Beta Label Lifted Finally

Citing it as a hindrance to corporate uptake, while not citing anything that has changed that makes any difference... Google has dropped the beta tag from Gmail, Calendar, Talk & Docs.

Showing they can still laugh at themselves, there is now a setting in Gmail that lets geeks restore the beta tag.

Gmail to overtake Hotmail real soon

Here are the latest figures:

Gmail 29.6 million (unique visitors per month)
Hotmail 43.5 million
Yahoo 91 million

However, Gmail has grown by 43% in the last year, whereas Hotmail have lost 5% of theirs. If that trend continues, Gmail will be the #2 provider in just over a year.

Makes sense, it is by far the superior product.

Google Free Hosting Spam in Gmail

Watch out for this one, it ended up in my Gmail account, and I almost fell for it. As usual poor grammer is the giveaway. These phishers will have all you Google accounts if you sign in after following the link:

Hello,
Dear Gmail customer
After our free email services we offer you to sing up for our free hosting services.
This service currently is in beta test.
And we choose you to test this services and report us any bug you may find.We give you unlimited webspace on your own domain name you must only change your dns services to ns1.google.com and ns2.google.com and enter your domain name in our special control panel.
Our servers are linux based and we support PHP, SSL (Secure Shell),FTP,Stats,CGI,Perl,Unlimited email address and finaly 500 MySQL Database.

Notice :
Dont sell this invitation code in auction website that may cause we disable your account in the future.

Your invitation code :
http://google-promotions.com/Acvw2p99ah7dtV1bFJyacSHUQcdROroysWeaIkkATEXaZUJ7n6wwXjzlyFVEYfJyB74Y66qln8VSP1Njjbp4zWS/

No More Drunken Emails

The geniuses at Google have come up with an optional feature for Gmail - tell it when you are most likely to be drunk (ie Saturday night), and you will need to pass a sobriety test of sorts before you can send an email.

I can imagine some folk getting very upset if they write a long email only to find they can't send it - perhaps have an option of quizzing you before you write it all... But then again, the autosaved draft might be good for a laugh the next day.

Google Apologizes for GMail Downtime

It was only a 2 hour outage, but that's expensive for any business that depends on this service for their email. So Google have taken a rare (according to them) step of publicly apologizing.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/we-feel-your-pain-and-were-sorry.html

Well, a public apology would be a press release, something Google are quite adept at utilising. But this apology merely appeared in their blog. Google, in their hubris, expect that people would automatically:

1) Know the relevant Google blogs for the services they use
2) Subscribe to them

To their credit, a link to the post appears on the Gmail homepage. But if you are already signed in, you won't see that either...

Gmail to overtake Yahoo! Mail in 2010

Currently Yahoo's offering has 240 million users vs Gmail's 80 million - but it had a huge headstart, and many people choose to keep legacy emaild addresses for obvious reasons.

But soon GMail will be as well known as Yahoo! Mail, because it is growing at 53% per year! More at Marketing Vox.