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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.
$ whois googlemail.com
[snip]
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-302458)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
Domain Name: googlemail.com
Registrar Name: Alldomains.com
Registrar Whois: whois.alldomains.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.alldomains.com
Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Created on..............: 2001-Jul-18.
Expires on..............: 2005-Jul-18.
Record last updated on..: 2003-Dec-30 15:39:37.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.32.10
NS2.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.34.10
NS3.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.36.10
NS4.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.38.10
Alldomains.com - The Leader in Corporate Domain Management
$
probably quickly snatched up. booble@google.com
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
Step 1: Google takes over search engines
Step 2: Google takes over webmail services
Step 3: Tomorrow - the world!
What next? The Google OS?
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.
We really have to admit that Google is in decline. In all likelihood, there may be only one more (or possibly two) years before Google goes away forever.
I know it is now almost a mantra set in stone that "Google is dying". Unfortunately, the abuse of that fact by trolls has obscured the truth, that truth being that Google really is dying.
My main reason for moving away from Google to MSN Search has been twofold. First, to avoid the constant IPO uncertainties. And secondly, to investigate more promising and viable entries in the search engine sweepstakes. Google is no longer a legitimate player, I'm sorry to say.
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
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.
If you have a fairly advanced toolset of software knowledge, you can download YahooPOPs! over on the SoresForge page.
What is it? Well, YahooPOPs! is an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! E-mail accounts. It works in both Windoze and Unix.
What it does is emulate a POP3/SMTP server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mozilla, IncrediMail, Calypso, etc., to DOWNLOAD AND SEND emails from Yahoo! accounts.
It's amazing, bro. I had NO idea it'd even work. I had to download it to believe it. There are also other similar programs out there for MSN, Lycos, etc.
No self-respecting webmail user should be WITHOUT it.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Here ya go. (The same article is also available in The Ledger)
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?
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.
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!
loismustdie@google.com
On a serious note: google is very tight lipped about what services they will be launching (until after they launch/beta) so not sure how credible these rumblings are...
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I use alltheweb when not using google. Between those two I generally find what I want.
Alltheweb is a bit more international than google (I believe its hosted in Europe somewhere) and is owned by Overture who sells google lots of search info.
About us page here.
They also seem to have a knack for lowering the importance of weblogs, which seems to be a big issue with some people nowadays.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I am not sure how "insightful" this is.
;-)
Webmail services are not meant to be checked with a mail reader - but with a browswer. MS has hacked something together to make Outlook work w. Hotmail, but that's an exception. Outlook won't be able to check Yahoo mail or your ISP's webmail (though your ISP probably offers POP, which Outlook will gladly check) except through some 3rd party webmail-to-pop utilities.
If Google wants people to use any reader of their choosing to check their e-mail, they will open POP accounts which no "bug" in XP will keep from being accessible.
If Google follows the pattern that Yahoo has - ie, you only get POP when you pay the subscription fee, otherwise use the webmail interface - then it won't work w. Outlook (or Thunderbird or any of them).
Hope this clarifies the magic of e-mail a bit.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
They also seem to have a knack for lowering the importance of weblogs, which seems to be a big issue with some people nowadays.
Here's a simple way to get most blogs out of your results in google or any other search engine (personally I use Gigablast as my primary):
Type search query plus "-blog"
Et voila!
Of course it can't help it if some pages are ranked high because they are linked from blogs, but I don't think that anything from the user-side can change that.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
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.
Will the Google's mail service have "I feel lucky" button instead of the "To:" field?
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!
The way it works (I believe!) is that once you've done your search, all of the search result hyperlinks go through a redirect on google.com.
v =2/SID =e/l=WS1/R=1/H=0/MI=other/*-http://rdre1.yahoo.com /click?u=http://www.slashdot.org/&y=028A85020D5FD4 C2&i=482&c=8540&q=02%5ESSHPM%5BL7ls~lw%7Bpk6&e=utf -8&r=0&d=wow-en-us&n=E9D45H3DU8S41MO9&s=1306&t=&m= 4038FB5A&x=01914BFE9E6908BB"
That is how Yahoo! seems to work, but not Google. For example, if I search for "Slashdot" on Google, I get this as the first link (right-click, copy link location):
"http://slashdot.org/"
in Yahoo!, I get:
"http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=slashdot/
When Yahoo! started doing that is when I stopped using Yahoo.
From looking at these results, I don't think Google really has any idea what links I selected.
According to a friend of a friend (I know, I know), Google email will place targeted advertisements in the email based on the content of the email! They plan to convince everyone that the data will not be kept, stored, or used after the ad has been placed. Why would people choose google over yahoo, hotmail, etc? They are offering 1GB of storage for free! Yes, one gigabyte for every user.