On the 1st of April, Google decided to
announce a new service, and there was a lot of speculation about it being an
April Fool's Day prank (a couple of years ago they flipped the Google logo on
the home page so that it read backwards - this company is known for a sense of
humor). The new service (GMail) is a free email service ala Hotmail.
Besides
the date of the announcement and their track record with this sort of prank -
the fact that Goggle was to provide 1GB of disk space to store your messages
vs. the 4-5MB typically provided with this type of service, just fanned the
flames of its being a hoax. Instead of working so hard to organize your
email into folders, and keep them cleaned out so your inbox wouldn't get so
full, you would have 1GB of mailbox space!
Why
would the most popular search engine provider decide to move into the free
email arena? The announcement explained that email is just more
information, and that the purpose of this service was to make their customer's
email messages easily accessible using search technology - eliminating the
need for folder organization, and allowing related messages to be presented as
a thread from a single search.
News
services were clamoring to get the inside skinny and discussion boards had
long threads on the topic.
At the end
of the day, it turns out to be true, and there wouldn't be much else to write
on the subject except...
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