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Gmail Becomes 3rd Largest Email Provider

It's being reported that Gmail has surpassed AOL and moved into third place among email providers behind Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo. Yahoo, the email leader has 106 millions users, Hotmail has 47 million while Google has a small by comparison 37 million.

Google surpassed longtime industry powerhouse AOL who has 36.4 million users to make it the number 4 email service. This is another bad break from AOL who after years of offering pay email finally made their service free. This could have been a big deal 5 years ago when so many people kept AOL just because they found the AOL software so easy to use. Now no one cares about downloading AOL's program because it's a waste of time and all of that stuff can be done simply by going on the web.

While Yahoo and Hotmail do need to innovate their service, they are the incumbent and people are comfortable with them. If you have been using the same email for years and years, changing it would be similar to changing your phone number. Someone who you may not have talked to forever would lose their ability to get in contact with you if you left your old email address for a new Gmail address.

One of the best reasons for someone to sign up for email with another service is synergy with another service. While this is a gross generalization, a lot of email is all the same. I personally keep my Yahoo email because I need a Yahoo account when I play fantasy football with my friends every fall. Google is always going to have people because of their iGoogle page, documents, and RSS reader. Hotmail has synergy with Windows Messenger, a popular instant message service for a lot of international people, and Xbox Live subscribers.

While this is good news for Google, if Google ever wants to be the #1 email service out there they have to come out with something revolutionary to up their users anywhere close to Yahoo. Perhaps Google Wave could be that spark.

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/14/gmail-nudges-past-aol-email-in-the-us-to-take-no-3-spot/

Google Wave Update

Google Wave is apparently going to be available for public preview on September 30th. Truperior.com did an article on the Wave which showed how Google was trying to make email more streamlined. It can best be described as taking email and making it like sending an instant message. We'll give you a full report on whatever we notcie on September 30th.

Souce: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/15/2347257/Google-Wave-Preview-Opens-Up-On-Sept-30th?from=rss

iGoogle trying to have their own Facespace

iGoogle, Google's popular "do everything" destination site is trying to up their social networking game by adding in the ability to comment on items such as pictures, videos, and news articles. They are also allowing status updates and play games against each other ala Yahoo Games. The ability to comment on articles was already implemented on the Google Reader site, but adding it to iGoogle will be a great step because if it takes off, it's just going to turn more people into Gmail users, and will keep Google on top of the computing world. As reported previously Myspace was starting their own email service, so Google needed to get involved in social networking to compete as a multifaceted internet service. I have yet to see some of these features yet, but I'm looking forward to a nice game of Scrabble.

Source: http://gigaom.com/2009/08/12/igoogle-finally-goes-social/

The Speed to Browse

One of the most frustrating things to do in life is wait. They say patience is a virtue, but I have a cliche of my own: why wait? Your web browser, as one of the most important applications of a computer shouldn't keep you waiting too long. After studying all of the web browsers that I saw available on the market the one thing I did not take into account was the load up times of browsers. Google Chrome loads up really fast. My Flock browser, not so much. Instead of going by the overall vibe, I decided to take out my iPod Touch's trusty stopwatch feature and load each browser up individually to find out how long each one takes. To make things fair since I haven't used some of these browsers since I wrote the article, I have loaded each of them up to get them refreshed. For each individual start up, I shall restart my computer to give it time to get the juices flowing. Also to keep things fair I made the start up page for all browsers iGoogle and I counted a start up as a browser is open and I can start to use it. Let's see how this goes:

Apple Safari: 1:01.7
Mozilla Firefox: 46.4
Flock: 40.2
Opera: 36.6
Google Chrome: 29.1
Microsoft Internet Explorer: 27.3
AOL Explorer: 10.3

To say that I was shocked by AOL Explorer is a gross understatement. I swore Chrome would run away with this. To be fair I use Flock and Firefox a little bit more than most, so I have more add-ons loaded into them. Microsoft IE also has a good amount of add-ons but it still loaded up very quickly. Safari and Opera opened the browser window very quickly but it took a ton of time for the actual web page to become available.

I almost feel guilty being so rough on AOL Explorer when I reviewed it before. Sometimes when I need to check out a web page quick, I would open Google Chrome while I'm waiting for Flock to open. Now I'll be giving Explorer more of that opportunity. 10.3 seconds is great. Maybe AOL should make a music player so I don't have to wait 5 minutes for Itunes to load up anymore.