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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"."
Coming from Google its pretty much a given the tried and tested 'Free Email' sector will see some new and exciting innovations.
However, the KISS method should defintley continue to apply for Google.com - the moment it begins to mimick Yahoo or MSN is the moment it will have lost its edge.
If google starts a mail service, is it really to take on Yahoo? I have a pretty good opinion of Google for most of their decisions and I find it hard to beleive that they would go out and try to attack another company.
Maybe I'm naive, but 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.
I wonder whether Google mail will index my mails. sounds spooky..
Hey, that's my password you are typing
Google was great, but "advertisers" figured out how to game it long ago and I don't think the folks at google are interested in evolving the concept much further. I have serious reservations about MS being able to actually compete with their technology (they can't even figure out what's on their own damn tech support site) but I really wish SOMEONE would do some "duplication and evolution;" maybe THAT would light a fire under some asses at google.
I remember reading about a year ago on one of the google related stories here on slashdot, that the reason google has been very successful is that they've done one thing and done it well, rather than trying to be a portal and integrate everything. Specifically, one poster said that if google ever offered an email service (and implying that that's an unlikely possibility) he'd ditch google for searching and google would soon degenerate into just another website with a Dubious Business Model. Follow up posters agreed with that comment. So, the time has come now. I ask the people who felt that way last year, are you sticking to your decision/analysis? If not, what has changed?
...should be a Google IM based on Jabber! That would rock!
If it can go wrong it wnetscape: Segmentation Fault, Core dumped
Can't wait for this to happen. Currently I have to use gotmail to fetch my hotmail accounts then forward them to my ISP via an hourly cron job. With Google doing mail, I'm sure they will add IMAP support and be a little more "User Friendly" to us Linux users. (Not to mention No ads !)
I agree, search quality will definitely take a hit, and the competition is building to such a degree that it won't be long before some startup from Stanford/MIT will do what google did to altavista/yahoo.
I already suggested the benefits for both Google and mozilla.org for Google to replace their IE Toolbar with an official Google branded Firefox. If they don't want to make their mail service freely available through IMAP or POP3 then they could do what Netscape did in NS 7.x and make their mail servers accessible to their own branded mozilla client. Although it would be nice if Google mail would be based on Thunderbird rather than the suite.
Hotmail is available through Outlook Express, so it'd be nice if Google did something similar without the tie in to MS products.
One of Google's mayor strenghts is its simple interface. When compared to other search engines including Yahoo, Google's interface seems very clean and simple, and also the way the whole site is put together. Regular users don't need all the features that Google has to offer, but power users may want to use them, and they can easily find out where they are accessed. For example, Advanced search is on the front page where all can find it; but one must know about other features to use them, and that's not a problem for the users who wants to use these.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
I think that what Yahoo did wrong (boy, I'll bet there are tons of analysts starting sentences the same way) was to try to make a mega-page, to rely on some data that was human-indexed rather than entirely machine-produced, and to fall behind technologically.
Google doesn't do this.
* Google is very spartan. I'm glad to see that all the web designers that thought that fancy web pages are what people want have been shown to be wrong. Excuses like "oh, this is for a 'distinctive feel'" or "we won't look up-to-date without Flash", etc, just don't measure up. Google works well on all browsers, has pages that download quickly, and renders very rapidly. The only large image used is the ever-changing "Google" logo, which gives folks a fair amount of enjoyment (well, *I* get more of a kick out of it than any other single image of that size each day). Their ads are text-based, and there are few links on each page. Their page works well in any browser, including lynx. Spartan is in -- web development has matured, and garish pages with faux metal bits and hard-to-find imagemap-based links are out. Functionality matters.
* All the data that Google presents is produced by a computer, not an array of humans (except for the Directory, which is from dmoz.org, not Google-paid people. They can scale up as far as they want by just increasing their processor power. All their people just figure out how to get the computer to do the right thing. Sure, in the short term that can be a bit less efficient, but it's a big win in the long term.
* Google doesn't fall behind when it comes to technology. Google is rabid about recruiting PhDs working with automated data mining. They are constantly adding neat little features to find, interesting new experimental searches (Google Sets is my favorite), and do an impressive job for a group of people that have hordes of people trying to beat the engine constantly and are avoiding using any human-based indexing.
