Google Green - The Story of Send

[nkurz]

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]

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

[vnorby]

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

[masklinn]

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

I am impressed.

[hk_kh]

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

[riffraff]

> 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]

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]

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

[GreenNight]

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.

[bawllz]

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.

[Eduard]

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]

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.

[dm8]

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]

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/

[dude_abides]

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

[dugmartin]

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

[aubergene]

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

[Gring]

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 :-(

[mrtron]

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

[evincarofautumn]

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).

[kodablah]

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

[KeithMajhor]

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.

[famousactress]

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

[VikingCoder]

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.

[adamt]

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.

[_delirium]

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]

> 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.

[rurounijones]

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?

[eevilspock]

Probably a list of future Android version names :)

[tripzilch]

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.

[nanijoe]

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?

[Drbble]

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

[mkopinsky]

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.

[AndreasFrom]

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

[ScotterC]

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.

[cgs1019]

Yes, relentlessly so.

[inportb]

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]

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.

[redstripe]

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]

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

[mlf]

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.

[nollidge]

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

[AVTizzle]

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