A question
Aug. 27th, 2004 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
emmagrant01What'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."
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."
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no subject
Date: 2004-08-31 10:31 pm (UTC)As Helens and others have mentioned, it's great for tagging, and since almost all my writing these days is either RPGs or other co-written stuff, it's great. Instead of having 50 separate emails at the end of a fic, they're all threaded together into one. I keep them in my inbox until I tag, then I archive them, and when I get a tag back, it pops the entire thread back into my inbox.
The one thing that's bad about threading is that it works by using the from address, which means all LJ replies will clump together, as will all JF, and all GJ. If someone uses the subject line in a comment then it will see that as a separate email, but how often do people use the subject line? Not very, IME. This really annoyed me at first, because I was used to saving comment replies. Now I've just decided to trash them, because otherwise every new reply popped hundreds of LJ comments back into my inbox in one huge thread.
The storage capacity is a plus for me, too. Verizon's email storage is really small, so even though I check my email several times a day and download it to my HD, deleting it all from the server, if people sent me large files, they would often bounce. I translate doujinshi into English, and most people choose to send me scans to translate from. Obviously the bigger the scans the better, especially since some doujinshi are written by hand and can be very hard to read at smaller sizes. So now I have everyone send me scans to gmail so I don't have to worry about bouncing. It's really been great for that.
The labelling system gmail uses instead of folders appeals to my obsessive-compulsiveness. All my tags get labelled by who I'm tagging with, and if it's a three or four way tag, I can put multiple labels on.
As for the ads, honestly it took me ages to even find where they were. I was expecting something big and obvious, but it's just this little column of text on the side of some emails (not even all of them). Also, the ads are on the side of the threads, not the individual emails, so even if you have 100 emails threaded together, there's only one set of ads. It's much better than the flashing, moving banner ads slapped all over Yahoo and Hotmail.
And the whole "oh no, my email is being read!" thing is laughable when you see what the ads are for. Targetted, my ass. They just pick up on random words. One current fic of mine is called "The High Cost of Renting" and so there's an ad for financial stuff. Another is from the Sable Knot RPG and so there's talk of Eton and Oxford and there are ads about boarding school. Another makes mention of caffiene and being tired and there are ads for tea... Over half the stuff doesn't have any ads at all.
As for the complaint of "gmail encourages you not to delete", the fact is that gmail can encourage you not to all they want, but it's still up to you if you want to delete. I delete stuff all the time and only save that which is essential. And sure Google may still have it on their server even after they've said they deleted it, but so may Hotmail or Yahoo or even my own ISP.
There are a lot of things I like about gmail, but the main uses I can see are for receiving large files and for tagging, so if you do neither, then I think that lessens a lot of its appeal.