Well out of the blue on the weekend I got an invite to use Google's Gmail beta (probably because I am both a Google Adsense publisher and an advertiser). This morning I noticed I can now invite 6 more individuals to join.
This whole thing is interesting on a number of fronts -- they are offering 2GBytes of free storage of email but also it seems allow large attachments to email in and out. They whole thing is supported by Adsense like ads as you view your email.
What I found, though, is that the ads in the email that I have received there (I tried redirecting mail from a list I subscribe to) bear very little relation to the context of the list emails themselves (well they do seem to pick up on keywords but it seems that that is not enough).
I notice some for sale newsgroup activity attempting to sell invites to the use Gmail as well -- what is with that? Are some people desperate enough to be early in the use of the "free" service that they willing to actually pay to start?
I wonder if this try at context based advertising can actually work. Anybody else out there using this and seeing valuable ads in their email?
