Today marks the 1-year birthday for one of the most talked about web-based email services ever developed, Google’s Gmail.
The funny thing about Gmail is when it launched last year; many people initially thought it was an April Fool’s Day joke. Of course, this was not the case. Because today is Gmail’s birthday, Google is giving Gmail members a present, and no, it’s not a prank.
To celebrate 1 year, Gmail is introducing their “Infinity+1 storage plan.” A description from Gmail’s about page explains:
Google’s Schematic of Their Infinity Storage Plan
Notice the cup ring?
Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn’t mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we’re giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people’s lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more.
In order to convince members this increase isn’t a hoax, the Gmail homepage features an increasing counter showing Gmailers the storage capacity increase while it is occurring. The counter is currently at 1338 MB and climbing. When the article began, it was at 1336 MBs.
Not only is Google in the process of increasing storage capacity, they’ve also introduced some other features to improve overall service. One of the major improvements include rich layout control, which Google describes as:
“Fonts, bullets and highlighting, oh my! Gmail now offers rich text formatting. And over 60 colors of the rainbow. Discover a land of more than just black and white.”
As I continue this article, Gmail has already passed the 1340 MB mark and continues to climb. However, what will the fall-out from Gmail’s increase be? When they launched Gmail last year, most of the web-based email services scrambled around, working to improve their storage capacities and improve overall service.
This catch-up continued into 2005 when Yahoo announced they too would be increasing storage to 1 gigabyte, even though it took them the better part of the year to do so. Initially, Yahoo and Hotmail only increased their non-pay email service storage capacity to 250 MBs.
Now that Gmail has opened the email storage floodgates again, how long will it take for their competitors to respond in kind? Given the fact that Yahoo just recently announced their storage increase, one can imagine it may be a while before they match Gmail’s upped ante.
1351 and counting.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
