Gmail

Gmail is one year old today. Gmail is the Google free e-mail that sort of competes with hotmail and yahoo mail.

I remember when this was announced last year, and nearly everyone thought that it was an April Fools joke, as Google has a tradition of doing something on April 1st (today they announced Google Gulp).

But, Gmail is real, and going strong. Today, they announced a new 2 Gigabyte limit, promising to continue to grow this over time. This basically means that you never have to delete e-mail messages. You can keep them on their server, search through them, etc. This kind of idea represents a large shift that is starting to happen in the computer industry. A large part of my hard disk space on my computer is just for e-mail that I've downloaded. If I started keeping it on Google's servers, I would have more free space locally, but more importantly, I can get to all of this information anywhere that I can get to a browser.

There is a whole list of new features announced also, like rich editing, Picasa integration, saving a draft, older browser support, etc. etc. It's still in beta, but it's getting better every day.

How do you get Gmail? Someone needs to invite you. If you don't know anyone else with a Gmail account, you can always ask me. I think I can invite 50 people...