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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."
people are making so much use of gmail for different things
i wonder when ill be able to run off a remote OS installed on a gmail account
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.
from the just because you can doesn't mean you're allowed dept. http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.ht ml
My other car is a slashdot UID.
How are they getting past the new gmail authentication?
Many of Google's other functions, like the search, they openly published interfaces to via web services and such. They explicitly disallow in the GMail TOS using web-fetching "screen scrapers" like this thing uses, but I'd imagine their main objection would be not so much the loss of control as that they don't want to be locked into a specific set of HTML-- if they significantly change their page layouts then any program which fetches and reprocesses GMail web pages will break.
But this bloggy thing is a very cool feature and Google might well publish a public web-services interface to GMail as well to allow things like this to happen before the end.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Can I now mount my blog using gmailfs?
;-D)but a blog????
Seriously, this is getting silly. It's supposed to be an email system and it's going to be financed by google targeting ads specificly to their users (based on their emails, but who cares about privacy anyway?), so I don't think google will let these things survive.
Now I could understand if someone developed a technique that allowed for bigger attachments (pr0n anyone?
It's a classic marketing device - the "ha, ha, you can't have it!" technique... Builds up a huge expectation momentum, provided you have the resources, and Google certainly does.
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
Gmail is invitation only because it is in beta and they want to scale up their size slowly. When it is completed, it will be open to everyone. And good luck not using Google; a lot of other search engines use Google indirectly.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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?
I'm a bit concerned that everyone seems to want to find a way to fill up their Gigabyte on Gmail. If storage becomes the main feature of Gmail, people will eventually open up 500 accounts and built a Gmail array for their file storage. This will force Google to lock down their application, and those of us using it for EMAIL will suffer.
If you want a gmail invite you just have to search on Google. Google is giving invitations away a lot more now to current subscribers. Visit my website, I have 5 gmail invites left to give. And I'm giving them away for free, no strings attached. Gmail is still in beta too, so that's probably why it's currently invitation only. Not sure if they have plans to make it open to all though.
Btw, POP access is currently in the works, though IMAP would indeed be nice. I'll make a suggestion.
I thought Google already provided a free blogging service?
Other companies have their operating systems, programs and services tested on their users, I think you might know the one. There's a reason why there's a "send bug report" button now every time IE crashes. Google takes its time to let the service grow with its userbase in case of size and functionality. Which I personally prefer.
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.
1000MB may sound like a lot but at current hard drive pricing that is only about a half dollar if you buy a 100GB drive. Why do people go to so much trouble to redirect GMail for other uses? If people do things that make their advertising less valuable then they will strike hard on everybody and that only hurts us normal users if they make it harder to login or use as an email service.
Anyone who needs a gig of space to write down what is on his mind has a bigger problem than finding space online.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - September 6, 2004 - Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that they are discontinuing the popular beta trial of their "Gmail" personal e-mail service. "When we realized that Slashdot user thammond had pledged not to use the service, we decided there was no point in continuing," said Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products. While the service had appeared to be gaining momentum as an alternative to other free e-mail services, thammond's pledge, announced today on the popular technology news site Slashdot, made it clear to company management that there was no future in the offering. Existing users of the service will be notified early this week and Google assured concerned shareholders that "future innovations will be submitted to thammond for approval prior to release in the future."
So now I have 1gb of online, searchable mp3's.
Email. Blogs. Mountable drives. And all built on GMail. I'd be quite concerned about becoming too dependent on the good graces of a third party for maintaining my data. I recall the number of people who got caught flat-footed when free email services and photo hosting went belly-up with little or no notice. Not to mention putting potentially sensitive material in a convenient place for hackers to target, or law enforcement or aggrieved spouses to subpoena.
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?
Aww, sounds like someone hasn't been invited to the party... ;)
Google just gave me a few invites, I'd be willing to give you one if you think it might help sweeten that sour taste in your mouth.
Funny thing is, I hardly even use my gmail account because I've had my mac.com address so long. What I've done, though, is to use gmail like an email archiving station. Just a simple, "If sender of message is in my address book, forward the message to my gmail address" rule. Requires no interaction at all, I don't even know it's happening but all my "good" email is auto-magically archived.
Blah blah, I ramble. Seriously though, I'll send you an invite if you'd like...
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. --
Seriously, it took me 5 min after I read about gmail to get an account. Have you no friends? There are _millions_ of invites out there.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
You really have no idea how cheap storage is (and is getting) and how much advertisers are willing to pay for googles targeted ads.
The question is not the storage, I would think, as much as the bandwidth. GMail's business model does not include the idea of, say, 10k people accessing a single gmail account to view content, which may or may not include Google's adverts.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
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?
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Google Accounts.
google RAID.
any takers for this newly-starting project?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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 :)
Although this may be a little off-topic: I think google should keep Gmail invitation only, as it is doing with orkut. I don't see any downsides, that is unless you refuse to communicate with any other person on the internet. But then why would you be using email?
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 thought a gibibbyte was a shitload of kills....
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
fundisom.com/free-gmail
first come, first serve.
and if you manage to catch one, and feel like saying thanks -
have a look at the ads there...
I'm not necessarily lazy, but I have to say, I'd prefer to use 85,840,734,641,021 over 5840734641021. Especially if I have to quickly add 1000000 to it or transcribe it by hand to some other medium.
Of course, I tend to prefer using tools that help keep me from making mistakes.
I've worked on documents where people have written things like "4,24,120 incidents". It was a great flag to me that something was wrong and I was able to check it with them. If they had simply written 424120, I would never have spotted the error.
Commas might be deprecated and spaces prefered in the world community, but in either case, I think they're helpful in reducing errors.
I don't see it on those pages. However I signed up for a GMail account a few days ago, and that was definitely one of the clauses of the clickthrough agreement I was presented with at that time. It appears their clickthrough agreement is different from their posted TOS policy? I guess you'd need to find a gmail invite in order to read the clickthrough...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts