On Gmail

Initially appeared on doktorko.com 1/18/2005.

I was never really one to hop on the bandwagon. My cellphone was always three models behind the current craze, i never played any MMOG (starcraft doesn't count), and i adamantly refused to open a friendster or myspace account on the grounds that it was too "bakya." I had heard about gmail before and had an inkling that it was "the next big thing," but i never had any interest in finding out more because it seemed like just another fad. Imagine - people paying thousands of dollars on ebay to get a gmail account?! Almost as crazy as thousands of dollars for the Virgin-Mary-Grilled-Cheese-Sandwich, but not quite.

Anyway - my kuya sent me a gmail invite the other day, and having nothing better to do, i googled it (hmmm - is google turning into the new microsoft?) and found some reviews raving about the program. Which i though was weird; email is such a basic thing - how much tweaking can people do, and how great can it actually be? Out of curiosity, i decided to follow the link and open my own account.

Now, i most definitely will not be raving about how great gmail is, because 1. i'm not the raving type, and 2. i'm not being paid. What i will say is this: it's the fastest web-based email that i've used ever, bar-none; i had been using mail.com for a while, and while it gave me a doctor.com address and was decently fast, the speed is nothing compared to gmail (think PC-XT vs. pentium 4). While the GUI will need more work in the days to come (it's still in beta, after all), it is very functional and probably has near-infinite possibilities for the power user. 1gb worth of storage space, multiple ways to file your mail, and the ability to follow threads by subject and sender - pretty amazing stuff. Seems like nothing, but like one review i read said, once you start using it, you won't know how you got along without it.