I just signed up for a gmail account - to use for blog communication and so forth. Gmail is wierd - it's been on beta now for over a year - they must have ironed the technical bugs out.
But you have to jump through a small hoop to get an account - there's no "sign up here" page - instead, you need to go to something like http://www.bytetest.com/ and get an invite. Apparently, they used to be sought after and sold - now, people just donate unwanted invites to a pool.
Why is this? Possibly Google lose money on each account - 2G of disk space costs a few dollars a year to maintain and if gmail accounts are mostly secondary emails, then ad traffic might not be enough to cover this.
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4 comments:
Why is this?
It's more likely to make it harder for the service to get used by spammers. Google have a paper-trail of who created accounts, and how they got them.
Other systems like hotmail and yahoo offer no such checks, and are thus open to abuse.
I have a zillion if anyone wants one
They know me as an IP address and nothing more. I could have signed up from an Auckland internet cafe and been totally anonymous.
Might be psychological manipulation, to make people think the free service is more 'valuable' somehow. (It is a great service though.)
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