Kenyan developer who tried making Gmail faster
Google recently launched their social networking site, Google+. Twitter and mailing lists like Skunkworks have been abuzz with people requesting for invites from those lucky enough to have received invites and joined the service. 7 years ago, Google launched their now popular email service, Gmail, in a similar fashion.
Three years later, Gmail was to open to the public. In Kenya, Gmail could not have had a better timing as it was launched at a time when the Internet was experiencing a huge growth in the region. Many young people in Kenya joined into the Gmail bandwagon.
Gmail users in Kenya however faced a major challenge -- the region was not connected to undersea fiber cable, this would only happen towards the end of 2009. Internet access was expensive and quite slow as the country relied on satellite connectivity. This meant that email services like Gmail, using its heavy Ajax interface, took quite a while to load, at times failing to load.
John Karanja is one of the early users and a fan of Gmail. Karanja was concerned about the time it took to perform transactions on his favorite email client. As a developer, Karanja was convinced that he could make the situation better. He then set out to make Gmail faster to access, and it worked - that is until he Google's legal department contacted him.
We talked to Karanja on his efforts, and what happened to them.
How did you conceptualize the idea?
The idea arose out of a problem I was having with accessing my Gmail account back in 2007 which I was using to communicate with my clients. I was freelancing in a cyber cafe and when many people in the café where accessing the internet, we could not access Gmail because of low bandwidth problem. This meant that I was delaying my client's projects and it became very frustrating for me. I then came across an open source tool that made use of the Google mail API (Application Programming Interface) on the internet.
ajax email client - News
This meant that email services like Gmail, using its heavy Ajax interface, took quite a while to load, at times failing to load. John Karanja is one of the early users and a fan of Gmail. Karanja was concerned about the time it took to perform
The other weird thing about all of these recent improvements is that it feels as if you can get ahead of the AJAX, so to speak… as it's doing all of it's caching, etc, in the background, it seems to get to a point where it hangs if you're moving to
Mac" program providing the same email and web hosting of iTools alongside a cloud Backup tool. Apple later added a web client for email in 2006, followed by a Web Gallery app for posting photos and videos online. Apple also released iWeb as a Mac app
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