Gmail Doubles Storage

G is for growth

Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we're giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2 gigabytes by giving you more space as we are able.

Two gigabytes? Are they mad?

History suggests they are not. So how can they give this amount of storage for free? Let's start by considering what it must be costing them.

Most users are going to take a long time to build up that much archived mail, for example I just looked at my thunderbird mail repository containing my saved mail going back over a decade, it's only 200 megabytes, and Google would be mad if they aren't compressing their mail storage. Naively zipping up my mail reduces it to 60 Megs. Compression varies and images in popular formats like jpegs and mpegs don't compress well, so not many people are going to get compression like that, but the 2 gigabytes is somewhere between 2 gigabytes and 600 megabytes; probably closer to the 600 megabytes end. Most users won't use anything like their 2 gigabytes limit for a few years, so let's say that the average use is going to be around 1 gigabytes or 400 megabytes once compressed.

At current disk prices that works out at about 50c worth of disk per user. OK, they need backup media, and computers, and will have some other hardware costs, so lets say that doubles the requirements, bringing it to $1 per user. With their adsense technology it isn't going to take them very long to pay that dollar off from paid clicks. Obviously there's running costs as well, electricity, maintenance on their servers, etc, but no more than for any other web hosting business, and I'll bet they buy internet bandwidth at bargain basement prices.

Google Gulp

Google are carrying on two of their favourite traditions

1. April fools announcements of new services
2. Doing it a day late

The joke

Google Gulp, a new fruity drink with a DNA reader that indexes your genetic code and modifies the drink to change your hormonal state to produce optimal effect.

This reminds me of the other DNA's description of the Sirius Cybernetics NutriMatic Drink Dispenser

The way it works is very interesting. When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant, but highly-detailed, examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain, to see what is likely to be well received. However, no one knows quite why it does this, because it then invariably delivers a cup-full of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Make sure you read the FAQ, it's hilarious, but oh-so-true.

A day late

Yes, it's already the second of April here. Google are obviously keeping US time, which for a service based in the US would normally be reasonable, except that I'm reading this page on google.co.NZ, a site that they run which masquerades as a New Zealand site and customises its view for New Zealand readers, so it would be expected that they used the New Zealand time zone for their jokes.

I remember from childhood that jokes were OK until Noon on the first of April, after that the trickster was the April Fool, not the victim. So April fool, Google!

On the other hand, Google have built a massive business on not being first to market, but on coming into an existing markets and doing it so much better that they sweep the former incumbent aside. I remember the old search engines from before Google. You do a search and their databases were so confused by keyword stuffers that you had to look through 10 or 11 pages before you found what you were looking at, as time went on this got worse and you had to look for more pages, tell it to exclude certain terms, etc. With Google, if what you are looking for isn't on the second page, you've asked the wrong question.

Another good example is adsense. I used to see ads as a browser, but they were never terribly relevant to me, and as a small publisher it was difficult for me to get relevant ads on my site. With Adsense I see ads relevant to the page I'm looking at, and customised for the fact that I'm browsing from New Zealand. As a publisher I can place ads on my sites and have Google's software select the ones that are most likely to be relevant to my content.

So let's just be charitable and assume that Google have spotted the business advantages of being in the April Fools industry and are simply coming into the market with a better version. Nah!

Last word, a Gmail reference?

From the Google FAQ:

I mean, isn't this whole invite-only thing kind of bogus?

Dude, it's like you've never even heard of viral marketing.

Yahoo! 360

Yahoo! are readying their assault on the world of blogging and social networking. At the moment it's in beta and they are doing the Gmail "Invite only" trick, so you can't just sign-up for an account. This is a shame as I'd like to at least experiment with the software. If anyone from Y! is listening, I'd love an invite, email me: yahooinvite.u.kiore@antichef.com. One thing they are doing that's, I believe, unfortunate is that you need to be logged on to Y! to even view blogs. Most of the blog directories and search engines won't like blogs that are password protected. Here's hoping that they reverse this decision soon, so I can report on it myself.

What others say

Michael Schuermann has reviewed the service.

The interface is very well designed. It works smoothly in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and is very clean. In fact, it properly uses CSS and XHTML for it’s design. No tables used for layout as far as I could find.

The blogging tool is the centerpiece of the experience, and overall it’s pretty nice. The blog entry form is WYSIWYG, which will be a benefit to blogging newbies or others without HTML knowledge. However, there’s no spell checker that I could find. I would suggest that Yahoo add one ASAP, so that we’ll be spared from posts rife with misspelled words.

Tristan Louis says

The first thing that is apparent is that this is more than just a blogging package or social network one. From the name to the way one's web page is integrated with other parts of Yahoo!, it is clear that this is a longer term play with attempts at integration.

While some integration points are pretty solid (Yahoo! messenger, Yahoo! Launch, Yahoo! local, and the Yahoo! photo service seem well integrated), others are major misses. For example, why is it that this service has a different mailbox than my already existing Yahoo! mailbox? (and does that mean I now need to check mail in two accounts?) Going further, why are services like Yahoo profile and Geocities not integrated in this? It seems they would be natural integration point and yet they are nowhere to be seen. Last but not least is the main question about integration of my.yahoo and "My page" on this service. There should be another natural point of integration there, shouldn't there be?

[Update 10:31 AM 31 March] I've deleted a reference to copyright. Yahoo have explained that there was a technical mistake caused by a cut and paste from some existing code and that blog contents are copyright by their owners. See the first comment to this posting for more. I'm a software developer myself and I know that the purpose of a beta is to find and fix bugs. Yahoo! are doing just that.[/Update] Danah Boyd's summary

Anyhow, my general impression is that i'm wary, but i don't think that this is for me and i think it will be nice for the heavily integrated Yahoo user.

Marc Canter enthuses

Can't yah feel the vibe?

That's the sound of a 100,000 rushing into the next big thing - Yahoo 360. Over the coming days people's impressions will be revealed on this hybrid social network/blogging tool.

Just to be clear. This is what I call a DLA (digital lifestyle aggregator.) No they didn't get completely right- but it does successfully combine these two latest technology aspects - which each have been hailed as new 'spaces' (marketplaces, trends, what have you.)