I like it, anyway.
The guys whose podcasts I listen to have been gushing about Gmail, which is Google’s new email service. Since I don’t tend to gush about my email services, I figured I should find out what all the hoo-ha was about and went to Gmail’s website.
And to my great annoyance, I found they won’t let people sign up for it.
It’s still in beta. That’s nerdspeak for “We haven’t got all the bugs out of it, so we’ll let you play with it as-is, and you find all the bugs for us.” This way they can release a buggy first version, and people don’t scream their heads off about how buggy it is—it’s in beta so of course it’s buggy. Beta’s a great way of getting away with posting half-done crap on the internet. Google just keeps things in beta for years, just so whenever people complain, they can use it as an excuse: “We’re really sorry it caused your hard drive to burst into flames, but you know it’s still in beta, right?”
So because Gmail is in beta, they don’t want 10 million users clogging their system, so you can’t sign up for it. Instead, you have to find someone who already has a Gmail account, and beg them to invite you to use it. Gmail is invitation-only. Existing users are allowed to invite 16 others to use it, and that’s all.
Well, it isn’t hard to find people with spare invitations. In fact, the person who invited me had more than 90 invitations she could offer. (How’d she get so many? I didn’t ask. Obviously you can just create 16 more Gmail accounts for yourself, which would give you 272 more invitations, so there y’are.) She wanted me to ask in haiku, so I figured that was reasonable and dashed off a 17-syllable request, and now I have Gmail.
If you want an invitation from me, sorry; I’ve already invited my family. I got a big family.
So what’s the big deal? Well first of all, you can search for things in your email, which makes it a lot easier to find old stuff. Second, Google bunches email by “conversations,” so you can keep track of your mail and its replies and re-replies and so forth. Third, Google gives you 2.5 gigabytes of storage space, which definitely comes in useful; I spend way too much time deleting bigger-than-average files because I’m always in danger of maxing out my storage space. (I even found some hacker software that’ll let you tap that storage space like a hard drive.) And last, its sorting system is a lot more practical than sticking stuff in folders.
So I like it. So far. It’s still in beta, after all.