Thursday, February 03, 2005  How will Google prevent Gmail from
being a storage depot?  Ever since the initial launch of Gmail,
I've wondered how they'd prevent people from signing up for
multiple accounts and using the service for high-speed,
reliable, online storage, 1 gig at a time.  Need a place to put
MP3 files? Big Powerpoint collections? Movies? Why not Gmail?
Lately I've been thinking that they might never open Gmail up
for open enrollment; they might just stick to the invitation
model. While that wouldn't solve the problem totally, at least
it would limit it.  Just now I see that my stash of invitations
has grown from the typical 6 to 50. Is this the real launch of
Gmail? How many Gmail invitations do you see right now?  It
would be fascinating to graph the pattern of Gmail invitations
worldwide. I bet Google has the data from day one: who invited
whom? Perhaps more importantly to Google: what mail service did
they use previously? Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL...  No comments: