was recently checking out
www.gmail.com and they've recently added
another gigabyte to their already significant 1 GB to celebrate gmail's birthday. google has also added another thing where by the amount of space
increases continuously. it's a very interesting idea and i think a great publicity stunt, to show how committed they are to increasing spac
e. so, what's the rate of increase? a quick calculation: it appears that it increases 0.0001 MB every approximately 3.5 seconds, which makes it or about 2.5 a day or 1 additional gigabyte per year (at time of publish, it was at 2093.7 GB total). that's in line with the first birthday's increase, and i won't be surprised if this continues for another, oh, year or so. that is a pretty nifty publicity trick - instead of simply adding 1 GB per year, google adds it on continuously and without much cost either.
talking about publicity stunts, the initial launch of gmail was announced on the 1st of April last year. 1 GB was so big, everyone thought it was an april fool's day joke! what a great way to start off your service with a bang! it turned out to be true and i think it surprised the competition like MSN and yahoo, as they started to offer much larger space soon after. it also really fits in with the brand image that google wants to portray - fun-loving and playful, straight-forward (no catches, do no evil approach) and reliable, innovative, generous... etc etc. i'm all for it!
i'm getting more and more satisfied with gmail's service. as they're upgrading it, they have been adding little improvements here and there, and it seems more like a full-fledged computer application than a webpage (things like typing autocompleting an email address which Outlook does for you). the idea of leveraging google's unique search capabilities for the gmail service seems a bit superficial though (cambridge's webmail and Outlook both provide it, although hotmail doesn't), but i guess that is why they've provided such massive space and removed support for folders, for this to become more useful. [c.f flickr which does the same thing by using photosets and photostreams instead of photo galleries to encourage people to navigate more freely - innovative but risky idea. gmail has a larger potential to succeed, because email needs less sorting than photos, where presentation is everything for photos. oh, and did i mention that gmail offers 2093.7 gigabytes and counting??].
gmail's pretty great. end of ramble.
2 Comments:
So how come u dont use gmail? Also, if u visited gmail.com on 1 Apr 2005 (ie gmail's 1st birthday) the welcome page had a joke on it, saying they will offer infinity + 1GB of space..haha and it was a really funny way they wrote it, google is such a bunch of geeks i love those dudes, i forgot to copy n save the page tho, it cracked me up! :)
would really like to see what google wrote on that page! hehe, guess their competitors should be take their jokes seriously...
btw, i do use gmail (thanks to your invitation), but rather sparingly. it'll become my account of choice once i lose webmail (*shudder*).
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