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A GMail-based blog With 1000 MB of entries
Jean-Luc R. writes "Via mediaTIC blog. Gallina is a GMail blog tool created by Jonathan Hernandez that uses GMail messages as "entries" (so 1000 MB of entries!!), replies to conversations are the "entry comments", uses Libgmailer (gmail-lite project) to connect to GMail. It uses XML/XSLT and by the way it's a GPL software.
You can download it there.
See the Gallina Demo Blog as for an example."
Google was pissed at third-party tools which check emails. Now I wonder what Google is going to think of a program or script which uses the Gmail email directory as a sort of web-hosting deal. I'm not too optimistic about Google's response. :-(
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
What, Google create an free, optional service that you aren't personally interested in? How dare they?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
That's because Gmail is currently in BETA. They want to test it with a lot of accounts, but they still want to control the number of accounts so their system doesn't get overloaded before it's ready.
Having an invitation system seems a good way of getting a good number of test accounts.
I suggest you read the FAQ as it talks about this and POP access etc.
From what I remember they are working on allowing you to access it all via POP. It's BETA, what do you expect? You can't expect them to give an account to everyone who wants one, i think a lot of what they're doing is trying to slowly roll it out so they can test scaling and such while they do the testing of the interface and stuff. by slowly rolling it out they get an idea of just how the 1000 megabytes of space grow from user to user and can try to balance things better.
As mentioned already it seems they do it to create a bit of hype. Is the hype all it's cracked up to be? Eh, not really but it DOES work really well and I use gmail over yahoo now for my email, it also makes organizing my mail a hell of a lot easier in terms of mailing lists and such (that's really all i use it for, all my normal mail goes through my websites email addresses).
You just need to calm down and chill, if you want a gmail account ask and i'll gladly give you one of my invitations.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
Dude, its in BETA. Its not ment to be for everyone yet. Its still in testing.
Also, how else do you think they will finance it? 1gb of email with no Ad's? Maybe they will release POP3, but with inserted ads, who knows.
Hotmail has ad's - but no one goes mad about that - surely you don't think those ads are not targeted???
Is it a boat?
But even google with all its servers have limitations. Would love to see gmail grow in kind of uses it could have, but simplicity and speed are some of its strengths that it could lose if it is abused.
So when do the cease and desists start coming in?
The post-IPO google isn't the type of google that would be happy with this kind of thing. (And if you say there are no post IPO pages, just take a look at the recent furor over parodies, and just a couple of days ago, I noticed an image ad for Picasa (TM) on google image search.)
Is that they force us to look at Gmail in many different ways beyond the "Jesus Christ, look at all that space" factor.
When I started using Gmail I really liked the threaded messages feature and the search engine. Having to use labels instead of folders was (and still is) annoying, but I still place more value in the threading of the messages so all is well.
Some of my friends put more value in the fact that they can pretty much forget about their mailboxes getting too big and their PC choking on it. The mailbox here can be almost a gig and all your PC sees is just a web page.
Some friends also discovered that it is a great way to store memos, since is is very easy to pull them back between the labels and the search engine. I liked the idea so much that I sent myself every shareware license and CD key I have as separate emails so I can easily pull them.
The blog thing will probably break by the time it hits production, but it tells us (and Google too) that Gmail is so versatile that you can do all these crazy things with it.
Now Google can look at it and go uhm, maybe this is faster than whatever it is we are doing to store Blogger entries, and it also takes care of the post comments! And since you are already giving people a Gig of space, you can in theory claim that your *hosted* Blogger option is now free and allows you to share your 1GB of Gmail space. Then later plug the whole thing into an Orkut that doesn't suck and also into Google Groups.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
If you want a blog that's associated with Google, you could always just mosey on over to blogger.com. Last I checked, there's no limit with them as to how much storage you get and it's probably a bit easier than getting this running. Yes, this is kinda cool and innovative, but couldn't this creative/technological skill go toward something that everyone would benefit from, like, say, easy sound/3d in Linux?
Stop doing shit like this. Yeah, it's "fun", yeah it's "cool", but it's gonna piss Google off so much that they'll just put more and more limits on the service which piss off the majority to stop the minority.
I don't know about you, but I want to READ MY FUCKING EMAIL with GMail, not use it as some file storage solution, file system, blog client and kitchen sink. Leave it be. Google is generous, they've released APIs and other fun shit to do with their service, and they've been nice enough to let people try their beta service. If I lose that service because morons like fucking with it to store their porn, I will be MAJORLY pissed off.
Don't be so fucking selfish and stick to the friggin' ToS already.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Oh, sure, let's use a blogging script which uses a webmail service as its database. It can fetch data from this service by internally connecting to the web site, parsing the HTML, and pulling out the relevant data.
Uh.
Seriously, people, install a fucking SQL server. Not only is this going to be extremely extremely inefficient for you, but you are basically taking a nice service provided to you free by a nice company and exploiting the hell out of it. I am quite certain that if this thing gets a lot of use, Google will implement measures to break it. And I'm guessing Slashdot will whine when that happens, and I will be disgusted.
Really... When your girlfriend offers you a blow job do you forcefully ram your dick down her throat until she vomits? Why on Earth would you do this to Google?
JESUS people, it's a goddamn EMAIL SERVICE.
What are you all DOING?! You're out of your Minds!
*ala William Shatner*
HAVE ANY OF YOU EVER EVEN KISSED A GIRL?!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Google will need to start doing this - just stating an abuse policy is not good enough, they will need to start detecting abuse and counteracting, otherwise they will go broke trying to buy enough drives to make the exploiters happy.
the fact that they own Blogger probably gives them some interest in not wanting this :)
I think this could turn out to be a serious miscalculation on Google's part. It would be quite trivial to write a web app that front ends Gmail with a virtual file system to which you can upload and download hierarchically structured folders and files. The system could even seamlessly encapsulate more than one account so you could have multiple Gbs of storage available totally free, with huge bandwidth and no maintenance.
I imagine that Google's estimates of required storage assumed some relatively moderate average consumption for each user. This would make it really easy to eat up more space than they expected. This, combined with the fact that they won't get any advertising revenue from accounts using this trick, might make it difficult for them to continue the service.
Peer Pressure
I bet Oreilly is writing up Gmail Hacks as we speak....