The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Google’s joke?
: The web — and big news organizations — are all scratching their heads today wondering whether Google is joking — April Fool — with its announcement re free email or whether it’s real. Doc thought it was a joke, until he got a phone call….
: UPDATE: The GMail FAQ.
yeah, they are going to have ads which tie into the words in your subject lines. weird.
It doesn’t seem so far-fetched to me. With memory being cheaper and cheaper (whatever is involved in ‘memory’ storage and all that) it seems like an obvious move. Yahoo is the most boring ‘leading’ provider of internet whatever on the net. Where are their blogs, by the way? MSN’s sites all run like bug-infested, slow (you know what I mean). Google just does things right, and I’ll bet they will get email right too. I notice in the USA Today business section article on the Gmail announcement they don’t point out to their readers the difference between 4 megabytes and 1 gigabyte… They must have some sister division that is unhappy about all this…
> Yahoo is the most boring ‘leading’ provider of internet whatever on the net. Where are their blogs, by the way?
Unless Google offers user an ability to turn off the adsense-type features in the e-mail then I do not think it will be that big a success as it will invite outrage from privacy groups and also lead to embarassing interactions. (e.g., most dramatic – an ad for a porn site linked to a e-mail from a rape victim to her best friend)
[They’re called GeoCities. Yahoo was offering blogs — or, “my little pony pages” — before blogs became trendy.]
This is, frankly, dumb (and unimaginative). I’ve used geocities webpages for private interests in ways that are actually useful and practical and effective to what I’m doing (usually as an extra feature for communication but also as a motivation to complete projects). Blogs are totally different. You can’t see the difference between for instance Jeff’s blog and a webpage?
Will google take ad money from porn sites? Do they need to? I doubt it. I’m sure this enterprise will require a G rating through and through.
1000 megs is sure appealing. I’m tired of getting that almost out of space message on yahoo… If it’s true, I’m certainly checking it out.
Well if that doesn’t just hit the Gspot…