Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

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Evolution of Gmail

Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.

The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).

If Google wants Gmail to pass Hotmail quickly and gain the No. 2 spot, my suggestion is to keep pumping in new enhancements through Gmail Labs and to speed up the pace at which mail storage increases. Not that I am a typical user, but I am already at 97 percent of my allotted 7,358 megabytes. One of the primary lures of Gmail has always been its seemingly endless and ever-expanding storage limits. Please don’t make me pay for more storage.

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenIDand the like all the time.

But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?

via Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID. .

Google today will finally remove the long-standing beta tag from some of its most popular web applications, most notably its wildly popular email application, Gmail.

In addition to the beta-less Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, and Talk (i.e., the rest of the Google Apps suite) will also shed the beta moniker. Gmail has notoriously worn the beta badge since its initial invite-only launch back in April of 2004. Strangely, as the New York Times points out, Google’s reasoning for keeping Gmail and other apps in beta for so long isn’t all that fleshed out:

“Obviously we haven’t had a consistent set of policies or definitions around beta,” said Matt Glotzbach, a director of product management at Google. Mr. Glotzbach said that different teams at Google had different criteria for what beta meant, and that Google felt a need to standardize those. “It was time to address the issue and bring the products out of beta,” he said.

The Times also points out that “[p]ractically speaking, the change will mean precious little to Gmail’s millions of users” who’ve been happily using Gmail in beta for years. If our recent poll on whether “beta” bothers you, it seems clear that next to no Lifehacker readers were avoiding Gmail just because of its beta label. Still, if your workplace was hesitant to adopt Google Apps because of its beta status, this move could make all the difference (a fact not lost on Google).

We’re still seeing the beta label on every Gmail account we’ve got as well as our Docs accounts, but Calendar is beta-free. Google’s rollouts are always just that—rolling—so you can probably still expect to see the rest of those beta tags drop sometime yet today or this week if they haven’t already. The Official Gmail Blog even highlights a new tongue-in-cheek Gmail Labs feature called Back to Beta that, when enabled, “[s]oothes the soul by putting the familiar beta sticker back on the Gmail logo.”

Does the beta-less Gmail, Calendar, Docs, or Talk mean anything special to you? Will it inspire you to use Google apps more confidently? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.

via Lifehacker – Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, and Talk Leave Beta – Gmail Beta.