Google Green - The Story of Send

http://www.google.com/green/storyofsend

by mayanksinghal • 14 years ago

142 60 14 years ago

My first thought was green washing, but I do not know enough about Google to judge. Are they really this environmentally aware?

cgs1019• 14 years ago

Yes, relentlessly so.

ScotterC2• 14 years ago

As mentioned, they are relentlessly green because they're in a wonderful situation where it saves them a lot of money.

The green washing aspects would be carbon offsets and such because those are still up for debate as to whether they really have any positive net effect.

Edit: Got a downvote so I thought I'd clarify. Carbon offsets are the act of paying for carbon neutrality. No matter how efficient or environmentally friendly Google is, they can't possibly be carbon neutral with all their energy use unless they use primarily nuclear power with some hydro, solar and wind built in. Therefore they buy carbon offsets, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset, which allow them to advertise that they're carbon neutral. The controversy over them stems from the fact that they're very similar to indulgences from the catholic church in the time of Martin Luther; paying for greenness isn't actually being green.

jrockway2• 14 years ago

Google picks offsetting projects that are more valuable than average; details are here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

I saw a talk recently about how much solar and wind power Google buys, and it's not at all cost effective. Google does it because they think it's cool, not because it saves them money. (But, the rate of return on the investment into wind infrastructure tends to be pretty good; wind power can be sold at a higher price than regular power.)

As an example, look at the Googleplex in Maps some time; all the parking spaces are covered with solar cells to charge the specially-converted fleet of plug-in-hybrids available for employees to borrow during the day. Building solar cells and custom-modding cars to give to employees for free is not exactly "saving them a lot of money". But it sure is cool.

dude_abides• 14 years ago

After watching this video, can anyone still justify the existence of Adobe Flash in this world?

dugmartin• 14 years ago

Yes - this demo pegged my 4 core cpu on Chrome/Windows 64.

magicalist• 14 years ago

That seems unlikely. For an accelerated tab you'll have the Tab process, the GPU process, and the Browser process. Even if you pegged all three (which is extremely unlikely considering the content), you'd still have a core to spare.

There's a point in there about the relative maturity of graphics code, but let's keep things honest (also, I think the Mac/Windows divide on Flash would be lessened if everyone had to use Flash on the other platform for a while. Imagine your CPU doing that on virtually every page that decides to embed a Flash ad and you'll get some idea of what it's like on a Mac).

icebraining2• 14 years ago

Yet it ran fine on my single core two year old netbook on Firefox/Linux, while Flash rarely does.

Of course, Flash on Linux is even worse than on Windows.

eevilspock2• 14 years ago

Must be a Windows or Chrome problem. On my dual core 3-year-old Mac, Safari stayed between 20 and 30%.

masklinn2• 14 years ago

Sounds like what Flash does on linux or OSX, 1:1 perfect replacement!

Gring• 14 years ago

Well, it crashed my browser consistently everytime I openened the page (Safari 5.0.4 on Windows), so it sure lives up to flash in that department :-(

aubergene• 14 years ago

It looks like parts of it were authored in Flash and converted using http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/

vnorby• 14 years ago

Push your back and forward buttons on your browser in the middle of one of the animations. That is seriously cool.

hk_kh• 14 years ago

Also, move the vertical scrollbar up and down...

masklinn2• 14 years ago

And it even works correctly in Firefox 3.6 (actually Camino), including sounds.

I am impressed.

dm8• 14 years ago

Insanely cool!

Any resident Googlers out here: Who works on such projects? Is it a 20% project? Or there is some dedicated team to do stuff like this?

Edit: Downvotes? Really?

mattupstate• 14 years ago

It was done in part by an agency called B-Reel. They do quite a bit of work with Google.

http://www.b-reel.com/

mrtron• 14 years ago

How was this made? The browser scrollbar is even perfectly useable.

evincarofautumn• 14 years ago

Very well, that’s how. A quick look reveals that each scene is a section, the assets are linked with data attributes, and the rest is fancy combinations of TweenJS and Three.js animations, coordinated by /assets/js/main.min.js (which also handles the invisible history).

thisisblurry• 14 years ago

It also appears that Swiffy, the SWF-to-HTML converter (http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/) was used for helping to generate some of those animations.

kodablah• 14 years ago

Although they don't appear to use it, there is a project out there which does pathing like this: http://joelb.me/scrollpath/

KeithMajhor• 14 years ago

It's plain HTML5. That scrolling behavior isn't a freebie. The scroll bar you see is actually for an empty div. There's an attached scroll event handler that they're likely using to run the animation.

famousactress3• 14 years ago

I can't decide whether this is in explanation or apology for the fact that gmail is crazy slow.

VikingCoder• 14 years ago

My GMail is consistently faster than my corporate Outlook, on the LAN, in a company with ~200 employees. This has been true of every company I've worked at.

famousactress3• 14 years ago

I don't currently have Outlook/Exchange. I suppose if I did it's possible that gmail would seem much nicer to me than it currently does.

adamt• 14 years ago

My experiences with gmail are very positive. I have about about 10GB of mail across 4 gmail/apps accounts with about 100k messages, and the performance is almost always instant (search, send, read, file). Furthermore if I travel to the other side of the world (which I do 3-4 times a year) then it continues to offer a quality level of service. I've never seen any in-house system get close to what I get from gmail.

famousactress3• 14 years ago

You and @VikingCoder make similar points. I suppose it's possible that I suffer slower gmail than you guys (I am mostly using a company 'apps' account, maybe that matters).

It's also possible that you find gmail awesome because you're comparing it to an in-house system. I'm not. I'm comparing it to Asana, Quora, StackOverflow, or even other some GOOG products. In my world Gmail lines up with JIRA more often than with the tools whose performance consistently delight me.

AVTizzle• 14 years ago

This is absolutely delightful. Interacting with this graphic practically tickled.

nkurz2• 14 years ago

Beautiful animation, which almost perfectly reflects Google's transformation from a engineering-driven tech company with a flair for beautiful solutions to a advertising-driven "ideas" company with a penchant for meaningless marketspeak. Wow, their servers are 93% efficient!

I was sort of hoping it would be an explanation of why they thought it was a good idea to have the Send button in one spot for new messages and in another when you reply. Double tricky bonus points for putting the Spam button in the same place as the send button when it moves!

ubercore• 14 years ago

It's not at all marketspeak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply_unit_(computer)#Ef...

nkurz2• 14 years ago

Upvoted because I appreciate pedantic responses, but I'm familiar with PSU efficiency standards. I still feel confident saying it is nonsense to say that "We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient" and would bet that this was written by a non-technical marketing person.

My overclocked I7 downstairs is also using a power supply that claims to be 90%+ efficient, and blows out enough hot air to warm the room. But this is from the processor, not the PSU. It would not make any sense to say that the entire computer is 90% efficient unless we were rating it as a space heater, in which case I'd feel safe claiming 99%+.

I don't even know what it would mean to say that a given server is X% efficient. A percentage of what?

nollidge• 14 years ago

Looks totally messed up in Safari for Windows. I just started using it, is that typical of WinSafari with newfangled HTML5 type stuff?

_delirium• 14 years ago

Not too detailed, but a nice overview that I think succeeds in having some information while being engaging.

The only thing that particularly confused me was this line:

> We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient.

How do you measure overall efficiency of a server as a percentage, rather than some kind of compute-per-watt metric? I assume it's not 93% of the theoretically optimal electron->computron conversion factor. ;-) The only thing I can guess is that it's the average efficiency of the power supplies?

SEMW• 14 years ago

> The only thing I can guess is that it's the average efficiency of the power supplies?

Googling suggests the most efficient server power power supplies available do indeed have average efficiencies of around 93% (e.g. http://goo.gl/R1HqV ), so yup, that seems likely.

riffraff• 14 years ago

> the temperature on our server floors at a warm 80 degrees

and after ten seconds of open mouthed astonishment, my metric brain realizes they are probably talking about Fahrenheit

furyg3• 14 years ago

Also:

> That means we don’t need as much energy-intensive air-conditioning, and our employees get to wear shorts to work.

