If you’re a Gmail user, you may not have noticed that your storage counter (you know, when you log in) stopped on January 1st at 2800MB. It did, and there could have been a variety of reasons for that. Afterall, Google was scrambling to get that serious flaw fixed (Gmail could have potentially given anyone your contact list). It started counting again on Wednesday, but, it won’t be the last time that it stops counting.
Garett Rogers over at ZDNet wrote up a post yesterday saying that on April 1st, 2007, the storage counter will stop again. He gave no reason has to how he knew this, but we were curious. Ryan sent him a quick email asking him how he knew, and this is what he said:
If you set the clock on your computer to April 1st or anything later, the login page for Gmail will display your quota as 2835MB (I think that’s the number…something nice and round anyway)… but any date before that will give you the incrementing counter.
I was curious, so I tried it, and sure enough he was right. If you set your calendar ahead all the way up until March 31st, you’ll still get the ever increasing amount of storage. Starting with April 1st and on, the counter is stopped at 2835MB. Are you wondering why this might be? Garett actually gave some good guesses why. First of all, April 1st if Google’s birthday, hmm… I wonder what they’re up to. Reasons he gave were:
- They are going to take Gmail out of beta for its birthday (Could this be true? Wow, it’s about time!)
- GDrive will be launched, maybe with unlimited storage (Hmm.. another good guess. If GDrive is launched with the unlimited storage, chances are Gmail will simply be unlimited storage too).
- A good day to re-evaluate the storage situation would be on its birthday.
Either number 1 or 2 seam like feasible options, particularly taking Gmail out of beta. It’s been years now! I think it’s about time Gmail is taken out of beta, don’t you?
GMail is in beta? Who knew.
Yeah, with millions of users and businesses counting on this service it’s time to remove the beta label.
When anyone non-tech savvy hears “beta” it probably scares them away…so I think Gmail could be missing out on a huge crowd by not advancing the service. However, I think they probably have something big planned that they want it to coincide with, like maybe the GDrive launch? If your gonna do something big…you gotta go real big!
I think the reason they stayed with beta is three fold:
1) by gradually lowering the restrictions on who got Gmail, they were able to observe server load and storage space and make accommodations and plan on new server additions and maintenance to ensure no data is lost. The last thing you’d want is to have all your saved mail gone. That’s IMO the main reason why it’s in beta. They were the first to offer anything about 500MB for storage space.
2) They were probably ensuring proper phishing measures and implementing anti dummy account measures to make sure accounts were not used fraudulently.
3) From what Gmail was to what Gmail is now has been a roller coaster. They added a ton of features to ensure when gmail came out it worked and that every feature worked like it should. They aren’t Microsoft.
Either way if GDrive has unlimited storage, I might just die from the excitement and shock. If it allows direct linking, then I’m saying goodbye to my photobucket, flickr, and box.net accounts in 1 fell swoop along with my gmail account that I use for storage.
I believe at one point if you read their faq, it said it was in beta so they could account for the fact that they were ever changing gmail, to improve and expand it. Thus, the beta, as a symbol of this.
I predict that they are going to take Gmail out of beta AND launch GDrive at the same time on their birthday.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Google will control much of my information as scary as that may sound (maybe not my important documents though).
I just think that GDrive is still a few years away although I would like to see it sooner. To make a storage solution that knocks all of the others out of the water there has to be a lot of development and testing because losing a user’s files could cause quite an uproar.
This holds no weight. If you look at the actual code, there are some variables that holds strings of digits. These hold the speed at which the size increases at certain times of the year. The reason it stops increasing on April 1st is just that the code does not have the rate-of-increase after that yet. The New Years’ Stop could have been caused by many things, including they got busy with the bug and forgot to update the script.
Of course this is all speculation
But, doesn’t it seem a little odd that the counter stops ON Google’s Birthday? I think there might be more to it than just the rate-of-increase code.
I agree with Ashley…I think this was one of their “hidden” hints that they wanted someone to find to so that some buzz would startup.
I don’t think they will get Gmail out of beta.
Here’s a paranoid theory: by requiring invitations, they have a clear view of who’s connected to who. That’s lots of data…
I never really thought about that but I think you’re right with the invitations, but they do also let people sign-up via a cellphone text message. I remember reading at one point that they were concerned with opening it to the public because of spammers creating accounts. I bet they are working on some really technical way for accounts to be created so that spammers have a hard time creating accounts.
Paste this into the address bar on the login page and it’ll give you the date on which the counter will stop if they forget to update it again.
javascript:alert(CP[CP.length-1][1] ” megabytes on ” (new Date(CP[CP.length-1][0])).toString());
Uh, huh. Okay, that got scrambled. Those quotes around “megabytes on” should *not* be smart quotes, and there should be plus signs outside of the quotes. Or copy and paste the target of this link, and it should work…
I doubt Gmail will be taken out of beta anytime soon!
It’s gotta come sometime, well, maybe not but it should be out of beta by now. I mean they have already opened it up to the world so all they have to do is change the logo for goodness sakes.