Google’s Todd Jackson carries the weight of the web on his shoulders. As the product manager for Gmail, it’s his responsibility to make sure your inbox experience is fast, secure and always available. Jackson is also the product manager for Buzz, Google’s real-time social sharing system that launched in February and was promptly criticized over privacy issues and its “noise” problem. Talk about a tough gig.

We got the chance to ask Jackson about the inner workings of the Gmail team, what’s ahead for Buzz as far as user controls, and what it feels like to bear the collective rage of Gmail’s 140-million-plus users when the system takes a dive.

Webmonkey: Do you think we’re going to see the death of the desktop e-mail client anytime soon?

Todd Jackson: We don’t like to think of it that way (laughs). No comment! Seriously, though, we think deploying an app in the browser is something that easily makes sense to users now. They can log in on any computer, all their stuff is in the cloud. It’s just easier. And for us, we can push frequent updates and improve the product iteratively.

At Google, we run our own business on Gmail — we call this “eating our own dog food.”

Webmonkey: So do you suffer the same service outages as the general public?

Jackson: We do. When Gmail goes down, it goes down for us. That’s one of our first alerts.

Webmonkey: What happens in your office at Google when Gmail goes down?

Jackson: Everybody freaks out (laughs). Our Site Reliability Engineers — SREs, whose job it is to keep the servers alive — have extensive monitoring systems. They have this giant wall of dashboards that chart the system health. They also carry pagers. Even in a very small outage that only affects 0.01 percent of users, the SRE guys will get paged. They run to the dashboards and figure out what’s gone wrong. In a larger outage, we all switch to an alternate communications channel like IRC. We also use the bug reporting system inside Google to communicate during outages.

Our response time has gotten much better. But we definitely feel the pain. When Gmail goes down, that’s one of the worst feelings in the world.

Webmonkey: I completely agree.

Jackson: The outages we’ve had, we’ve learned from, and it’s made the system better as a result. For example, we changed things so one component going down can’t bring down the system as a whole. Gmail used to be reliant on the Contacts system, so when Conacts was unavailable, Gmail would be unavailable. We changed it so that won’t happen anymore.

We’ve also gotten better at communicating with users. We built something called the Google Apps Status dashboard. Every day, we log anything that went wrong with the system. It answers that question, “Is Gmail down for me or is it down for everyone?”

Webmonkey: How much effort do you put into improving Gmail’s speed and performance?

Jackson: Performance is huge. We think of it as a feature. Speed is the best feature your product can have.

Last year Google introduced these performance enhancements to Picasa to make flipping through photos faster, and the usage more than doubled. When a site gets twice as fast, it often gets more than twice as much usage.

Webmonkey: Gmail is one of the most high-profile products at Google. Because it’s so popular and widely used, do you have to be more careful when you change it?

Jackson: It’s a very demanding product to work on, and there’s a very high bar for everything we do. We know that when we’re shipping something, it’s going out to a very wide and very large audience. This is why whenever we launch new features, we have such rigorous testing requirements.

Whenever we do something new, all the Googlers are using it and immediately giving us feedback. They’re very boisterous. And most new features go through Gmail Labs as experiments first.

Webmonkey: What Gmail Labs experiments are your personal favorites?

Jackson: Undo Send is my favorite, without question. I use it all the time, it saves a lot of embarrassment. One of my other favorites just graduated, it’s Search Auto-Complete. We’re all power users internally, so I navigate Gmail almost entirely through keyboard shortcuts and search.

Keyboard shortcuts are used by less than two percent of our users. Then again, they’re kind of nerdy. How do you explain to somebody that J goes down and K goes up?

Webmonkey: How much do you use Buzz internally?

Jackson: A lot. We have a very dense network inside Google, you see all kinds of stuff. It’s become a secondary communication channel. You can be kept up to date on what everyone is doing in a way that wasn’t possible when internal communications were just e-mail and chat-based. The level of transparency in passive communication has improved.

Webmonkey: When Buzz launched, there was friction among Gmail users over things like inbox control and the increased level of noise. What was your reaction to that?

Jackson: We learned from it very quickly. We bring certain Buzz items into your inbox when you get involved in a conversation: when people comment on your posts, when people comment on your comments or when you’re @replied.

On one level, it works really well, because on a lot of these services, people comment on one of your posts and you never find out about it. When we deployed this publicly, we found that especially for accounts that have a ton of followers, these notifications would get out of control.

To fix this, we launched two new features: Settings for which Buzz items come into your inbox, and a second feature which shows a banner above each item that comes into your inbox that tells you why it’s there — “Mike, you @replied to this” — along with a link to mute that conversation.

One of the things we heard loud and clear is “Buzz in my inbox is cool, but it gets noisy.” We’re trying to improve things as fast as possible.

Webmonkey: Personally, I found it troubling. When I tweet or check-in or comment, those are things that happen “out there” on the web. But when I’m in Gmail, it’s like my inner sanctum, my bedroom. Buzz launches and all of a sudden, there are people who are friends of friends, people I may not even know, who are showing up and hanging out in my bedroom.

Jackson: That’s something we need to improve. We want you to be able to engage in the conversations that you want to engage in, but not be spammed by the conversations that you don’t care about. The controls we launched recently get us a step towards that, but we’re not there yet. We want to give you the controls to manage what comes in to “your bedroom” and what doesn’t, but we also want to get it to the point where you don’t have to think too hard about how to manage it.

See Also:

• Hands On With Google Buzz – It’s a Stream in Your Inbox
• Google Launches Buzz, Its New Social Media Sharing Platform
• Gmail Features Graduate From Labs to Big Leagues

Buzz integrates directly with your Gmail inbox, so updates and comments appear along side your e-mails. It bears a strong resemblance to other sharing platforms like FriendFeed or Twitter and Facebook’s News Feed — imagine all of those magically inserted into your Gmail inbox and you get the picture.

