Mood:
happyTopic: geek love
2 new things I'd like to talk about today that have me really excited.
1) You probably already know this if you're really into webstuff, but Google will soon have its own mail like yahoo or hotmail. However, unlike the other two, Google will give users ONE GIGABYTE - FREE! That's right, free! They stated that users shouldn't ever have to delete their email. It also has a bunch of other features like being able to search through your mail using Google technology and having all of the replies to a message listed together. This could seriously undermine Hotmail's sales model which charges uses for a measly 10 megabytes (or something like that). It's going to be called GMail. At the end of this article is a review by Forbes magazine of the email. I know that I'm DEFINITELY going to use it as my email fwding address when I graduate.
The other item is Alcohol 120%. This program is awesome! It allows you to make images of CDs and DVDs onto your computer and then use up to 31 virtual DVD-ROM drives to play these images. The program claims that it runs a lot faster than your CD-ROM. Is it true? YES, YES IT IS! I hated using my Encarta DVD because it took forever to load. The DVD kept trying to spin it faster and faster and it would take a good 5-10 minutes to load up. And everthing else on my (fairly) fast computer (including photoshop) loads up very quickly. Using the image file that I created and even stored on my USB 2.0 external harddrive it ran 400000% faster. It was running in << 1 second. It was great. Since I have the space I'm planning on using this for all of the CDs and DVDs that I use often. It can also be used to make backup working copies of discs that you use often. Say, a game or other piece of software that you use a lot at a tough environment (like a lan party), but don't want to risk scratching the disk. You can make a copy of the disc by burning an image. It even works pretty well on "protected" discs. Of course, I'd just use the virtual drive instead of wasting a CD-R (even if they are only 5 cents each). And, of course, this can be used to send your friends the image so that they can make a copy of your program. However, this is illegal and neither the makers of the program nor the author of this blog reccomend that you use it for that purpose. (Unless you're letting your friend evaluate it before buying)
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Forbes article:
Ten O'Clock Tech
A First Look At Google's Gmail
Arik Hesseldahl, 04.12.04, 10:00 AM ET
NEW YORK - Having tried most Web-based e-mail services, we were eager to try Google's new Gmail, which offers up to a full gigabyte of storage.
Google invited us to experiment with the early version of the service, and taking into account that it remains under construction, we have a few preliminary observations.
At first glance, it looks like pretty much every other Web-based e-mail service out there. But there are a few interesting features we haven't seen before.
First, Gmail is good for the e-mail pack rat that many people are becoming. Most people delete old e-mail messages because they have storage constraints--or think they do, or because they just don't like to see a cluttered inbox. But if you're the type who likes to refer back to old e-mail in order to remember what you or another party said, Gmail's 1-gigabyte storage is certainly a welcome change.
Another feature that makes it easy to re-trace the steps in an e-mail exchange: say you need to remember a few action items sent by e-mail from the boss. Once you find the one of the e-mail messages that is part of that exchange, Gmail displays it with related messages in the window. Gmail calls these exchanges "conversations." And clicking on one expands it so that more than one relevant message is displayed at a time. A link at the right of the screen says "expand all," and it expands all the messages that are part of a conversation.
Finding those messages is far easier and faster than with any other e-mail program or service we've ever experienced. A search field at the top of screen lets you search for practically any word that may appear in any part of the email, including the subject, the name of the sender or what may be in the body of the message. If there's one thing Google does well, it's search. We entered in words we knew we had used in messages sent and they popped up instantly. Another search using the last name of the moderator of a certain mailing list we subscribe to was equally fast and comprehensive.
On other e-mail programs or services, the most effective way to search message content without taking a long time is to rearrange e-mail by date, sender or subject and then try to zero in on the message you're looking for. Gmail has solved this problem brilliantly.
Organizing messages from your inbox is also different with Gmail. Gmail's approach is to use labels, instead of folders, which allows messages to have overlapping types.
For instance, you might subscribe to a mailing list where you discuss politics, but also correspond privately about politics and other things with a personal friend, with whom you're also making vacation plans. If a message from your friend addresses both an ongoing political discussion and vacation plans, it can be labeled as "politics" and "vacation." On the left side of the inbox screen you can click on these labels and instantly see all the messages labeled as politics or vacation or whatever you want.
Finally, you've probably heard much of the hot air surrounding Google's plans to push ads at Gmail users. The first night we started using Gmail, late April 9, we saw the text ads, which were nearly identical to the text ads you're used to seeing in on the right side of the screen after a Web search at Google.com. As of this morning, we noticed no text ads at all.
E-mail is an inherently insecure medium. For the most part messages are sent in the clear, meaning almost no attempt is made to obfuscate the contents of a message from someone with prying eyes. All Internet service providers store e-mail on a server in order to deliver it to you. Technicians with time on their hands and lousy ethics can--if they want--read your mail.
The only way to prevent this is to encrypt your e-mail so that only those who have the keys to decrypt it can read it. But consumers have shown that they overwhelmingly don't care to use encryption, mainly because it adds too many steps in the process of sending and receiving e-mail.
Google insists quite clearly in its privacy policy that "No human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent." The process by which it pushes ads at its users is fully automated. Fears about privacy problems inherent with the Gmail service are, in our opinion, overblown.
As yet, many other basic features, like access to external email accounts via POP3 protocol, and the ability to change the "reply-to address" that appears in mail you send, are missing from Gmail. But it's still early in its existence. When the service gets to general release, we won't be surprised to see a mass migration from Hotmail, Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) free Web-based email service, which has in recent months gone from being average to utterly abysmal in terms of user experience.
Users of Yahoo!'s (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) much better and more powerful Web mail service may start to migrate as well, if only to get around the fees that Yahoo! charges for extra storage. As it stands right now Gmail's main advantage is its storage limit and searching ability. For many users, that may be enough.
Posted by Eric
at 7:19 PM EDT
chatty