Ugh, I hate these "X looks like Y" articles.

What it comes down to is they are both trying to display the same data (picture, username, message, etc), and honestly, there are only a few ways to logically present this information. Eventually the web will migrate to a standard for displaying this kind of information.

It's like saying The New York Times looks like The Boston Globe (which looks like The Washington Post (which looks like The Wall Street Journal)).

I'd go further. I'd go so far as to call this article disingenuous.

Aside from a very superficial reading, the actual functionality of the page components for each app behave quite differently, and have different purposes in mind. To call these apps similar, disregards the fact that they are messaging systems in two distinctly different ecosystems.

First reaction: "Do Not Want ><"

It does look a lot more like G+, latest G-Doc and so on, so it feels like a natural evolution of it, but I don't like that suddenly everything became so big and sparse. I want to manage my emails and last time I checked I had a buttload of them, don't need something that makes me scroll x3 more than I already have now... Sure it looks prettier but is it more usable? I wouldn't bet on that.

Though I guess it's going to be the same as any redesign people don't like - lots of complaints and everyone will forget about it sooner rather than later.....

If you've seen the other videos, they seemed to have heard users' concerns. There's a dropdown to control density, and on top of that density is automatically adjusted based on windows size. So shrinking a window naturally causes the UI to collapse, complete with subtle animations as it does so.

Yeah, the huge sparse white space is killing me. I don't have a lot of money so I am rocking a 22" screen at 1680 x 1050. I try to squeeze every last bit of screen real estate out of it.

Hopefully someone will make a Firefox plugin to make it look like the old style.

There is a drop down to control the information density.

To me, the new look doesn't seem that much like Facebook's ui; rather, it seems to just be a Google Plussification of Gmail---a natural progression.

Unless I'm missing something, basically all of the major UI elements in the new Gmail are in exactly the same place they as in the "old" Gmail.

If you squint enough, I imagine any messaging web app with a white background and three columns would look similar to either of the inboxes.

Hmm... To me it seems like the similarity is simply that both use a typical 3 column layout. Mountains of molehills?

"dangerously similar to Facebook’s" with the only difference being "Unlike Facebook, the inbox doesn’t have a fixed width and users can choose one of four display density types". I cannot imagine what innovations are to be made in this field, but still, I like what Google did and it really looks nice, outsmarting the Facebook gloomy system.

Isn't message center just an email inbox in any case? We used to just send email to a client and the inbox would be your "message center." With html you could even make highly application specific presentations and interactions. I guess the innovation is then embedding that inside another frame to make it part of a larger application.

It's pretty good UI to give more sparse so as to appeal to more general less technical population. Facebook was one of the early implementers. Look at kid books for an example of how long sparseness and largeness has been going on for.

Does Gmail offer an option to classic as a way to retain power/early users?

I feel that Facebook is starting to look more like an email client than Gmail looking more like Facebook.

I like Yahoo Mail's new interface better out of all three of them.

This looks like Facebook just as much as the next message list in a three column layout with a bar at the top.