On April first I was sitting at a board meeting with folks from a bunch of agencies and top sites. One guy came in and teased the AOL guy saying Google was introducing a free email service. We all
laughed thinking it was an April fool's joke right away.
Google's press release was subheadlined, "Search is Number Two Online Activity -- Email is Number One: 'Heck, Yeah,' Say Google
Founders."
Was this a strategy of Google's PR folks? Did it just happen this way? Either way, the buzz meter cranked all week long. The news set message boards afire with Netizens thinking it
was a hoax too. It wasn't.
I'm sure you've read about it. If not, here are the highlights directly from the Google site:
Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea
that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want. The key features are:
Search, don't sort.
Use Google search to find the
exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received. Don't throw anything away.
1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message. Keep
it all in context.
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.
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As a consumer, I think Google is on the money when they are providing such a huge storage
capacity. And of course searching through several messages will become significantly easier.
However, as an advertiser, I'm scratching my head a bit. About what you ask dear readers? Well, the
destiny of Ad Words and contextual advertising have gotten me worried. We pay fees for the Google system to scan for popular words and serve up relevant ads. To me, this is one of the most efficient
forms of advertising today. And let's face it; it's cool.
My personal email however, is a different story. It is too close to home. I have big time privacy concerns here. Do you? Think about this
for a moment. What's the first thing you do in order to obtain a free email address? You offer up your first and last name. Sometimes your address or zip code. I don't want my name correlated with
anyone's search.
The other thing I was thinking about is Spam. I want my email client to search for and warn me of Spam prior to categorizing messages in any way. I'm not sure if Gmail does this.
The biggest worry I have is the mainstream user. My guess is that most of them either won't be aware of privacy issues or just frankly not care. I guess the newsflash is good old Microsoft. They
are already scanning email. Microsoft serves up ads and pop ups all over it's free email. Do users mind? Do they lower the bar of expectation when it's "free?" Do they raise their tolerance level for
acceptance of intrusiveness because it's free? Damn right they do.
Seems to me this is a huge threat to those who are using Hotmail and Yahoo! mail. In fact, I went to Yahoo! to type in mail. The
first result said, "Did you mean mail?" Will Google be ubiquitous in email as well as search?