May we never see th
Let's look at the facts:
First, there was Google. Beautiful searching. Love it dearly.
Then, there was Google cache. Beautiful, wonderful idea. Love it dearly.
Then, there was Google image searches, and News, and it was all still good.
But adding free mail to it? I'm starting to worry that our at-one-time all-simple, all-powerful, all-effective search engine is becoming (possibly?) another Yahoo? They're already the most widely-used search engine (by far!), but why offer free mail? Leave that to the low-life such as Microsoft and Yahoo.
Don't get me wrong, Google's seemed to manage everything quite smoothly thus far, and is still a wonderful site to use for everything they've made (besides searching, I use image search and the news listings & searches quite often). But free mail is quite a big undertaking...will they be able to manage it and still stay as good as they are?
The point is, they have to be original if they want someone new to notice them, and webmail sure ain't original.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
I guess the "Find Files or Folders" and spell checker would be really powerful features and the OS interface will be fairly simple, something like this:
Work / Porn / Email / Links / Logoff
Mind you that would be fine for most people....
I know i know, yahoo's front page is clutting as hell, links upon links.
but have you taken a look at the actual search page, it actually looks damn clean.
I like it better than google's interface IMO.
kawai
Search "Groups" to find:
1 2. htm
Drake (capatan@googlemail.com)
John (John@googlemail.com)
And GOOGLE had to fight to get the domain back:
(Dated: August 18, 2002)
http://www.arb-forum.com/domains/decisions/1147
You can get the ISP out of the IP (via whois), then with an accurate time, it's possible to get the ISP to give you an address (law enforcement use this method all the time).
If you're on static IP it's even more trivial... you don't even need the time.
They kept the newsgroups (rebranded as Google Groups), but phased out the email service.
I've used Google since Infoseek ceased to be the best, and like everyone else, I've noticed the gradual reduction of relevancy as people figure out how to scam Google for higher placement. Reading about this, I had an idea that is probably not original: Could a search engine be set with Slash-style moderation code, so irrelevant results could be modded down by annoyed users? Is there an engine that does this already?
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Sounds like hotwayd which does much the same thing for Hotmail. I think hotwayd also works for Lycos and a few other webmail providers.
I've got it set up and it works fine, though it only picks up mail from your inbox, not your junk mail or anything. If you want it picking up from multiple folders you just have to set up multiple copies of the daemon to look in each folder.
Why's Google wasting its time with an ancient idea like this one when there are truly innovative things out there, waiting to be done?
You mean like when they decided to go for the ancient idea of "internet searches"? Altavista, Yahoo etc. weren't exactly whimps when Google came along. I'm not quite sure how Google wants to do better on this one though, free email is pretty much the same boilerplate thing everywhere.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I love all the web. My top three search engines are AlltheWeb, Google, and Kartoo. Google gets the majority of my searches, just because it's built into Safari. But if I'm going in, fknowing that I'm looking for specific results, then I always start with AlltheWeb. I use Kartoo when I want to break results out quickly and visually--come up with more defined search terms, etc.
That page is only simple compared to the Yahoo portal. It took about 10 seconds to load, and has 6 images. Speed is everything for searches.
There are tons of posts here questioning whether Google is losing their way by doing this, but I don't see what the problem is... Mail doesn't have to be complicated, even with integrated virus checking and spam killing software. Just because hotmail and yahoo are extremely bloated, doesn't mean that Google's will be the same way.
Personally, I hope that they will allow free POP access. That's what got me to open my Geocities mail account, which later turned into Yahoo. Then they made it a pay service and I stopped using it.
I suppose it is folly to make a serious reponse to a post modded "funny", but I should point out that the OS that Google uses to run their servers (a *highly* modified GNU/Linux variant) is usually reffered to as the Google OS since it was designed by them specifically for their server farms (I think anyway). Also, I believe there is a GFS (Google File System, or Gordon Food Services - an entirely unrelated business) which is the distributed file system run at - of course - their server farms.
Not duplication, revolution is the notion you want: Google was successful because its founders believed in a completely new paradigm, that graph-based methods (PageRank, HITS) could outperform dusty (but effective) vector-space retrieval.
