Liberty's Blog: Gmail inspires hacks

Friday, September 17, 2004

Gmail inspires hacks

New Scientist Reports that folks are comming up with all kinds of hacks on Google's gmail service. The one I can't figure out is the Hack that allows one to set up a Blog service. Bizarre .. Why would anyone do something like this. Google already supplies Blogger free, and they will even supply the webspace if one would like. At any rate Gmail isn't opened to the public yet, but we do have access to some invites and have been giving them away for some time now.

Gmail was created by the web search company Google in April 2004 amid much excitement as every user is promised an unprecedented gigabyte of storage space for messages. Google encourages users to keep all their old messages and automatically searches these to determine what kind of web advertisements might interest users.

But Gmail's copious storage space has inspired a number of programmers to come up with completely novel ways of using the service.

These include a "weblog" or online message board that uses Gmail to store postings and a desktop file system that plugs straight into the Gmail system.

These projects were largely started for fun, but might perhaps provide a glimpse of new features that Google could eventually add to the service for itself, according to some observers.