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Google to Launch Free Mail Service?
prostoalex writes "The New York Times article on Yahoo and Terry Semel's management (soul stealing form required) mentions Google preparing "to offer a free e-mail service, people close to the company said, in a bid for Yahoo's most important source of loyal customers"."
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
If they'll provide POP or IMAP access without having to pay for it like Yahoo!, I'm sure it will be quite succesfull.
thisnukes4u.net
If they can avoid yahoo's extremely bloated interface and stick with google's simplicity for their webmail, the idea might be a winner.
Of course they will need to invest a lot of effort into spam filtering for the service to be of any value.
Or it could be that they don't want someone to use the domain to create a shady business. I thought this was common practice. If they brought this domain in 2001, likelihood is that they brought it more for safety's sake.
You are naive. You probably also believe Apple is a "nice" company, too (see battery replacement plan).
I hate to spoil it for a lot of you people, but Google is no longer run by the engineers. They have a CEO. They also have a bunch of backers who want to get paid a lot of money when this company goes public. They are not in business to make you guys feel good about them. They are in business to make money.
Everybody and their dog is offering free webmail. What's so special about googlemail?
If google can combine targeted text advertising with email (like by analyzing the content of the email) then maybe they can offer some serious competition.
That would be just great. Then we could not only get tons of Viagra and penis enlargement emails, we could also tons of Viagra and penis enlargement targeted text ads. Maybe even all in the same email. Can't wait.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
(like by analyzing the content of the email)
Personally I don't want Google reading/analysing my e-mail. Even if is just some algorithm.
I beleive if Google has decided to go after new business, it would be because they decided to move into a new market, not because they wanted to act in malace against another company.
That's how every company and every business works in this country. It is for that very reason - direct competition - that we have so many awesome, cool products and services. At the end of the day, consumers want the best value for their dollar, the most choices, the most convenience. It's what a free market is all about.
So consider this, if Google creates an email service, and Yahoo starts to see some of its customers switch to Google, then Yahoo will be in a position to either a) do nothing, or b) offer something new to make Yahoo an even better service than it was before.
At the end of the day, if both services are doing a really good job, then they'll split the user base. But if one is really doing a better job than the other, that one will "win" the majority (usually). End-users will have more choices for web-based email, and we'll possibly see other services created to entice us to switch services.
To the poster (here) who talked about how Google has done one thing, and done it well - yes- that is very correct. However, that was back in 2000. Searching is something Google is undoubtedly "the daddy" off. They have moved on - groups, image search, directory, news - they are all at the top of their respective content leagues in terms of quality and service.
Whether or not the NYT article is correct or not doesn't really matter. The plain fact is that Google faces increases competition, and they need to offer more services to maintain their position as number 1. A Google email service is A) cool B) useful for people. As posters before has said, it would probably come quite feature laden, and thus be popular.
No, that would imply that you could search for mail.
If Google were to link to Google Mail, the link would appear somewhere else on the page.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
There is a huge difference between will and could.
Admin's could read my e-mail but most likely will not. Especially if they have some privacy policy against it.
The parent post is pointing out if Google uses targeted advert's they WILL read my e-mail.
If I decide to subscribe to porn, and then suddenly whenever I got to google.com or google mail I have to deal with porn adverts. Well that isn't going to look too good at work or home.
Or what if I get an e-mail regarding AIDS, and then I see adverts for AIDS treatment when I visit google, other may see this, realise I have AIDS and then discriminate against me.
So no, I am not ashamed of what software 'thinks' about me, but I may be adversly affected by the ad's it displays.
Yes, and it seems more likely they would use 'mail.google.com' for a mail service, fits in with 'directory.' and 'images.' and so forth.
There are still some things they have not done that they could.
If google does what it is famous for...being innovative and simple..with spam filtering I will drop yahoo email like Dr. Atkins dropping a hot potato.
Steve
If google really wants to do something worthwhile with email, they should go out and purchase hushmail. I happen to be a big fan of their service (web based PGP compatible email!) but I loathe how *few* people actually use encryption in email. If a powerhouse like google offered not just webmail, but *encrypted* webmail, I bet that the conversion rate would be pretty mind-blowing and voila, the huge bump encryption / PGP / GPG needed to get to the point of critical mass.
Can you imagine a world in which you can say to someone: "what you mean you don't encrypt your emails?" Please make it so google!
Yay i can get another email address! as if i dont have enough with linuxmail, hotmail, yahoo, yourmom.com, playcs.com, etc. just more places for spam to go
Their designers/programmers, happily possess a full set of clues. They understand that the Web is not TV, and that HTML is a carrier for contents, not eye candy.
If they can do this right with free webmail too, they win even more brownie points!
Don't get me started about sites that give you error messages (or worse yet, fail dismally without explanation) simply because you don't have *script or foo-browser-extension from M$.
Or, the even more annoying ones that complain and refuse to let you in when they think you aren't using MSIE but in fact work perfectly if you instruct your browser to lie about what it is.
K*I*S*S!
-- MG
http://images.google.com and search with any of the well known Playboy playmate model names.
Linux at home
The trouble with a modertion system is moderation is often wide of the mark. There are some really good mods, some really bad mods, and many mods who may not be experts in a field but moderate what seems correct to them - when they may be wrong. And as Slashdot proves regarding economics, incorrect opinions get modded up when they are incorrect one.
Moderation is a way to enforce groupthink, not to encourage what is best.
As much as I am a mozilla supporter (I really love the element-animal products -- I've installed them on my parent's system), I don't think the idea of a google branded thunderbird would work well, at least until Ben finishes his smart update (due for firefox 1.0) and Scott encorporates that into Thunderbird. If google will be giving it out, it will need to be dummy proof, and we can't have X people playing around with Google Thunderbird 0.5 for the next few years.
