I’ve been giving my invites away to strangers using the super-simple form at isnoop.net

Is anyone else guessing that they’re pretty close to getting rid of the beta tag? It’s about time they start finishing some projects.

As someone pointed out the other day, GoogleNews has been in beta for well over a year now…maybe close to two.

It is interesting that they have given so many invites out recently. They obviously know that people freely auction them off on their blogs so maybe they want to test their server capability with the new load that will come. How much do these servers cost Google, by the way? 1gig/user doesn’t sound like a lot until you have millions of users…

Sup Ian.

A Gig of hard drive space is cheap. I mean, you can buy a 120gb SuperATA drive for about $100.

Besides, Google is making money off the adsense that are included when you view e-mails.

Jeremy: I read somewhere that the reason why Google News is still in beta is solely due to legal issues. I mean, it’s finished by all standards. If they go live with it, they would put some ads on the page–without which, it wouldn’t generate a cent of revinue.

But having a finished commercial site somehow violates the ‘fair use’ statute of copyright law. You may ask how it’s any different than a regular search: Honestly, i don’t know. But according to some lawyers, it’s different.

And as opposed to regular search that generally help the linked companies, linking news takes away ad revenues from newspapers: They’d much rather you go through their whole site instead of bits. So most of those newspapers are pissed as is, and owned by media giants who’re just waiting to sic their blood hungry lawyers at Google. So the speculation is, Google news will be in perma-beta, and will just serve as a feature–not moneymaker–for Google.

Interesting Cliche.

Do you remember where you read that information?

I don’t really remember where I first saw it, but a quick search got me a similar article:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65106,00.html

1gig is cheap, but you the main point to consider is that maybe only 1%-3% of the people will actually reach up to a gig in email space.

Right Scrivs. I have been using Gmail since June 04, have well over 1000 messages, 31mb worth, and that is only 3% of my 1gb storage.

I have 10 invites with nobody to send them to. Send me an email at finvarra@gmail.com and I will send you one.