Gmail is hot

I had maybe about a 12 or 15 Gmail invitations to give away. They kept awarding me more as I used my account.

(For those of you who don't know, Google has started a new free web-based e-mail service with cool features and 1 GB of storage. But you can't sign up just yet. However, some early testers were allowed to issue invitations to others so that they could also be early adopters of the service.)

I posted a note in my blog offering them, and over a period of two weeks I only had one request. Then suddenly over a period of a couple days, I had over 20 requests.

All I can figure out is that Google indexed my site and people were finding my offer via the search engine. I've received so many e-mails from people eager for an invitation.

Luckily, everyone will have the opportunity in the not-too-distant future.

It's great having 1 gig of storage. I use it for offsite backup. Every time I'm working on something, I e-mail regular backups to myself at my Google account. Just last week it was a savior. Suddenly the file I was working on was corrupt and wouldn't open. I only lost a half hour of work because I had earlier e-mailed the document to myself. I simply downloaded the attachment and went back to work, hardly missing a beat.

Thank you Google.