Google Doubles Gmail Storage

One year to the day after search giant Google unveiled its beta Gmail service, the company announced it was doubling storage capacity to two gigabytes, up from one.

Google's announcement came one week after rival Yahoo! said it would quadruple storage allowance, from 250 megabytes to one gigabyte. Although the announcement may have been timed to the first birthday of the search giant's mail offering, Jupiter Research analyst Niki Scevak said there may have been an element of one-upmanship in the upgrade. "There's certainly always chest-beating going on," said Scevak.

But, while two gigabytes is a lot of space, Scevak said, it's unlikely that it will make too much of a difference to consumers, because for the average user, even one gigabyte is probably more than enough room. "Increasingly it will become irrelevant," he said. "In differentiation between Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail, I think storage is one factor that will increasingly disappear from consideration." Plus, Gmail's invite-only club lessens the move's effect, Scevak said. "From a consumer's point of view, it's relatively tough to be invited," he said. "It's certainly not a mainstream consumer service at this point in time. Consequently, its impact is muted by that fact."

In the larger and more abstract view of Google's mission--"organizing the world's information," according to the company's Web site--the move makes more sense, Scevak said. "When you're talking about two to five years down the track, it gives some sort of persistence to content," he said. "In the Hotmail world, everyone deleted things they sent and received; perhaps in a Gmail world, it allows you to search through those years of e-mail."

In addition to the beefed-up storage space, Google also unveiled a host of smaller features, including rich text formatting for highlighting, bulletted points, and colored text; Picasa compatibility; and automatic forwarding.

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