Gmail: overrated and underestimated.

Who needs 1000MB of space, and why?

A whole gigabyte for all your photos, email messages, years of conversations, passwords, spam, mp3's, videos, and any other fragment of your cyberlife. Thousands of records in your inbox that make you a digital being. That is the new offer of Gmail, a concept of Google, the ones who brought you a new paradigm in searching, the verb "to google", and now a new contender in the free email arena.

Will you use "all" that space? Yes.

One gig sounds like a lot of space, and you are thinking that you'll never fill it up, but c'mon, remember when 10MB of email space was humongus?. It was just 1992 when the first 1GB hard drives where available for PC's. Back then it seemed like enought space to install Windows, Lotus, and all of your DOS files. There was no premonition of your dog's digital pictures, your vacation videos, and much less the web as we know it, including all your emails.

Will other contenders offer similar amounts of space?

My prediction is that free email boxes will become the standard. Oops, I meant free-with-tons-of-space-free. I keep getting these flashbacks and it seems 1997 all over again... people is excited about free email accounts! Free with more-space-than-you-need, that is. While today, a Gmail is equal to 500 Hotmail, or 250 Yahoo accounts, it is likely that other email providers will step up their offers, since page views are imperative for those portals who want to keep in the loop and grace of advertisers.

Why is Google doing email?

Seems a good move for Google to go into the email business, because first of all, as they say in their Gmail FAQ, it is a "natural area" to assist users search their emails. I sense that AdSense (pun intended) is partially responsible for all this non-sense. The business approach implies that Gmail offers a "natural area" of growth to AdSense to display more ads in the web... the more available content (in forms of email conversations), the more targeted those ads will be... bringing a better ROI for advertisers. Just like Hotmail advertises for MSN, and YahooMail for Yahoo, Gmail advertises for Google.

Page views is the other culprit in this story. While MS has many online properties bringing them millions of page views (Hotmail, MSN, Microsoft, BCentral, as well as international counterparts for these properties and many others as well as partnerships); and Yahoo has many services as well: chat, auctions, mail, and of course, search engine and directory; leaving Google in third please of page views.

It is obvious that Google, before IPO'ing wants to increase visitors and page views.

Other services are already stepping up to the 1GB offer. Yahoo will offer 1000MB to their premium users and 100MB to their free ones. SpyMac.com is offering a 1000MB account already.

And, as I said in a previous paragraph, it will not be as much as we thing. This gigabyte inboxes will be soon filled with photos, videos, audio, and anyother rich content that we can find.

What is worst, they will be filled with rich content spam.

Oh well, I've been looking for a GMAIL account for a while now... to no avail. It is not available to me because I don't want to spend a few bucks to buy one on Ebay I guess... they are going from around 50-100 usd in there.

If you have an invite, please send me one... or two, to give to my rich-content friends.

-- Send me a link related to "GMAIL Privacy concerns" and please post your comments.