googlemail.com is on it's way
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quote from theregister
Quote:
Much Adwords About Email
Google will have a hard time differentiating its email service from rivals, especially if those rivals opt to offer ad-free emails. One potential differentiator could be spam blocking, but here Yahoo! already does an excellent job, and Google's record with gamers doesn't auger well for its success. As the ensuing Slashdot thread points out, users attribute Google's dwindling reputation for search excellence as the result of focusing on ancilliary commercial activities.
"Getting rid of the page rank spammers should be their priority, not expanding into a commodity marketplace where they will have no real niche," writes one poster.
"Instead of messing around with all this e-mail stuff, how about you concentrate on actually making your search engine useful again?" writes another.
"It has become completely overrun with results like sony.dscp10.reviews.digital.cameras.hot.sex.now.freesexsite.com that it's becoming incredibly hard to actually get any information out of it. It used to be that when I searched for a product, you gave me user/site reviews on that product. Now, all I get is a bunch of people trying to make me buy it from them," writes another. "Please remedy this before trying to do other things."
called Gmail -- 1 GB of storage
There's more news on the horizon about google's new mail service.. It'll be called Gmail (a name already in use I might add.. as well as a name of a trojan ) and it'll be offering an astounding 1 GB of space. wow.. :eek: Google has up a temporary page for it . It'll be at http://gmail.google.com/
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0...tml?tw=rss.BIZ
04:59 PM Mar. 31, 2004 PT
Google said Wednesday it plans to offer a free Web-based e-mail service with 1 GB of storage space, far more than rival services by Yahoo and Hotmail. It's another sign Google, traditionally known as a pure search engine, intends to compete more directly with general-purpose portals like Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN.
In addition to the huge storage capacity, Google plans to highlight its search capabilities, which would make it easier for users to search for specific information through thousands of e-mails. The service will automatically index keywords in e-mails to reduce the time it takes to search through them for information.
"You can search all of your e-mail as if it were Google," said Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering.
The service, called Gmail, won't be available to the public for a while. Instead, the company has invited about 1,000 employees, friends and family members to test it first. The trials began Wednesday.
Gmail could force big changes at Yahoo and MSN. Currently, e-mail is the most popular usage of the Internet. Yahoo and MSN rely on free e-mail services to generate traffic, sign up new users and goad them to reveal personal information that attracts advertisers.
While Gmail would offer 1 GB of storage, Yahoo users receive 4 MB of storage -- just a tiny fraction of 1 percent of Google's capacity. Hotmail users receive just 2 MB. Hotmail and Yahoo users must pay to increase their e-mail storage limits.
Rosing said the company arrived at the 1 GB figure by estimating how much storage an average user would need to store up to a decade's worth of e-mail. "It's a new paradigm where you don't delete your e-mail," said Rosing. Instead, users would leave all their messages on Google's server and search through them as needed.
The free service will be supported by ads that Google automatically places in users' e-mail messages. The ads will be targeted to the readers of the messages and will correspond to the text in the messages. For instance, an e-mail message about your trouble with your DSL connection might have an ad from SBC Communications in it.
When asked if consumers would perceive the targeted ads to be a violation of their privacy, Rosing said the company's terms-of-service agreement for Gmail "says clearly that the targeting is done by machines" and that they would respect user privacy. "It takes a bit of getting used to," admitted Rosing, "but we don't see that as a problem."
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are the top contenders in a brewing fight over search-engine services. Yahoo recently dropped Google's search technology to use its own. Google has responded by updating its look and bringing more services out of its labs and into production. For example, it began highlighting Froogle, the company's shopping-catalog search feature, this week.
Microsoft, too, has redoubled its efforts to develop advanced search technologies to stave off Google.
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then there's the newyorktime's article on it (subscription only)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/te...GOOGLE.html?hp
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: March 31, 2004
AN FRANCISCO, March 31 — Google, the dominant Internet search company, is planning to up the stakes in its intensifying competition with Yahoo and Microsoft by unveiling a new consumer-oriented electronic mail service.