Many people have a shady intuition of what information retrieval really is ("Um.. yeah, you look the pages up in which the keywords occur"), trivializing the area. Go to any top-500 company and try their site search if you want to have a good laugh.
What we need is once more something completely different. It still holds that there is more than one way to do it!
One way is to go ahead and build a distributed indexing scheme (see my earlier posting on this theme), borrowing conepts from SETI@home or Freenet, because an index that cannot be located anywhere cannot be controlled. It might also be a better test-bed for large-scale experiments, but where only few developers want to try out new algorithms ("at home"), using the distributed indices built on distributed, donated diskspace around the world.
Maybe they will just add a free e-mail service to blogger...
it makes sense that they would want to draw more users to their blogger service and provide more web-services through that brand (and in turn sell more ads).
I personally cannot see them bloating up google.com, but you never know.
If they'll provide POP or IMAP access without having to pay for it like Yahoo!, I'm sure it will be quite succesfull.
That's not a good idea from the business point of view. If people are popping their mail, they're not seeing text adds. What's the point?
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
I've often wondered if Google would do well as taking the clicking of the "Next" link as an implicit lack of confidence in the current pages search and having an abandoned search be an implicit vote of confidence. After all, if you have stopped searching, the current page of search results likely contains a good answer. If you click next, then the current page is likely not to have one.
Yahoo tracks your clicks, I don't like that redirect thing, it's much more intrusive than google and the others that make direct links.
And I'm pretty sure Yahoo is using Google engine again (I get the same results).
Alltheweb.com Looks really good (and the results are satisfying) but I got so used to the Google interface I coul'dnt use it.
And Google has so much features, like searching in a particular domain, converting PDF to HTML, etc.
Google Hacks
Yacine.
It's great that you use yahoo mail only for your "crap" emails and have your real email on your own domain. But believe it or not, there's people out there, *billions of them*, who are NOT you. Doesn't that just, like, blow your mind, man! Seriously though, while you personally may not care if Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. disappear, there are millions of other users who rely on them (and would rely on google mail). And that sort of *is* the point.
I hate it too. However, Yahoo's Search Page is not nearly as cluttered.
There is a GREAT client which makes encryption/signing very easy: Apple Mail! I am using a personnal certificate from Thawte (which is free, multiplatforms, easy to create if you find a good step-by-step guide with Google). Once you get your certificate, you insert it in Apple Keychain (which is the system wide program to manage your passwords and supports locking). You can then sign emails and encrypt for those people whom you have the public key. Try it ;).
They can add the text ads at the end of e-mails (sent or received) as well... Not nice, but still better than webmail.
Virus infects both Windows and Linux!
The reasons Google could/should launch an email service is the brand that they have created. As all the posts here corroborate, the Google as a brand is respected both in the tech community as well as the main stream, which is one of the reasons it is so successful. So even if it launches a free email service, its own branding power, regardless of features will draw many users there.
Now if Google reigns in its business and marketing departments to keep the mail free of extraneous features and ad-attacks err. advertising, it will be more successful than Yahoo! and/or Hotmail purely by that feature alone. However if it becomes another advertising saturated free email service it will just be another player in the market not a dominant one.
The reason that Yahoo! and MSN have turned into bloated portals is the same reason that Google is drawn create other services (froogle, images, ect.) to keep users in and use the power of their brands to hold users within their marketing umbrella. It's only too easy to add links and 'portal' type features to any popular web page for commercial reasons, which is the trap that Google must not fall into.
Interested in Sports with a brain? --> http://dispatchesofj.blogspot.com/
but when Google adequiared DEJA, they've dropped this feature. Granted, DEJA had some deficiencies, and in particular usenet group search was atrocious. Now of course deja search is excellent, and so e-mail is coming back as well. Nice ...Since I spend lots of time on deja, it will be quite natural for me to use google e-mail as well (and probably many of the former deja users will do the same)
Don't be so naive though to think Google is a room of computers. When people write in to complain about kiddie porn, removal requests, etc, this must be handled by a person, just like at any search site.
1GB per Google Mail user: Yeah, right.
Sure, it's possible that Google will give up to 1GB per user = 1TB per 1000 users = 1PetaByte per million of user, but it does seem VERY unlikely.
Not that I wouldn't like seeing that if you are right.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,