Gmail

Gmail is open to everyone now! I had to beg for an account last summer. I speculate that some large investment finally came through and made it possible, since the maintenance and storage costs for 100M accounts alone would have easily overwhelmed the annual budget of most financial institutions on earth. On the software side, I haven't yet gotten a clue how to thread emails into conversations (the sender and subject of an email, not its message, seems to play a dominant role), though the current Google algorithm only does a passable job (but still better than Thunderbird which apparently groups by subject headings only). The more I ponder, the more I think that a relational mini-database of graphs (whose nodes are keywords parsed from a message) should work. What about the computational complexity? There must be some brilliant graph theorists inside the Googleplex.

It seems that the cool Google X is short-lived (alive for its début only). I will be taken aback if Apple is shutting it down (to me, it's a free ad for the imitable OS X). Perhaps security problems or operational issues?