One Aging Geek

Monday, June 28, 2004

WSJ.com: The GMail craze

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/ ...

(The link in this post will expire in 7 days, it was emailed to me by a friend with a paid subscription)

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So is Gmail worth the hype? We haven't used our accounts enough yet to say, though we do like some of the features quite a bit, such as the threaded conversations. We do wonder what to do with all this darn space. And so little spam! The controversial ads haven't been a problem yet, and the privacy concerns seem to have died down. So if Gmail is a Ripken, perhaps it's Cal instead of Bill. Either way, by the time folks make up their minds, Google's brilliantly viral scheme may have signed up half the free world.

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It's always interesting to see the stuff that people think is unique or new in GMail. I've seen:

  • Single key keyboard shortcuts; my favorite Unix email client has had these for about 15 years and it's not unique in that
  • "threaded" conversations (really just grouping by subject); virtually every email program ever invented has this but it's not the default
  • Lack of spam; Well, duh. Every new email account enjoys a lack of spam. For a while.
  • Huge space; 1GB isn't all that much of a such. I'm about 1/8th full after a couple of months. My SBC-Yahoo DSL account recently raised the email limit to 2GB for the account and 100MB for each subaccount. Free Yahoo accounts have been raised to 100MB. Disk space is cheap, about $0.50/GB in retail quantities. Surely much cheaper in the quantities Google buys.
To me the cleverest thing GMail did was make it limited access and then let users invite their friends. The WSJ.com article refers to this as viral marketing. The ICQ program was probably the first widespread viral marketing success. The twist with GMail is that they can "throttle" the virus by controlling who and how often a user can invite friends.

There's a funny article on the net from Jeremy Zawodny about using all this free email space as archive storage. Just convert your files to email attachments and mail 'em to yourself. He predicts there will be a utility written soon to do that for you and present it as a virtual filesystem. Cute but not really likely, imo. And I don' t think JWZ is really serious.

I've got (as soon as I install my father's day present) >300GB of hard drive space with >100GB filled. Even writable DVDs at ~5GB a pop aren't big enough for backups.

A couple of gigs on someone else's server with no guarantee they won't just delete the files just isn't worth the trouble. Factor in the limits in size on a single email and the hassles of converting to and from email attachments... [update: fixed an annoying typo, changed article link to not show the whole url]