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It isn't an April Fool's joke. Google really is starting a webmail service with a gig of storage, targeted text advertising, and search tools.
A gig of storage is pretty cool, and oddly large, but not a big deal by itself. The ads just make sense if you're Google, and will be considerably less annoying than popups. What I find really interesting is the integrated search tools over your mail archive.
Pretend you're Google. You have this kick ass search technology that continues to blow everyone else's completely out of the water. You've been doing web searches for years and have amazing brand loyalty built up around your services. How do you make money? No one is going to pay for web searches. Not enough people are going to pay for your Search Appliances. (Though I sure wish LJ would!) You sell ads, but you can't make them really pay because you don't want to drive your customers off with annoying popups, popunders or darker evils. In an ideal world, you would license your amazing technology so that every desktop in the world would be running it. Ask Microsoft -- that's a pretty good business model.
But why would people want Google tech on the desktop? Normal people don't have huge amounts of data that need to be searched, right? Wrong. They just don't know it yet because they habitually delete data. And they're unlikely to change, since no one is making search tools to make archives useful. And no one is making search tools because no one saves. Etc. Into this chicken-egg recursion steps Google, offering Gmail. A webmail service with a suspiciously large storage allotment. No one has seen it yet, but I bet it will be fairly hard to actually delete messages. I wouldn't be surprised that even if you do 'delete' them, they will still show up in searches. From the privacy statement: Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account. Look for Remembrance Agent functionality to be added fairly quickly.
BAM! In a single move, Google introduces millions of average users the value of archiving data. More importantly, it teaches them the importance of good search tools to make these archives useful. Even better than searching your webmail, what about being able to search all your documents, web cache, music and images? And who better to sell you those tools than Google? Brilliant.
(And the really great thing is that this actively discourages them from turning to the dark side, at least as far as web searches are concerned. Other people will eventually develop search tech as good or even better. In the long run, Google is depending on its reputation, its brand image to sell these tools. Google has always shown a surprising understanding that the best way to attract users is to be clean, fast, and generally not-evil. So those of us dreading the inevitable evilization of Google can rest easy for a few more years. Take that, entropy!)
A gig of storage is pretty cool, and oddly large, but not a big deal by itself. The ads just make sense if you're Google, and will be considerably less annoying than popups. What I find really interesting is the integrated search tools over your mail archive.
Pretend you're Google. You have this kick ass search technology that continues to blow everyone else's completely out of the water. You've been doing web searches for years and have amazing brand loyalty built up around your services. How do you make money? No one is going to pay for web searches. Not enough people are going to pay for your Search Appliances. (Though I sure wish LJ would!) You sell ads, but you can't make them really pay because you don't want to drive your customers off with annoying popups, popunders or darker evils. In an ideal world, you would license your amazing technology so that every desktop in the world would be running it. Ask Microsoft -- that's a pretty good business model.
But why would people want Google tech on the desktop? Normal people don't have huge amounts of data that need to be searched, right? Wrong. They just don't know it yet because they habitually delete data. And they're unlikely to change, since no one is making search tools to make archives useful. And no one is making search tools because no one saves. Etc. Into this chicken-egg recursion steps Google, offering Gmail. A webmail service with a suspiciously large storage allotment. No one has seen it yet, but I bet it will be fairly hard to actually delete messages. I wouldn't be surprised that even if you do 'delete' them, they will still show up in searches. From the privacy statement: Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account. Look for Remembrance Agent functionality to be added fairly quickly.
BAM! In a single move, Google introduces millions of average users the value of archiving data. More importantly, it teaches them the importance of good search tools to make these archives useful. Even better than searching your webmail, what about being able to search all your documents, web cache, music and images? And who better to sell you those tools than Google? Brilliant.
(And the really great thing is that this actively discourages them from turning to the dark side, at least as far as web searches are concerned. Other people will eventually develop search tech as good or even better. In the long run, Google is depending on its reputation, its brand image to sell these tools. Google has always shown a surprising understanding that the best way to attract users is to be clean, fast, and generally not-evil. So those of us dreading the inevitable evilization of Google can rest easy for a few more years. Take that, entropy!)
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On the other hand, if -spam- can't be really deleted and excluded from search, this will be a big old mess, filling up vast amounts of space (particularly virus spam) and mucking up search results (just like the real web!)