Gmail

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 08 Apr 2004 12:00:00 GMT
# My copy of Don Hill's fine 1945 Skyfighters flight simulator came in the mail yesterday. Mighty good turnaround. I submitted my order on Sunday, and it arrived via Priority Mail on Wednesday. Old style drag-and-drop install. Unfortunately, it requires the CD to start up. But it works like a charm. Yippeeeee!!!

# David Carr at The New York Times - Putting 40,000 Readers, One by One, on a Cover BugMeNot - the June, 2004 issue of Reason Magazine will have 40,000 different covers, one for each subscriber, containing a satellite photo of the subscriber's neighborhood with their house circled. Big Brother is watching you! [picks]

When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood - their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.

On one level, the project, sort of the ultimate in customized publishing, is unsurprising: of course a magazine knows where its subscribers live. But it is still a remarkable demonstration of the growing number of ways databases can be harnessed. Apart from the cover image, several advertisements are customized to reflect the recipient's particulars.

Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason, said the magazine, with an editorial mission of "Free Minds, Free Markets,'' used the stunt to illustrate the cover article about the power and importance of databases.

"Our story is man bites dog," Mr. Gillespie said. "Everybody, including our magazine, has been harping on the erosion of privacy and the fears of a database nation. It is a totally legit fear. But they make our lives unbelievably easier as well, in terms of commercial transactions, credit, you name it."

...

In some respects, Reason's cover stunt is less Big Brother than one more demonstration that micromarketing is here to stay. "My son gets sports catalogs where his name is imprinted on the jerseys that are on the cover," Mr. Rotenberg said. "He thinks that's very cool."

In his editor's note describing the magazine's database package, Mr. Gillispie left open three spots - commuting time, educational attainment and percentage of children living with grandparents - so he could adapt his message to individual readers. Mr. Gillespie said that the parlor trick could have profound implications as database and printing capabilities grow.

"What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you?" he asked. "That would be a magazine that everyone would want to read."

# skrenta at Topix.net Weblog - The Secret Source of Google's Power - 100,000 servers and a petabyte of storage adds up to the world's most powerful general-purpose computer. Gmail, Google's new email service is not yet generally available. They're running a beta test to an invited crowd of reviewers. I signed up for their mailing list. [wes]

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
From Google's About Gmail page:
As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we're testing an email service called Gmail.

Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of storage. The backbone of Gmail is a powerful Google search engine that quickly recalls any message an account owner has ever sent or received. That means there's no need to file messages in order to find them again.

When Gmail displays an email, it automatically shows all the replies to that email as well, so users can view a message in the context of a conversation. There are no pop-ups or banner ads in Gmail, which places relevant text ads and links to related web pages adjacent to email messages.

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