Common Sense for the Biochemist

Enough of the introductory crap. Let's get down to some real blogging business. First item up: e-mail. I ranted a little about this on my website a year or so ago. Flash back to about a year and a half ago. I have had a hotmail account for at least five years. I had to check it daily because I was at my storage limit (all of what 5 megs?) and the daily dose of spam would put me over the limit. Of course, I could pay to get more storage to alleviate that problem. Enter Google's Gmail. Holy crap! an entire gigabyte of storage space. I was able to get an invitation by promising to vote for George W. Bush in the upcoming presidential election on one of the gmail invitation websites that had popped up. You want to talk about a service that blew everyone else out of the water, that is exactly what Gmail did. These guys were offering 200 times the amount of storage compared to the other leading service, hotmail (you'll notice I am not providing a link to hotmail because I don't think it is worth visiting). Of course, hotmail got around to finally offering a whopping 250 megs (still four times less than gmail). As if the storage thing wasn't enough, gmail provides a clean interface to work from and it is extremely user friendly. Although some people have reported that Gmail can be a little slow, I have had no such problems and can say that Gmail is faster that hotmail. Okay, so you may take issue with the fact that gmail computers "read" your emails so that they can display content oriented text advertising but I am really okay with that. It sure beats the dancing snakes trying to sell mortgages that you will find on hotmail. Gmail also allows you to access your mail via POP3 (so you can access it through your favorite e-mail reading program). Skip ahead now, to this last April and Google announes that they are going to give you another gigabyte of storage space and keep giving you more (their infinity plus one program). Since this announcement, they have provided an additional 200 megs of storage space, almost as much as hotmail what a hotmail account still gives you. I am currently in the process "archiving" all of my e-mails that I have collected through the years into a Gmail account. It is very intersting digging through your old e-mails and seeing what kind of story they can tell about your life. You'll notice through all of this I have not mentioned Yahoo!'s e-mail service. I have an account through them and I get 2 gigabytes of storage (because I had DSL through them), but I don't use it. Gmail, also caused them to up their storage space and they responded better than hotmail, but Gmail still blows them out of the water. I would like to know what kind of economic impact they have had on these two services by offering for free something you had to pay to get with the other services (extra storage). I guess what really ticks me off about this is that it took Google shaking things up for the other e-mail providers to expand their services (and they still haven't caught up). As long as noone was rocking the boat, these guys were going to sit on their current level of tehcnology and milk it for what it was worth. I'm going to be writing more about Google later and I will have more to say then. Alright, that's enough, its only an e-mail account. If you want to try out gmail, leave your e-mail address in a comment to this post and I will send you an invitation.