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May 18th, 2012

Are you sitting comfortably? Here's 'The Story of Send'

Are you sitting comfortably? Here's 'The Story of Send'

'The Story of Send' tells us that Google is so hot, its employees have to wear shorts

Google and its products split opinions and loyalties. But whether you’re a big fan and avid user, or have reservations about some of the corporation’s policies, you surely have to be impressed with its technologies from time to time? Perhaps it’s just hard to connect the tiny start-up that gave us its first no-frills search engine back in the late 90s, with the huge behemoth powering the cloud of services we see today?

When Google went public in 1998, it did so under the mission statement: “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Which I guess is part of the reason that it’s still devoting effort to producing superbly executed branding and marketing projects like ‘The Story of Send’, which you’ll now find waiting to be clicked under Google Search.

The Story of Send is an animated tour of the journey of an email through Google infrastructure. It was developed and designed by Google Green, and unashamedly promotes Google’s data centre security and energy conservation credentials. Along the way you can stop off to look at galleries or watch videos that show you how Google’s data centres operate, what steps are taken on the server floor to protect data, and why some Google employees have to go to work wearing shorts.

Google says the project was an effort to show people how the journey of an email really works, because although it’s something that takes just seconds, it’s also something that has to work smoothly billions of times a day. Now, I’m assuming you probably knew that already, and also have a fair idea of the basic journey your messages have to take from your desktop to their destinations. But that’s no reason not to spend a few minutes watching The Story of Send. It’s great.

If you’ve ever worked with writers and illustrators to try and develop a simple, fun way of conveying dry, complex concepts, you’ll know that what ultimately looks simple, can prove quite a challenging task. This story though is slick, interesting and fun, and well worth the effort. The only thing I’m still trying to work out is, how do the plesiosaurs and vampires help..?


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