> Have Google really built a product out of a real human need/problem?
Are you a troll?
Maybe he is too young to remember the pre-google search experience ;)
Yes. Calendar. It was built because the purchased solution sucked. (And was insecure. Passwords in a flat file in one's home directory?)
Gmail also comes the closest of any webmail interfaces to MH.
I'm not excusing Facebook and how they make money today. These aren't the same motives that influenced their reason for being, which were a lot more focused on people and universities.