I’m checking my Gmail…

Gmail, Google’s forray into free email, is potentially a Yahoo and Hotmail killer. I currently have over 2.5GB of storage space for email and attachments alone, whereas the free services offered by those other companies is less than a Gig. Granted, 1GB is a lot of text and HTML email, but add in attachments and storing all of this data on a remote server (as opposed to your local PC), and you will eventually run out of space. Gmail’s space capacity grows constantly, so it will take a LONG time to fill your quota.

But that’s not the real reason for this post. Yesterday, Google added their IM program, Google Talk, into Gmail. Basically, instead of needing to use their IM client to chat with your Google buddies, you can do it directly inside of Gmail.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, you don’t have to open yet another stand-alone application to IM your peeps. On the other hand, when you check your email, your peeps can see you come online. So now Shorty and Reardon can see me checking my email. You can disable this feature within Gmail, but I’ll keep it active and see if anything comes out of it.

By the way, if anybody wants a Gmail account, you can email me here: yarshicle{at]gmail[dot]com, or for those brave enough to give out their email addy in the blog comments, you can post it there.

UPDATE: Hotmail only gives you 250MB of storage space, and Yahoo now gives you 1GB, but for $19.95/year you can get “virtually unlimited storage”, or 2GB (which is still less than the free Gmail)…