I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
I’m getting used to accessing email through a web browser.
At first I thought it was a bit clunky but I like the convenience of being able to log on from anywhere, and everything is there, including contacts, classifications and search.
I like that you get an ‘instant picture’ of your email. I haven’t used a pop3 client for a week to get my hosted Gmail messages. So the next time I fire up my mail client I know they’ll be a huge download.
The web page essentially ‘flattens’ the email experience with no download on start. For example I might have 10MB of new email. I can see that instantly. With email clients you can’t normally ‘peek’. It is really a ‘meta-view’ of your email.
The normal flow of email is.
- Upload from your mail client to your ISP
- Your ISP sends it to my ISP
- I download it.
If both parties are using Gmail or Hotmail the upload and download steps are pretty much eliminated (except for the posting the message through your browser of course). Cutting out the download step is possible because of Google’s desire to store your data. This is so convenient and currently free. But I would pay for it as Gmail and Flickr have allowed me to experience the benefits of hosted storage. I would not want to go back.
These characteristic bodes well for hosted web applications. Once you get used to it the benefits are compelling.
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