Thursday, April 1, 2004
Google's Gmail: Hoax Or Not?
Posted by Janak Parekh in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 03:00 PM
Speaking of April 1 doozies...
"Mountain View, Calif.-based Google also will provide one gigabyte of storage to free account holders, far more than that offered by Yahoo and Microsoft's Internet unit, MSN, which each built strong user bases around free e-mail services and have been attacking Google's prominence as a Web search provider. However, Google's one gigabyte of storage claim led to some speculation about the Gmail announcement being a hoax since it took place on April Fool's Day. Google has pulled April Fool's jokes on the tech community before, including jokes about pigeons being the driving force behind Google's search technology and that Google was looking to start a new research center on the moon. In addition, the press release about Gmail was fairly goofy, including lines such as 'Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born.'"
The one gigabyte of email, plus the fact that the press release was dated April 1 2004, UTC (why would a CA company make a post at UTC?) made me believe it was a hoax -- but apparently, it won't be. 1GB of email for... free? 8O How would they handle the backup? I can tell you this: if it's for real, I'll be signing up.
"Mountain View, Calif.-based Google also will provide one gigabyte of storage to free account holders, far more than that offered by Yahoo and Microsoft's Internet unit, MSN, which each built strong user bases around free e-mail services and have been attacking Google's prominence as a Web search provider. However, Google's one gigabyte of storage claim led to some speculation about the Gmail announcement being a hoax since it took place on April Fool's Day. Google has pulled April Fool's jokes on the tech community before, including jokes about pigeons being the driving force behind Google's search technology and that Google was looking to start a new research center on the moon. In addition, the press release about Gmail was fairly goofy, including lines such as 'Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born.'"
The one gigabyte of email, plus the fact that the press release was dated April 1 2004, UTC (why would a CA company make a post at UTC?) made me believe it was a hoax -- but apparently, it won't be. 1GB of email for... free? 8O How would they handle the backup? I can tell you this: if it's for real, I'll be signing up.
