Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Braving the frontiers of technology...sort of

There's a story today on Salon.com called Don't be afraid of the big bad Gmail. If you haven't heard of G-mail, don't worry. You will. It's a new web-based e-mail service from Google that offers 1 GB of free storage to users. The trade-off is that your e-mails will show "contextual ads" from Google, similar to when you use their search engine. The idea that machines are scanning your e-mail to decide what kinds of ads to show you has some privacy advocates worried. The Salon article takes a look at what the service offers, how it works and what it means for you and me, the user.

Since The Daily Upload is hosted by Blogger.com (which is owned by Google) I received one of the invitations to be a beta tester of the new service. So I've signed up for an account and I'll let you know what I think about it after I've used it for awhile. By the way, if you want to send me an e-mail to help me test it, my new Gmail address is dave.traynor@gmail.com.

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