April 16, 2004

Paul Boutin of Slate.com has reviewed a beta verison of Google’s Gmail web mail service and finds its content based ad model perferable to existing services. He states: Gmail isn't an invasion of privacy, and its ads are preferable to the giant blinking banners for diets and dating services that are splashed across my other Web mail accounts. Presumably this include’s Hotmail which is owned by Microsoft, Slate’s parent company. Like other Google pages Gmail will insert ads to the right of your content. There will also be automatically added linked to related content pulled from Google’s main search index. Overall it looks fairly clean and uncluttered. One key feature is that instead of folders you can apply labels to pieces of mail, which you can later search for. This allows a more flexible filing system then a hierarchical folder based one in which you have to decide the one category in which a piece of mail should be placed. A similar system to label your pictures for later sorting and retrieval is used in Adobe’s PhotoShop Album, which has a free Starter edition available from Adobe. No doubt somebody has a patent on the idea of assigning attributes to documents to search for later retrieval. 12:11:18 AM