: Does anyone know who the Gmail account belongs to, and has anyone made any attempt to contact its owner other than Rocky Mountain’s initial e-mail? Do we know that the recipient is using the account at all? Do we know who this person is?

The temptation to heap scorn upon District Court Judge James Ware is obvious, but I’m most appalled by the reported initial actions of Rocky Mountain Bank. Why was anyone there e-mailing Social Security numbers to anyone? The company has a security statement on its site explaining the measures it takes to protect customers’ Social Security numbers, but I find no acknowledgement of this Gmail incident. (“Dear customer: We accidentally leaked your private information to a random stranger, and we’re not sure what he or she is doing with it. Our apologies, etc., etc.”)

While I was rummaging around the Rocky Mountain site hoping to find useful information, I clicked on the Letter From CEO link, and got this:

Doesn’t exactly inspire vast amounts of confidence, does it?

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For about two and a half hours this morning, some Gmail users found that their contacts or the entire service was unavailable. Once the service bounced back, folks continued to debate whether Google outages are a sign of serious trouble or not.

The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen quotes a Gartner study that says corporate e-mail is only available 95.5 % of the time on average, and says Gmail is more robust than many:

About 150 million people have Gmail accounts, making its failures highly public. Even if the service is available 99.9% of the time – the service level that Google guarantees for its corporate customers – it will be unavailable for about nine hours a year. That looks to be around the amount of time that just nearly everyone on the planet notices these failures.

GigaOm’s Om Malik, however, is a nonplussed Google customer:

What really bothers me is the crap Google posts on its Google Apps status page. “We are aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users,” it posted this morning. Seriously, guys? If you look at the number of people complaining on Twitter and Facebook, it sure doesn’t look like only a small subset of users is affected by this.

Google didn’t define what it meant by small–but when a service has as many customers as Gmail does, even a small percentage adds up to a lot of unhappy campers who can’t get their stuff done.

At 9:58am, Google’s Apps Status reported that the glitch had been resolved, and apologized for the disruption. But it didn’t explain what had happened. And unlike the last significant Gmail outage, this one went unacknowledged by the Gmail blog.

Me, I’m still willing to believe that Gmail’s track record for reliability is still respectable. But I’d like to see the company consistently address major outages on the blog, telling us all what happened–even if the circumstances are dreary and technical. The company’s blogs are pretty good as is, but wouldn’t they be even better if they reliably tackled difficult Google news as well as cheery rollouts of new services? And wouldn’t concerned Google customers feel better if the company gave them as much evidence as possible that it takes outages really seriously?

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Then I checked the Google Apps status page, which confirmed that something was amiss but didn’t mention contacts (I’m also not sure why it calls it “Google Mail,” but let’s avoid addressing that for now):

Lastly, I turned to Twitter, which rarely explains why something is going on, but which can certainly help determine whether it’s widespread. It did confirm that some people can’t get into Gmail, period:

Whatever’s going on, it comes less than a month after Gmail’s last major disruption. When this is sorted out, I hope that Google not only publishes an explanatory blog post, but also one about that addresses more overarching issues concerning Gmail reliability.

So are you having Gmail issues this morning?

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