Gee! Email....

Soon, we will have to be reminded that there was seach and email and instant messaging and blogging, etc. in the benighted days before Google (BG), because G is working towards dominating all these functions. I am devoted to Google search - anything else is cluttered, slower, and seems less reliable. But now I've got Gmail - email from Google. And, as you can see, I bloG...

Talk about "viral marketing" and buzz - you've got to be invited to join Gmail! A friend offered - how could I refuse? All the old (and new) adages tell you to just do it: don't look a gift horse in the mouth, opportunity only knocks once... Nevermind that we are talking about just a webmail site. Invitation! The Gall! In G's defense, the service is in beta development stage so they may want to limit the load before they let in the great unwashed. See how insidious the invitation-only approach works? It's like getting past the bouncers at some hot new club (I can only imagine). I'm shocked, shocked at my own smug response...

Unlike Google search, the Ur G (the UrG to search?), which was a breath of fresh air after the increasingly cluttered and slow-loading search pages of the time, Gmail does not appear dramatically different from other webmail sites such as Yahoo (which I rely on). Gmail does offer an intruiging, attractive, and perhaps actually intuitive new discussion metaphor for organizing emails. Instead of each email having its own line in the inbox, whole email threads (postings and replies) occupy a line. When you click on the line, the emails separate and sort themselves vertically based on the sent/received time. Folders are supposed to be replaced by better search tools. Gosh (©), I'm talking myself into liking Gmail in principle.

G bought the Usenet archive from Deja.com in 2001. Blogger was a developed by someone else and bought by G in 2003. Now G is starting instant messaging - which, after a rumored dalliance with meetroduction, is apparently home grown. So far, this looks like Microsoft in their days of assembling Office and then buying a web browser. But somehow it feels different. Maybe that's because G has been free so far. We can try and never have to buy. Sure, there are hidden costs, but there are very small increments and easily ignored. Also, the products to date have set new standards for ease of use and function, something that could rarely be said about MS products since the early years. Google, founded in 1998, is only 7 years old...