I remember months ago when Gmail accounts started being offered to people as part of a “preview release and limited test.” According to the FAQ on the Gmail web site this is still the case. :dubious:
Come on, Google, stop the charade! I have nothing wrong with the concept of Gmail itself. But the idea that it is still in “limited release” is a joke. A marketing ploy, designed to make people feel special that they can get a Gmail account. And it’s working, looking at the numerous threads here and on places like FARK, where thousands of people are getting their Gmail accounts.
I admit, I fell for the ploy as well. Signing up for a new Gmail account when I already have 3 others I check regularly. Alas, how can one give up a whole gig, especially being one of the exclusive first people who signed up!
It’s not exclusive anymore. The Gmail people are smart, and know as people get “invites,” they’ll quickly go out to get their friends accounts.
Perhaps I was being a little harsh in the title. Gmail isn’t the spawn of the devil. They don’t even have a bad service. But their marketing… effective, yes, but still very misleading.
Just be honest with us, end this pseudo-preview release, and open it up already!
They can place an upper limit on how many people sign up by using the invitation system. They can be sure that no more than X people can have accounts at any given time, which is useful when your trying to test something out.
It’s no worse than any other number of transparent marketing ploys like, for example, selling something for $19.95 instead of $20 (or to be even more relevant, $4.95 instead of $5). People fall for it and it works so I don’t blame or hold anything against them for it.
Besides, I’ve had my account for four months now. I was one of the original 1337 933k5.
It’s still a damned good interface, and you probably got in early enough to get a good name, so what’s the big deal? It’s not like it was gonna be “special” forever.
It’s not only marketing, though. It lets them gradually introduce users without the whole thing crashing. I have a feeling they’re going to be opening the it up soon, though.
I’m skeptical. Every time I give away my invites, it doesn’t take more than 24 hours before I get 5 more. I don’t think it has anything to do with crashing.
To repeat, I have no qualms with the service whatsoever. If I did, I wouldn’t have helped spread it. Just the invite system, which seems, at this point, useless.
Threaded conversations, for one. If you send me an email, I reply, and then you reply to that email, when I look in my saved email, all three are in one chronological thread so that I know exactly what each email was about and in context.
Starring emails for easy access later is nice also. If you need to be able to find one particular email in a sea of hundreds, having a little indicator beside the important ones makes it much easier.
And finally, you can also label threads too, to make the starring process even more easy to use for future use. It’s really a quite nice interface and I use it almost exclusively.
Haven’t had the first piece of spam in four months of heavy use either.
I have a lot of spam, but the spam filter takes care of every single piece of it.
And the filters are pretty cool too, it automatically places a label and archives emails for you. I used to only use my hotmail account. Now I barely touch the POS. Gmail also loads a lot quicker.
And right now the invite system is fucking up too
I like the threaded conversations, too. I also like being able to use the search engine to find an email. As far as the “invite” thing, :shrug: no skin off my nose. It’s still free, and if they have an “open signup” thing, they could definitely get more accounts opened at once than they want to handle.
I love being able to filter incoming messages and automatically apply a label to all mail that matches a search pattern. This, by the way, fixes most of the cases where Gmail’s spam filters false-positive, at least in my experience with opt-in mass mailings.
The interface is beautiful. If you have looked around Google-designed webpages, you’ll notice the lack of banner ads and popups. AdWords are there, of course, but AdWords don’t blink in 256 colors and spawn a half-dozen windows each time the page changes.
Even if you take the lack of annoying ads as read, Gmail still looks very nice. It’s a very minimal interface that makes good use of color and position to draw the eye in useful ways, and still has a lot of whitespace. Gmail makes the SDMB look busy.
Threading and searching are both very, very helpful in keeping your emails organized. As you can search on the contents of email, as opposed to just the header information, the search function begins to look more and more appealing. And, of course, threading keeps your conversations neatly organized.
Finally, don’t underestimate the value of a gig of free online storage. I use it to move files between computers that otherwise can’t talk to each other at all. It’s much simpler than any alternative I know of, and it’s more available. This isn’t an optimal way to move files between machines, and I wouldn’t use it if I had any other options, but I don’t denigrate a useful tool.
Well, thanks to this thread I’ve availed myself of an invitation. If it manages to cut down on the spam half as wel as some of the other poster are saying – and I see no reason to doubt them – the switch from Hotmail will have been worth it.
Ya know, I was thinking about this this morning and the invite system may have some really cool benefits.
I’ll admit that the feeling of ‘something special’ isn’t hurting Gmail but it may also help stop spammers using the system to send spam. Spammers like to register (automatically if possible) a ton of disposable accounts to spam from and then forget about when they get closed down.
The invite system essentially stops this by making it difficult to get hold of a large number of invites and, additionally, if you abuse your account than you’ll not get any invites to hand out.
That, and the careful controll they can keep on the numbers, suggest to me that invite based services may become more common in the future.
[tin foil hat mode]Of course they can also track links of who invites who and what their mail contails and do all sorts of devious data mining and identity tracking. If they were evil… [/tfhm]
