From: Mark Hubbart <discordantus@...>
Date: 2004-12-03T10:45:03+09:00
Subject: Re: SOT gmail invites

Hi,

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 04:27:42 +0900, Stefan Schmiedl <s@xss.de> wrote:
> Warning: Rambling rant ahead.

:)

> My personal take is that they just wanted to make sure that
> *everybody* is keen on getting an account. Make it exclusive,
> by invitation only. Seeding it amongst the geekest of geeks,
> first generation invites went quickly. But seemingly invited
> users got their own share of invites.

Only for a few levels, I think. otherwise, theya re doing some smart
filtering and not giving invitations to secondary accounts that I made
for myself.

> Now it has become a practical test for the claim that every two people
> in the U.S. can build a chain of mutually known persons of maximum
> length 6. If that is true, how many invites per person would you need to
> reach saturation?

Definitely a viral marketing thing, for sure

> Make people sign up and store their information on your company disks?
> Easy. Instead of crawling and begging them for their data, be a snob
> and make it a challenge for them. They will fall for it.
> 
> On my box I have gobs of gigabytes for email storage, no ads
> and a very fast interface via procmail, formail, mutt and grep.
> I will not entrust a company with a service I can provide just
> as good.  I will be the last one without a Google email address.

I'm a packrat. I *like* having massive archives of the ruby-talk list
hanging around. My email client hates it. By the time I reached about
a 100 megabyte mailbox size, it was moving a bit slow, searches were
far less than instantaneous, and threading started having issues.
Gmail was an upgrade for me; I can do instant searches over all my
mail, plus a few other nice features.

As for privacy: If I understand correctly the privacy statement says
that they do not share any of your data with anyone, and *they* only
use statistics based on your data. So I'm not particularly worried
about that kind of thing.

Anyway, I guess it's all a matter of taste. I've grown very fond of
the gmail interface. For me, it's sorta like tabbed browsing; once I
got used to it, I didn't want to go back.

cheers,
Mark