Internet

I know it seems that the GMail invite phenomenon has fizzled out, but in case there were still people interested in having a GMail account with 1 GB of storage space, send me your e-mail address and the first 6 people to do so will get invites.

You don't even have to do a good deed anymore, how about you just write something whimsical in the comment box to amuse me?

I learned today of an Israeli company called walla.com which offers free e-mail accounts with the same 1 GB (1000 MB) storage capacity that Google's GMail provides.

For those still looking for GMail accounts who haven't yet secured invites, consider looking at walla.com. I signed up immediately after I heard about this service, and my initial impression is that it is very similar to GMail. It doesn't seem that the advertising is quite as intrusive: ads are provided based on demographic and geographic information that you provide and certain predetermined keywords are highlighted in e-mail text as links to advertisers' sites.

I've been using my new GMail account for a little over a week now. I haven't used it for any personal e-mail, but I've used it as the contact address for some deals over Craig's List and other assorted communications.

There's a lot of paranoia about GMail's privacy policies, and it centers mostly around the fact that GMail displays targeted text ads like the ones displayed in the column on the right of this site. A lot of people take this to mean that Google is reading your e-mail to choose the ads. The application that chooses the ads does so in real time based on keywords in whatever page you're viewing. I don't consider this to be problematic at all. They are storing the content of your e-mail anyway, and they're not doing anything with it that any other free web-based e-mail service doesn't do.

What am I going to do with all of this storage space?

First, my GMail account had 1000MB of storage. Then my Yahoo account went up to 100MB of storage. Now my Excite account is going up to 125MB.

So my first question is, what on earth do I need all of this space for? Especially considering that I have over 200GB of storage space on my computers.

My second question is, how did Excite and Yahoo increase their storage space for each member by 25 times or more so quickly?

As I read the newspaper on my way into work on the train this morning, I got to thinking about just how much the internet has changed the way in which I process information. Until I was in high school, the only way to find information for a project was to use the library card catalog (which had actual, physical "cards"), or the encyclopedia (or Encarta if the one computer that had it wasn't being used). Searching by "keyword" was just about impossible, and finding the three "required" sources for a project was actually difficult. If I wanted to research something obscure, I might not be able to find any information at all.