The new service, to be named Gmail, is scheduled to be released on Thursday, according to people involved with the plan. It will be "soft launched," they said, in a manner that Google has followed with other features that it has added to its Web site, with little fanfare and initially presented as a long-running test.
E-mail has become a crucial weapon in the competition to win the allegiance of Internet users, who often turn to one or two Web sites as the foundation of their online activities.
As Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo are preparing to attack Google's role as the first place most people turn to carry out an Internet search, Google is hoping to counter those assaults by moving onto the turf its competitors have already claimed in providing e-mail services as part of their portals.
Google is starting far behind Microsoft, which claims 170 million active users for its Hotmail service, America Online and Yahoo. But Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., is planning to play on its information search strength to compete with the existing services.
Google will offer consumers better access to searching their own e-mail and could well upset the industry balance by offering free access to services that previously were only available by paying a monthly subscription fee.
The standard industry practice is to offer tiered mail services, providing only limited storage for free and charging higher fees to users who want to preserve larger numbers of e-mail messages. Google, by contrast, is planning a service to be supported by advertising that will permit its users to store very large amounts of mail at no cost.
One internal Google study put the operational cost of maintaining electronic mail storage at less than $2 per gigabyte.
In recent weeks, Google has picked up the pace of updating and adding new features to its basic search service, as part of its effort to position itself as a strong business ready to sell shares to investors in what is expected to be the most popular initial public offering by a Silicon Valley company in years.
Early this week, for example, Google polished its appearance, making the company's array of services more accessible. The company also moved its Froogle catalog shopping search engine into a more prominent position on the first page of the Google Web site.
Google has been closely watched in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street during the past year for any indication about its plans for an initial public stock offering. The company has steadfastly declined to respond to speculation.
Its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, told The Wall Street Journal this week that the company was exploring many options, but he explained at a recent industry conference that Google does not necessarily need to move forward on an offering any time soon.
Google's entry into the e-mail business will sharpen the lines between the major competing portals like Yahoo and MSN and Internet service providers like AOL and Earthlink. Google recently lost its position as search provider for Yahoo, which has turned to a company it acquired, Overture, to take advantage of the growing amounts of advertising revenue available on search pages.
To date, Google has maintained a strong relationship with AOL. But as it enters a business that competes directly with one of America Online's core offerings, it could find that AOL, like Yahoo, begins to view Google as a more direct competitor.
Microsoft has also dramatically increased the importance of building its own capability to offer search services of its own. The company has been showing a range of features that it hopes will make its MSN service more of a draw to Web users who rely on search engines as starting points for finding information and services on the Internet.
But as Google seeks to counter those thrusts from its competitors, it could find that an e-mail service that is advertising-based could also raise thorny privacy issues. Inside Google, one official said, the company has engaged in an intense internal debate over how extensively to exploit the content of e-mail.
Many people inside the company are worried that users might fear that the content of their e-mail messages could be used to tailor individual advertising messages, much as ad messages are now placed on pages tied to specific responses to search inquiries. Google hopes to quell any such concerns by assuring users that the content of their messages will remain private.
The e-mail service could also put new strains on the extensive Google network of servers, which is now devoted almost exclusively to offering immediate responses to search engine queries.
For some reason, a gigabyte of storage sounds too good to be true. I'll bet that they scale that figure down. But if they keep that figure, I think it's goodbye to yahoo and many others..
edit : here's one more link
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2004/Mar/1027811.htm
[size=1]The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them, Page said. And when she's not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, 'Can't you people fix this?'
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-- Speed: Gmail makes using email faster and more efficient by eliminating the need to file messages into folders, and by automatically organizing individual emails into meaningful conversations that show messages in the context of all the replies sent in response to them. And it turns annoying spam e-mail messages into the equivalent of canned meat.
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