Today is April 1st and you know what that means…
That’s right, its Gmail‘s birthday!
On April 1, 2004, Google launched a private invite-only beta of a new webmail service offering an astonishing 1 GB of free storage space. What did the competition have? A mere 2-4 MB. Gmail was Jupiter and the others were Mercury.
But wait, this is GOOGLE we’re talking about and it’s April 1st! Google has a huge sense of humor, and therefore, this is a hoax right? Just like Mentalplex and PigeonRank?
This theory was completely wrong. Gmail was launched on April 1st and was originally speculated to be an April Fools joke because it was too good to be true.
Gmail was not only the new kid on the block, but it revolutionized email. Traditional folders replaced by labels, which work the same way except an email could have more than one label assigned to it. And my favorite feature of all: Rather than have each reply be a separate message, they can be grouped together in a threaded conversation like format.
Today, 6 years later, it is one of the most popular free email services out there. It is one of Google’s most important services (besides search of course) and slowly became the foundation of many later products including Google Talk and Google Buzz.
How long have you been using Gmail? What is your favorite feature? What were you using before Gmail? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
P.S. It looks like Gmail’s servers failed to render vowels for many users today. :D
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