On April 4 I wrote:

What’d really kick ass: a desktop app communicating over HTTP to my Gmail account (like Outlook Express communicates with Hotmail). Dredging through long conversations over a browser will not be fun, I assure you (anyone tried really long threads on Google Groups?).

…to which a couple of people have written over to say that they’ve been trying out Gmail’s conversation view, which in their opinion is the greatest thing since sliced bread and is tons better than Google Groups’ threads.

The problem here is one of UI scalability: newsgroups often have very large threads (100+ messages at 7+ levels of nesting are not uncommon) unlike personal email, where 25+ messages at 3 levels would be a big deal. Gmail’s “flat” conversation view is ideal for personal messages, but it won’t induce folk who subscribe to high volume mailing lists like india-gii or debian-user.

One other thing: Gmail should really consider a SOAP API to their compose interface. It is still far easier to send a message using Hotmail (using Hotmail’s Outlook Express integration), complete with a decent editor for HTML email - something that the current Gmail beta just can’t do yet. Of course, what’d be really good would be an IMAP/HTTPMail interface to non-archived email in one’s Gmail account.