A question

[emmagrant01]

What's the big deal about GMail? I keep seeing people on my f-list asking for and offering invites, and I have no idea why. When I first heard about the premise, and that Google would "read" the content of emails you send and receive to target advertising to you, etc., I thought, WTF? Why would anyone want to do that?

Clearly people did want to do it, since it quickly became the "it" new email address to have. I'm still skeptical, myself. I'll offer some interesting links, though. Some of these express views that are a bit paranoid, but are still intriguing:

GMail is too creepy

"If Google builds a database of keywords associated with email addresses, the potential for abuse is staggering. Google could grow a database that spits out the email addresses of those who used those keywords. How about words such as "box cutters" in the same email as "airline schedules"? Can you think of anyone who might be interested in obtaining a list of email addresses for that particular combination? Or how about "mp3" with "download"? Since the RIAA has sent subpoenas to Internet service providers and universities in an effort to identify copyright abusers, why should we expect Gmail to be off-limits?"

Things Google knows about you

"If you use a GMail account:
• Who you send emails to
• Who sends emails to you
• The contents of those emails
• The contents of all emails received from any mailing lists of which you are a member, even if they are private mailing lists."


Privacy subtleties of GMail

"Even so, people have a reaction to a 3rd party computer doing scans like this. If you were offered a service that saved you money by having your paper mail opened by robots for scanning, which then inserted new junk mail in your box based on what it found, you might get a bit creeped out. Go further and consider a service that gave you free phone calls if it could have speech-recognizing computers listen in and barge in with product offers related to your conversation? It's easy to imagine an unpleasant situation where you get invited to a gay wedding in Vancouver, and find with it in your mailbox brochures for gifts, Vancouver hotels and a free copy of Out magazine. People have extended that fear into the e-mail realm."

Comments

[helens78]

Gmail is the coolest thing ever. Seriously. It's got a hell of a lot of storage space (I've used up 20MB just in text since I started using it a few months back), it's readable anywhere (though they are still working on an HTML-only version -- which I desperately want so I can use it on my PDA), you don't even have to worry about sorting your mail into folders (you can use the same Google search engine as, well, Google, to find the messages you're looking for -- SO MUCH FASTER than any local email program's search feature) and oh God, the conversation threading.

As makesmewannadie said, it makes cowriting unbelievably, insanely easy. Your entire fic-in-progress is saved as one "conversation", and when you get the newest message from your cowriter, it pops the whole conversation back into your inbox, so you can click one button and see everything that's happened in that fic to that point. Amazing stuff -- the people I write with and I have been using Gmail almost exclusively since we all started using it.

TANSTAAFL, of course. Gmail puts "relevant text ads" on your sidebar. They are non-annoying and non-invasive; they are, in fact, the least annoying advertising on the Internet I have ever seen. Also, unlike other free webmails, Gmail doesn't add a footer to the bottom of your email that serves as advertising for itself. Doesn't need to; the text ads bring in all the revenue it needs.

And the text ads are hilarious if you're writing porn. You have no idea. I've clicked on dozens of ads (which is why the text ads work; people are more likely to click on them if they're "relevant" to what they're talking about, which sometimes they are, and sometimes they're not), and I'm totally OK with computers spidering them. It's not any less secure than any other method of email transmission, unless you use encryption of some kind.

You'd think being married to someone who works in computer security would make me more leery of this sort of thing, but really, I'm not. I'm not willing to do what would be required to genuinely secure all my information and email online (believe me, it is more work than anyone wants to do), and I'm not going to stress about computers reading my porn (I put it online in public so people can read it, for heaven's sake).

One more thing it's useful for: a lot of military people are using it. 1000MB means a lot when you're storing pictures of the kids you haven't seen in six months and you don't want to have to choose which ones you're giving away. I've sent out a few invites to military personnel.

Really, I could go on and on about it. And I've been using it for several months now, and no spammers have glommed it yet, or if they have, Gmail's tackled them and made them cry uncle for me. *beams*

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that part of the reason I haven't been interested in GMail was because it seemed so trendy when it first started. I saw an article in a magazine about it, and someone from the Google marketing dept was saying how they intentionally capitalized on the social structure of web communities in getting people to try it out. They copied the "invite-only" policy made popular by organizations like LJ on purpose, just to create a market for the product. If the only way you can get an account is to be *invited* by someone who already has one, it makes it something people want more, or so goes the philosophy.

So that combined with the ad thing (and I've always paid for email, so I don't have much experience dealing with ad-supported email) made me not so interested. I can see how it would be good for the things you describe, but I don't write that way. I have plenty of space in my email accounts, and so on. I'm happy with AOL, actually. It does a great job of filtering spam. *shrugs*