Cameron's Thoughts

Google has announced a new service called GMail. I have to wonder if this is some strange April Fools joke, or if this is a serious service they are offering. I remember reading not too long ago that Google had registered some domain names such as googlemail.com. I think I saw that at Slashdot. But that lead some people to believe that Google had some kind of mail service up their sleeve. But, if what they are offering is true, it could eliminate Hotmail and Yahoo as mail providers. It would also make me question how Google is able to provide this with only text ads.
The main thing that is shocking, is that GMail is a 1GB e-mail account. 1GB of storage space. They estimate it will store about 500,000 pages of messages. The idea is, instead of trying to constantly delete messages to stay within the smaller limitations of other services, you save all your e-mail and never even need to organize it. Then use Google's search technology to find messages that have info that you need.
So far, this is still in limited beta testing, you can't sign up for an account yet. But once this gets up and going, Google is going to shake up yet another web industry. First, they showed up that searching could actually produce results that we wanted without all the junk and deadlinks, and now they will show us a new understanding of webmail.