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Dippo

macrumors 65816
Sep 27, 2003
1,044
1
Charlotte, NC
Yeap, I am going to register 100's of accounts and use it as my own personal storage.

Too bad, they are probably going to limit attachment files sizes :(
 

Awimoway

macrumors 68000
Sep 13, 2002
1,510
25
California
Yeah, hard to imagine their generosity won't be grossly abused. Either they have some kind of amazing discount on storage space or this isn't going to last long.
 

Grimace

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Feb 17, 2003
3,568
226
with Hamburglar.
once you do a free service, it's hard to start charging - NetZero had that issue. I hope Google can just pay for it with ads and make a better free email service. Maybe even .MAC will come down in price!!
 

jsw

Moderator emeritus
Mar 16, 2004
22,910
44
Andover, MA
Ah, another source of sp*m just opened up!

But, man, 1GB is excellent. Let's see how this one turns out...
 

Grimace

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Feb 17, 2003
3,568
226
with Hamburglar.
I hadn't even thought about that - I don't think Google would go to so much publicity if that were the case. The idea is plausible. Ads pay for space - the same way Google makes its money now.
 

jsw

Moderator emeritus
Mar 16, 2004
22,910
44
Andover, MA
Actually, CNN got it wrong. Google announced that each account had a 1 GB capacity, which CNN interpreted as "gigabyte". In reality, it is a GoogleByte, defined as a mere 23.6 megabytes.
 

rainman::|:|

macrumors 603
Feb 2, 2002
5,438
2
iowa
jsw said:
Actually, CNN got it wrong. Google announced that each account had a 1 GB capacity, which CNN interpreted as "gigabyte". In reality, it is a GoogleByte, defined as a mere 23.6 megabytes.

no offense, but did you just make that up? according to

http://gmail.google.com/

it will offer 1000 megabytes of storage per account...

paul
 

g808

macrumors regular
Oct 6, 2003
192
0
Bay Area, CA
KC9AIC said:
I'm pretty sure this is an April Fool's joke. I heard that they did something like this last year.

I really doubt it since this would serve as negative publicity. I would think many people would be angry if this turned out to be a joke. Basically getting everyone excited only to say "April Fools"? Not very good PR.
 

Flowbee

macrumors 68030
Dec 27, 2002
2,943
0
Alameda, CA
KC9AIC said:
I'm pretty sure this is an April Fool's joke. I heard that they did something like this last year.

Sorry, but Google is getting ready to go public (ie, issue shares of stock). It's *very* unlikely that they're making jokes about major business initiatives. Plus... just how is joking about free email supposed to be funny?? :confused:
 

Awimoway

macrumors 68000
Sep 13, 2002
1,510
25
California
Flowbee said:
Sorry, but Google is getting ready to go public (ie, issue shares of stock). It's *very* unlikely that they're making jokes about major business initiatives. Plus... just how is joking about free email supposed to be funny?? :confused:

I agree with every point. I think this story is probably legit. But really, isn't this a stupid week for any major announcements, especially if your company has a history of partaking in a little April Fools celebration?
 

MillieWales

macrumors 6502
Sep 15, 2003
484
191
UK
True or not, do you really like the sound of this:

Google plans to make money from the service by inserting advertisements into messages based in part on their content, effectively extending its AdWords program for presenting contextual ads in Web pages to e-mail.

Quoted from CNt News.com - http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5182805.html

So they have a system that reads your email's, and then inserts relevant adverts. Nice! Maybe they are hoping some terrorists sign up eh!

Marc
 

KC9AIC

macrumors 6502
Jan 31, 2004
316
0
Tokyo, Japan or Longview, Texas
Well, regardless of whether I think it sounds like a joke, I also certainly see that it would cause a lot of hype that wouldn't be good to kill. I'm certainly hoping that Google can go for this. Something that will save them is that not everybody will actually use a whole gig. This will allow them to have more users on a more reasonable amount of disk space. I'm thinking there will probably be some sort of restrictions on amount of file transfer, and attachment size, so people don't try to use it as a storage spot for their music collection, etc.
 

mrgreen4242

macrumors 601
Feb 10, 2004
4,377
9
marccarter said:
True or not, do you really like the sound of this:

Google plans to make money from the service by inserting advertisements into messages based in part on their content, effectively extending its AdWords program for presenting contextual ads in Web pages to e-mail.

Quoted from CNt News.com - http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5182805.html

So they have a system that reads your email's, and then inserts relevant adverts. Nice! Maybe they are hoping some terrorists sign up eh!

Marc

Ya that was my first thought. Don't liek that at all. I hope that enough people send them emails explaining that they decided not to choose Googles service over a competitors for that reason and they either abandon it, or off a service will smaller storage and no notext sensitive ads.

Altho, with the general contents of my email box, the ads could be quite humerous... :p
 

Sabbath

macrumors 6502a
Sep 18, 2003
534
0
London
Just imagine the amount of stick their servers would take as people tried to get their name/addy @google/gmail.com it would be a nightmare trying to sign up.
 

stoid

macrumors 601
As I originally posted at http://www.notanotherforum.com (Come on over for some great fun! BTW: put down stoid as your refferer. ;) ):

I don't know if I like the thought that all the E-mails I send are being read and word analyzed by a computer and modified accordingly. That is only one small step from it being censored, or reported to authorities based on context. Many times, I use sarcasm and irony in my E-mails. I don't want a computer or someone who doesn't know that I am not serious to misinterpret it and accuse me of treason or something like that. I personally will refuse to use an E-mail service that screens my E-mails on ANY level. Either that or I will send encrypted messages...
 

claytonbench

macrumors member
Dec 7, 2002
79
0
Humboldt, KS
g808 said:
I really doubt it since this would serve as negative publicity. I would think many people would be angry if this turned out to be a joke. Basically getting everyone excited only to say "April Fools"? Not very good PR.

There is no such thing as bad publicity. Anything to get your name heard.
 
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