It has all the makings of a powerful, real-time social platform that’s ready to compete with, or compliment, those established players.

But for now, Buzz is a bit of a mystery. Only a handful of people are actually using it, so the sharing features don’t really feel that social. It’s as if you’re broadcasting into an empty void. In that regard, my first day with Buzz reminds me of my first few days with Google Wave, or my first few days with FriendFeed. That feeling of being in a big empty room will change once Buzz opens up and more of my friends join, just as it did for those other services.

There’s another more serious limitation: What happens in Buzz stays in Buzz. You can’t use it to post to your favorite social networks. You can add feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and any other social site (except for Facebook, notably), and all that stuff gets aggregated into a single feed on Buzz where your friends can leave comments. But when you post a status update or share any sort of link or media on Buzz, you don’t have the option to CC Twitter or FriendFeed.

Google noted during Tuesday’s launch event that it does plan on adding the ability to post out to Twitter and other services soon. And, since all public posts in Buzz are available as an XML feed, you could hack together a way to post to Twitter if you know what you’re doing. But for now, for most every user, Google Buzz remains a one-way street.

Once those two things change — the volume problem and the cross-posting problem — Buzz will be a serious player on the social web. Right now, it’s worth playing with and getting used to, because once it gains momentum, it’s going to become part of our daily lives. It’s that easy to use, and that powerful.

Here’s how it works

Once you’re given access, you’ll see Buzz appear in your Gmail sidebar just below your Inbox. Click it and you’ll see something familiar: a white box inviting you to post a status update.

When you first arrive in Buzz, it’s automatically set up to follow the few dozen people in your Google Contacts list that you correspond with the most. It’s a rather genius bit of engineering — Buzz taps into your Gmail network so you don’t need to go through that process of importing contacts or “finding friends,” one of the most painful experiences on the social web.

Each post to Buzz can be public (for the whole web to see) or private (you select which friends see it). The default is public, but you can also address posts directly to a friend using a variation on Twitter’s @ reply syntax, like this: @joe@gmail.com.

Send one of those updates and it shows up in your stream and in his stream, and anyone following either one of you will see it. But the note will also show up in his Gmail inbox, so you can make sure he sees it.

You can type text of course, but if you put in a link, Buzz will go gather photos or videos that live behind that link and give you the option of adding them to your update. Photos show up in a nice little gallery of thumbnails. Videos get embedded and can be played inline.

Above that white box, you can see the number of services Buzz is aggregating for you. Click on that number and you can add or subtract services to control what shows up in your feed.

Also above that white box is the number of people you’re following. Click on that number and you can add or subtract followers. This will control whose updates show up in your feed.

All of your activities, comments and all those of your friends will show up here. Everything appears in real-time and the updates are very fast. If you or one of your friends posts something boring that doesn’t have any comments or media associated with it, Buzz will eventually collapse it. So long, clutter.

People can like, comment and e-mail anything that shows up in their feed, whether it was posted by you or them or whoever.

If you want to see your public feed of everything you’re sharing, check out your Google Profile (you know you have one, right?).

There’s a new Buzz tab that displays all your public posts. Google Profiles and Buzz are intricately tied together.

Posts can be geotagged, and the location-aware features really comes to life when you post from a mobile with GPS inside. There’s a mobile webapp optimized for Android and iPhone browsers — surf to m.google.com/app/buzz

Buzz will figure out where you are using the mobile browser’s geolocation abilities through HTML5. The interface for picking your location is elegant.

Buzz will then show you recent posts around your current location. It can also plot nearby Buzz posts on a layer in Google Maps.

Clearly, Buzz mimics the functionality of Facebook’s News Feed — minus all the Farmville, Mafia Wars and Superpoke notifications. It draws upon a common vernacular for sharing and commenting that Facebook helped establish.

So, is it a replacement for Facebook, or a compliment to Facebook? In a way, Google’s rapidly-expanding social stack — Buzz, Gmail, Contacts, Chat, Profiles, Picasa and YouTube — could be seen as a clone of Facebook that operates on the open web. If anything, it’s a version of Facebook for people who never got into Facebook, or chose not to participate because of its closed nature.

No matter how it ends up impacting Facebook, Buzz will go down in history as a transformative step in Google’s timeline. It brings a whole new utility to what is already our most critical social tool — the e-mail inbox.

See also:

• Google Launches Buzz, Its New Social Media Sharing Platform
• Google Takes On Facebook, Twitter with ‘Buzz’
• Microsoft, Yahoo Diss Google’s Buzz

Buzz is fully integrated with Gmail’s inbox. You can go to buzz.google.com and turn it on right now if you’re a Gmail user.

Buzz is more than a little bit like Twitter — and a whole lot like Facebook and FriendFeed. Anything you post is automatically sent out to the people on your Google Contacts list you interact with the most. All updates are real-time, and anything you share is open for comments. You can also post privately to a select group of friends.

Posts can be geotagged, and the location-aware features really come to life when you post from a mobile with GPS inside. Buzz will figure out where you are and show you recent posts around your current location.

You can post status updates directly to Buzz or pull in posts from Twitter or FriendFeed, YouTube videos, photos from Flickr or Picasa, links (complete with photos) from Google Reader or any source listed in your Google Profile. There’s no Facebook integration.

You can’t post from Buzz out to Twitter or other services — it’s a one-way street for now, but Google says it hopes add that ability later. All public updates are available as XML. Also, OAuth, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub and Activity Streams are all supported out of the box, but FacebookConnect is not. More details about the APIs and the supported data formats are at the Buzz Google Code site.

Read Ryan Singel’s full coverage of the Buzz launch on Wired’s Epicenter blog.

And here’s a video: