Well, as Google looks set to become an even more important presence in our on-line lives, it's good to look back at the origins: Slashdot pointed the way, via Archive.org's Way Back Machine, to these photographs. What appears to be the Google Stanford Project frontpage is here.
And as arguments and comment about Gmail and privacy proliferate (eg, John Gilmore, 'These terms don't restate the law. They sweep it aside'; Esther Dyson, 'The difference between Gmail and all the other privacy flaps lately is that Google is upfront about what they are doing — and you can sign up or not'; the reportedly fundamental clash with German privacy laws ...), alterego, at Mindsay, has rummaged in the archived Stanford directories and found what he thinks is a photo (presumably self-posted?) of a young Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, in drag. So what? Google Weblog comments: 'I think we as a society need to move beyond our embarrassment, and admit that all founders of major companies did some pretty silly things in college — the only difference is that Sergey was dumb enough to put them on the Web for all eternity.' The first part of this I agree with; the second smacks of schadenfraude. In any case, the photo is of no interest to me (or to most other people, I imagine) — except that it demonstrates that we are all now living in a world where 'privacy' is a rapidly changing notion and perhaps we just need to be a little more robust about ... (inter alia) Gmail. As Jeff Jarvis has concluded,
Esther Dyson gets past the hysteria over privacy — the most overused word of the age, I'd argue — with Google's G-mail and finds benefit to what they're doing (it's like someone on the street seeing you staring at a map and giving you directions). If you don't want to use G-mail, don't. If you want to get a free service, that's the price.
Gmail's Terms of Use begin, 'Google welcomes feedback on this document and policy as the Gmail service is currently in an early testing stage. As Gmail evolves over the next several months, we expect to incorporate improvements in response to community feedback. Send comments to gmail-feedback@google.com.' Cory Doctorow is reported (by Dan Gillmor) as saying we should send a friendly e-mail to this Gmail feedback address. For anyone still bothered by Gmail (and how different are its Terms of Use from Yahoo's Terms of Service and policies on privacy/advertising? — see Google Blogoscoped, update 2), this is surely the advice to follow.
There are still the arguments about the trademark to be addressed, of course.
