All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

Gmail


Google is scaring me

Finally reading through Podz’s post on “Feeding the InfoVac” (talking about Google) and the article he linked to, I’m a bit scared. There’s some good points being served up. Any other thoughts on this? I think Podz is the only one just doesn’t trust Google. I know James is kind of in the middle, but loves the search engine. IO ERROR doesn’t like Google at all. What do you think?

Dump everything Google?

I’ve been reading Podz’s distaste with Google. I think it started with Blogger, because someone copied his website exactly. Content, layout, pics - everything. Google didn’t do anything for him, because they stated that they can’t do anything about it.

I don’t know if he had a problem with Gmail, but since he kept it at 5MB most of the time, he switched back to using his email account through his site.

Should I break as many ties with Google as I can? It’s not like A9, Yahoo, or MSN Search are lame - for the most part, Google has been really good with their search algorithms. However, is there a deeper motive? (more…)

Will you use Gmail’s RTF?

Gmail is continually improving. With the additional space, they’ve added Rich-Text Formatting. Would you use this? Do your contacts have their email clients to read that formatting, or are they content with simple text? With simple text, email would take a smaller amount of space. Of course its negligible, but in a world where time is money, each second saved waiting for that message to download could save you a bit in the long run. “Input, input!”

Gmail space slowly increasing

“To celebrate our one-year birthday, we’re giving everyone one more gigabyte. [...] Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able.” It’s not an immediate upgrade. It’s been increasing slowly from 1000 MB. As of now, I currently have 1103 MB of space, but I’m not using that much anyway. It’s still nice!

Gmail purging

I just whittled it down from 68MB to 31MB 16MB in my Gmail account. (I’m not done, either - I’ll continue some other time.) Why? I’d hate to get to 1000MB of usage. I mean, how would I back all that up?

Donating Gmail invites

Update: Man, now they’re down to about 179,000 invites. That’s a huge decrease in just a couple days! I wonder if people are hoarding Gmail accounts - that’s just wrong.

If you don’t know what else to do with your Gmail invites, head over to the isnoop.net Gmail invite spooler. At the time of this writing, they have over 1.5 million invites. You can then send your friends to that website to get a Gmail invite, if they’d like one. I’m going to save 5 invites and donate the other 45 nobody seems to want.

Not receiving messages in Gmail

Good Update: Things are fixed, and all Gmail users are good to go once again. See that Slashdot post for more details. I came home to 77 new messages, so that scared me (I set my Google Groups settings incorrectly, don’t worry). :)

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Blogroll and comment issues

Update: Yes! It’s working again!

The following two things aren’t major issues. I accidently deactivated the Update Linkroll plugin. I’m hoping that’s why the last 9 updated blogs on the right hasn’t been changing the past 3 days. I’ve activated it in hopes that some things will go back to normal.

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All about today

The excerpt has nothing to do with what happened today, but it’s what came out. Note: This entry is a bit more personal at first, then some Firefox stuff afterwards. I’m sure you don’t mind.

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The reason behind Gmail invites

Someone finally finds the real reason why Gmail doesn’t just go public. Thanks Alex and Robert (Scoble)!

I met Chris Uhlik of Google. He’s the program manager of Gmail and the Google Toolbar and a few other things…I asked him why they only give out a few Gmail accounts at a time. Remember, I thought it was sheer marketing genius. Turns out it wasn’t. Turns out they don’t have enough server capacity to deal with everyone who wants an account. So, when they buy a new server and get it installed they hand out another round of invites.

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