What would you say you do here?
Many people come here looking for information on the Yahoo! Mail Beta. I enjoy talking about it and I like hearing comments from the people who leave them. But many times people use the comments to ask for things that I simply can’t deliver, mostly because of what I do at Yahoo!
It’s true, I work on the beta. To be more accurate, I work on a component of the beta. The beta has many moving parts, but for the most part you can pretty easily divide the application into two large chunks:
- The user interface. This piece of software that runs on your machine is what you’re actually seeing when you use the beta. Drag and drop, right click, AJAX…that’s all the user interface. It’s developed by some brilliant people, including some who joined Yahoo! when Oddpost was acquired.
- The web service. This piece of software runs on the computers at Yahoo! This is what the user interface (see the above bullet) talks to when it wants to access your mailbox. The user interface is great, but it can’t show you the contents of your mailbox without getting it from the web service.
I (and a few others) work on the second part, the web service. We don’t develop the end user features. We develop the services that make it possible for the user interface team to deliver those features. For example, the user interface developers decide it would be a good idea if they allow users to view their list of folders (sounds like something useful for a mail application). Problem is, the user interface team doesn’t have access to the list of folders in your mailbox. That’s where my group comes in. We implement a service that the user interface team can use to ask for a list of folders for a particular user mailbox.
So, what does that mean?
- In most cases, I can’t answer questions about the user interface. Like when a certain feature will be implemented. Either because I don’t know the answer (since I’m not on that team) or because I’d feel bad answering for them (what happens if I get it wrong?).
- I can’t answer questions about Calendar, Notepad or Address Book integration. There are entirely seperate teams working on those and I don’t currently interact with them.
- I’m not the right person to send feedback to. It’s not that I don’t like hearing feedback, I do. But you’ll get a better response through the beta feedback mechanism. The feedback mechanism may feel like a black hole, but anything you send does reach the development team.
- I can’t get you an invite. The only way to get invited right now is to go through the What’s New page.
- I can post release notes when I see them. I may not work on the user interface team, but I do get their release notes. I generally post them here within 12 hours of receiving them.
- I can talk about the web service as long as it doesn’t touch on any areas that are confidential in nature.
I can’t think of anything else. Hopefully that adequately describes what I do at Yahoo! If you can think of some other can he/can’t he question I didn’t cover, post it in the comments.
November 25th, 2005 at 1:15 am
I’m clear now! tks!!
November 25th, 2005 at 1:47 am
OK you’re saying you’re not intereacting with the people working on the Calendar and Notepad and Address Book???? Wow! I thought there was one Yahoo Mail team for the whole PIM.
That you’re not interacting with them right now makes me think this beta is nowhere near its end.
You sounds as if the calendar integration or the notepad integration were something completly different not even roadmapped which sort of surprises me.
November 25th, 2005 at 2:36 am
Guillaume, my work is meant specifically to expose the mailbox to the user interface. That’s why I don’t interact with those teams. That doesn’t mean that the user interface team isn’t communicating with them.
This is what I was trying to clarify in the post. The user interface team is responsible for the product you see today. My part in the beta is only to provide one of many components the user interface team depends upon.
November 25th, 2005 at 9:15 am
Thank you Ryan providing the mail beta release info to us. As far as I know, your blog is the only resource for this info (thanks to Guillaume for pointing it out in the Y-Mail Group).
I really appreciate you making this effort since it does require dealing with the many responses in the form of:
1) demands and complaints from people who assume you are the mail god and everything that touches the mail property is under your control,
2) demands and complaints from people who assume their designs for Y! properties are being implemented since they’ve spammed the feedback forms with their concepts while publically berating the current design,
3) reposting of your blog out of context and/or in a negative bent, and
Please realize that for every one of those people, there are hundreds of us who sit in quiet appreciation of your effort and mute disinterest in the self-important yammering of the others.
To that end, I was looking at the source code in my browser the other day and was amazed at the brevity of the code. This is a credit to the web services this code is calling. Nicely done. Thank you!
Joe
November 25th, 2005 at 10:41 am
Joe, wait…you mean I’m not the mail god?
Shoot, I’m going to have to go and get my business cards re-done.
That’s actually exactly the point I’m trying to get across in this post. I want to make sure that people understand I’m just an engineer working on a related component. I don’t have the power to make their wishes come true on the beta. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear all the comments people have (both good and bad). I just want to make sure people don’t have some misconception of the powers I wield on the project.
November 25th, 2005 at 12:00 pm
Ryan - You truly are a god!
November 25th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
You shouldn’t say thing like that, Skotch. It’ll just go to my head. Wait…too late.
November 25th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
Hey Ryan,
I totallly understand what you can and cannot do in your job. I was wondering, however, in the Yahoo! scheme of things, do you know if they are even going to/plan to update the calendar or notepad options in general? Before the final release of mail beta, I mean? Even later would be nice. We DO appreciate you!!!
Melinda
November 25th, 2005 at 10:44 pm
Melinda, I don’t know what the roadmap looks like for Calendar and Notepad. I do know that there are people in the company still working on them, so that should tell you something. Not only that, they have some very experienced people working on Calendar. I can’t imagine they stockpiled those smart people just to have them sit around and do nothing.
As for Notepad, they can’t have it unless they pry it from my cold, dead hands. I store all of my weekly status reports in there.
Just give it some time. Remember that Yahoo! had to go out and buy an entire company to make the mail beta a reality. Even then it took a year to get it ready enough for beta testing.
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:11 am
Office space is an awesome movie..and I can’t wait for the new Yahoo Mail Beta to go public. When do you think it will be public?
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:53 am
Well, the beta is public. It’s just that it’s only available to a limited number of people right now. I can’t say when it will be opened up to everyone. Even if I knew, I can’t tell you. It’s one of those things as an insider that I can’t talk about, unless I’d like to start looking for another job.
I like this whole getting paid thing, so you’ll just have to wait and see.
I will mention that Ethan, Product Manager for the beta, did say in a podcast that we’d be expanding the pool of beta users by quite a bit shortly.