The move into e-mail is typical Google strategy. Before the search giant arrived, the task of finding useful information on the Web was daunting. But with an elegant solution that ranked a Web page's importance by examining what other pages linked to it, Google fixed the worst of Web search problems and became the dominant provider. It recoups its costs and then some by selling ads on those search pages. Google showed up at the right moment, when broadband usage was gaining momentum and the Internet was moving from newfangled to mainstream.(Thanks Lisa from tryloncommunications.com, for the link)Google may be in the right place at the right time again. E-mail remains the killer app of the Internet Age, providing instant communication between any points on the globe. But e-mail has hit the same wall that search hit in the late 1990s, when the volume of Web pages and the Web's complex structure finally outdistanced the ability of earlier search engines to keep up. Today, most users struggle to keep their e-mail up-to-date and organized.
I sure hope google would do to email what they have done with searches as I'm getting around 3000
spam emails a week.
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Anders Jacobsen [extrospection.com photography] |