Meeting the team behind Gmail felt a bit like meeting the Wizard of Oz (except without all that evil stuff along the yellow brick road, right?). Regardless of which side of the Google debate you stand, it would be hard not to appreciate the honest and insightful musings of the Gmail team. Here are just a few of the highlights from Gmail: Behind the Scenes:

*On Gmail invitations: “The invite model wasn’t a marketing idea, we were just afraid that it wouldn’t scale it. It’s interesting that now this model is being used by other companies as a marketing strategy.”

*On project management: “One thing we do to make the projects fun is give it nick names. Like, for one project it was called “taco town”!  Having nick names like this gave us a sense of community through laughter: it made it fun to say things like, “Let’s take a look at ‘spicy chilli chese’”.

*On criticism: After hearing danah boyd’s criticism of Google Buzz and Privacy at yesterday’s SXSW keynote (i.e. “google assumed that people wanted their social network in their email”) the GMAIL team admitted to their mistakes and has decided to invite her to speak at the Googleplex in the near future.

*On the power of visual persuasion: “People thought that Gmail got faster when we changed the color.”

*On the speed of Gmail: The team discussed at length their strategy to improve latency issues within Gmail. Essentially speed is always top priority: all new features go through testing to make sure latency isn’t added along with the feature. Added latency can kill a new feature. Latency (along with debugging) is one of the critical reasons they deployed Google Labs (allowing users to add/test new features).

*On technology: “We have this amazing technology called ‘work really, really hard’”.

Tags: Arielle Reinstein, Braden Kowitz, Edward Ho, GMAIL, Google, Jonathan Perlow, SXSW, SXSWi, Todd Jackson