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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
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.
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.
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
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.
Or they could be saving money on law suits for trade mark stuff.
If someone took googlemail.com and used it, they could lose their trade mark and cause confusion, with or without knowing it. Paying $200 for 5 or so years for a trademark'd domain is sure cheaper than keeping a lawyer in court.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
Will the Google's mail service have "I feel lucky" button instead of the "To:" field?
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.