I Found Some Of Your Life

[via The Morning News]

I’ll bet you never even knew such a thing exisited.

Off the topic of librarians and dutch ovens, I’ll be working on a blog piece about Our President and his religious beliefs. Politics ain’t usually my bag around here, and I’ll try not be too ranty, but I find Mr. Bush’s views too fascinating to ignore and too easy to misperceive and mischaracterize. It’ll take me a while to research and write it, though, so don’t expect it soon.

If an invite link ever shows up in my account, this could be lucrative. Also, I’m beginning to think I need a Gmail (or general Internet) category around here.

How do I invite others to join Gmail?

Because we’re currently only offering Gmail as part of a preview release and limited test, we don’t have details on when Gmail will be made more widely available.

As we make way for more accounts, we may periodically allow you to invite others to join Gmail. When we do so, you will see an invitation link in your inbox.

To invite someone, click on the ‘Invite a friend to join Gmail!’ link in your inbox. You will then be asked to provide an email address and a personalized message to your invitee.

The person you invite will be sent a message that includes a link to join Gmail. That registration link will be valid for three weeks and can be used to create only one account.

Should your invitee have problems creating a Gmail account, please let us know by clicking on the ‘contact us’ link below.

Please note that the link may not always be available. When you are allowed to invite others to join Gmail, the number of invitations that you can send will be indicated at the top of the page after you click on the link. Once you have used all of those invitations, we will not be able to immediately issue more invitations.

We have also created a sign up list for those who are interested in receiving updates on Gmail, but have not been invited.

However, I’d like to add a reason he sort of glosses over–search. Since Gmail provides a gigabyte of mail storage, you can archive virtually all of your messages for years without having to delete them. (Google estimates that the average user can go five years without deleting a single message.)

This means that you can store mailing-list postings, e-mails from friends, your local paper’s daily-headlines mailing, Daily Candy or Manhattan User’s Guide reviews, or whatever you choose to store–and you can search all that material later. If, in five years, you want to find specific messages about a particular MoMA exhibit (say, a Times review, the plans you made with a friend to see that exhibit, and an article about a brazen theft of artworks from that exhibit), you should be able to find them all with just a couple words in the Gmail search box.

I think it’s damn cool.

michael [dot] dietsch [at] gmail [dot] com

Thanks to Jen for the review link.

But these are freakier.

I feel much better now. Don’t you?  

If you’re curious, however, about what the Web community is saying about this buyout, scroll to the bottom of Gillmor’s blog entry, where he links to commentary from all over the Web.