As someone who is in warm datacenters often, "get to" is a bit of a positive spin on it...

karpathy• 14 years ago

I first figured out something was fishy when they mentioned that it allows their employees to come to work in shorts.

bawllz• 14 years ago

Didn't you know they cook chicago-style steaks on their floor? its one of the perks of working at google! Not to mention the steaks are 100% organic and their automatic troughs operate at 93% efficiency.

GreenNight• 14 years ago

And it's already corrected in there:

>One way we save energy is by keeping the temperature on our server floors at a warm 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Either that or I'm seeing a different one.

Eduard• 14 years ago

On the way to the last information spot, your Google Mail goes through an undisclosed rack. This rack symbolizes the new NSA data spy center in Utah.

pirateking• 14 years ago

That quick stop caught my attention too. I'm thinking the same as you as to what it symbolizes. If so, happy to see it was at least represented on the tour.

inportb2• 14 years ago

In Chromium on my netbook, I could not figure out how to view this awesome thing that everyone's talking about. It looks like the page is supposed to scroll down, but I could not do it for lack of a vertical scrollbar. The horizontal scrollbar doesn't reveal anything useful.

enobrev• 14 years ago

Click the "Start The Story" button (if you see it). It animates through a scene in a side-scrolling manner, but there's no manual scrolling.

inportb2• 14 years ago

Thanks. I saw that button after scaling the page down a couple of steps. Really amazing stuff.

tripzilch• 14 years ago

Oh wow, a blank white screen. Took me a while to figure out what's going on, but I disabled Javascript for google.com (makes their search result pages so much less annoying).

Guess they forgot to put a "please enable JS to view this" message in.

But it looks nice! I haven't watched it entirely yet, though.

redstripe• 14 years ago

If google was truly sincere about going green then it wouldn't be so protective of it's data centre energy efficiency innovations. It's great that they're doing lots of work to benefit themselves - but don't try to spin it like it's done out of concern for the environment.

slewis• 14 years ago

They did help start this: http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/about

nanijoe• 14 years ago

The data you send through google spends very little time touching their own equipment, so the energy efficiency is of little , if any impact unless it can be spread to a majority of the providers whose equipment my data touches on its was to and from google.. A quick traceroute shows me that there ar 10 router hops in between my Laptop and www.gmail.com. If all the 10 devices are not 'green' , then what net impact does Google's data center being 'green' have?

Drbble2• 14 years ago

Transmission is a small fraction of the work that goes into your email experience.

mkopinsky• 14 years ago

100 Searches = 1 hour of a laptop

Really? That seems like a heck of a lot for just 100 searches. I guess this must be including all the googlebot etc. consumption as well.

hsuresh• 14 years ago

Yup, that caught my attention too. And i think it puts things in perspective - Google search is a really really complex system. The fact that 1 year of Gmail usage roughly translates to about only 6% power usage as 100 searches is insane.

rurounijones• 14 years ago

Can anyone explain the following in the code?

          <div class="overlayContentWrapper video displayNone" data-id="1" data-url="lJnlgM1yEU0">
            <h5>
              Title 2
            </h5>
            <div class="overlayViewWrapper"></div>
            <p>
              Chupa chups caramels tart carrot cake gum bears bear claw. Topping powder chocolate
              bar dragée. Tootsie roll tart lollipop pastry pi donut faworki danish. Jelly beans
              pudding jujubes bear claw jello marshmallow marzipan. Icing powder jelly beans. Pie
              sweetly rolling topping donut ice cream sweet roll cake a cheesecake. Candy chocolate
              cake gummies powder pudding pie sweet.
            </p>
          </div>

Some sort of placeholder used to size elementS?

eevilspock2• 14 years ago

Probably a list of future Android version names :)

mlf• 14 years ago

Although the page and everything on it are beautiful, I can't help but think that this kind of portrayal perpetuates the "series of tubes" myth about how the internet functions.

Google Green - The Story of Send

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