Get Firefox!
I use yahoo email, as well as yahoo messenger and have for a long time. The thing is, I never go to yahoo.com for anything. I ignore the little Yahoo insider thing that pops up, I never search with them, I never click on any ads in email. In fact, I only use that email addy for crap that I sign up for online. My real is email is from my own domain, that I never use for signing up to anything. Their thougths of lock-in are dubious. Yahoo could disappear to tomorrow and I would use linuxmail.org for my garbage mail, and MSN, AIM, Jabber, or IRC for chat and never once miss them. Thanks for the free shit, but maybe you should pay more attention to what your services are actually used for. In a word...crap.
I agree, and I've seen some [laughable,piteous,ignorant] moderation here. However, if it were limited to RELEVANCE, it might still work even if subjective. Find what you're looking for? Mod it up. Misleading header? Mod it down.
Just a thought. I'm mostly wondering whether it's been done already.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
That is true, I wouldn't expect Google to package up pre-release browsers, however if they did decide on this course of action they could perhaps pay for a few more developers to work on the project, I'm fairly sure Ben and Scott are paid by the foundation but it'd be nice to see others.
I'm looking forward to the smartupdate feature in Firefox and hopefully there'll be enough people to test it to death when it arrives in 0.9 so that we can get a really solid 1.0
Here's what I think the apps need to be successful (fortunately these seemed to be planned for before 1.0):
- The auto update feature for both the mail and browser apps
- Auto disabling of extensions not compatible with the current release
- An installer for Thunderbird
- Common plugins automatically installed (e.g. Flash/java) - optional of course
- Not stealing image associations on windows (already fixed in latest nightlies)
It's always bothered me that it takes 10ms to search the entire web but 10 minutes to search my mailstore. People are probably trying to go through their old emails just as often as they're looking for something on the web. Google has said that their mission is to find the answer to all of your questions and to do that you definitely need access to people's mail.
It also gives them a much needed source of stickyness. As easily as people switched from AltaVista to Google, they can switch from Google to something else. But mail is hard to switch.
I don't know how many people check their M$ hotmail account and other web accounts using Office XP Outlook.
I got a feeling M$ will purposely create some Office XP bug to make googlemail incompatible with Outlook. This is the typical M$ strategy up against any competition.
...but you should be expecting problems with a search for something as horribly generic as "motherboard review" anyway. If you search for something that *should* get millions of results, and you do in fact get millions of results, well, you asked for it :)
That's the sort of "problem" with only one solution: the user needs to narrow down the search himself. Continuing the mobo example, by supplying more... like processor architecture, manufacturer, and so on. To expect google to automagically do this FOR you is to defeat the purpose of a useful search engine - you're asking them to make all the choices for you. That's bound to make the wrong choices. Frequently. And it opens up a new way for shadier search engines to take money in exchange for adding bias into their results, or for random scammish web page designers to try to game the system.
The solution is basically what google already does: there's a "search within these results" box you can use to narrow down your search if you got a big pile of uselessly generic results. I suggest you use that.
They are not in business to make you guys feel good about them. They are in business to make money.
Yeah, and the two are, like, totally mutually exclusive, right? Believe it or not, but word-of-mouth is still the most effective form of advertising ever, and the best way to get that is to keep customers happy. In this case, google relies a lot on people telling each other just how cool this search engine is, and how quickly it loads, and how you're not spammed to death with advertisements, and guess what, it bloody works! Every person in my social circle who owns a computer knows google, and that includes some seriously digitally handicapped individuals....hi mom!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Extrapolate this to any words that somebody would be willing to pay to watch, regarding politics, religion, cults, music, or whatever other creepy corners your paranoia guides you to.
The important difference between targetting ads to web pages vs email is that web pages are designed for wide publication. The contents of email is usually meant to be private.
It's that mindset that keeps encrypted email from becoming a standard, and there is a major flaw in it. The real reason for encrypting everything is not so much to protect your photo collection or personal emails, but to completely cripple anyone (NSA, perhaps?) who would want to intercept everyone's email.
Currently, there are very few people using encryption for email, so if the NSA notices that Joe Geek is, they might suspect that he has something to hide and start throwing massive computing resources at cracking his private key. However, if absolutely everyone was encrypting their email, no privacy-invading government org would know whose email to even begin decrypting. Thus, we'd all be safe.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Personally I don't want Google reading/analysing my e-mail. Even if is just some algorithm.
Almost all email clients and servers analyse your mail these days. That's how the spam filters work.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Hey, can you tell me what an *incorrect opinion* is?
sure. as far as i know, my opinions are correct. any opinion contrary to mine, then, is incorrect. see?
Life is short; think quickly.
It's that mindset that keeps encrypted email from becoming a standard
Oh I agree with you 100%. But neither I nor 99% of other users out there are part of the tinfoil hat crowd - the so-called benefit to civilisation that would be provided by encrypting all my mail just isn't worth the inconvenience to 99% of people.
And while I have a strong interest in cryptography from a mathematical and theoretical point of view, I also have a personal belief in openness and a dislike of secrecy. Like most people I know, I leave my doors unlocked so my friends can drop by whenever they like. I trust people enough not to walk in and steal my stuff when I'm not looking, and in almost 30 years, I have never once had this trust violated.
In any case, the attitude I have toward cryptography is almost universal; it's simply not worth the effort. One could argue that the attitude of distrust that people have of each other is the mindset that keeps so may people locked up in their houses, afraid of terrorists and bad guys. And yes, in the end, the government is just a big group of people too; some good, some not so good.