Googlemail?

[Brian Turner]

Here's an interesting story...

Apparently, Google could be looking at opening up an e-mail service, comparable to Yahoo and Hotmail.

This seems especially to be the case:

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4151070

Google late last year purchased rival Sprinks, which had technology to deliver ads to e-mail as the messages were opened. Such real-time ad serving is important because it keeps ads fresh and insures that Google will not be giving away free ads or delivering ads nobody will see, industry participants said.

Kanoodle, a small privately held search company, in the coming weeks will roll out its own e-mail advertising product as part of its deal with CBS MarketWatch.com, Lance Podell, Kanoodle's president of search and content, told Reuters.

Under that deal, "sponsored link" ads will be served to MarketWatch's opt-in subscriber e-mails, including newsletters.

Google already knows how to deliver its sponsored link ads -- which are in the form of Web links and appear on the perimeter of Web pages -- to e-mail newsletters and content sites.

Furthermore, Google last year purchased an e-mail management software maker and in 2001 registered the domain name googlemail.com.

Some in Silicon Valley also believe Google could be preparing to launch free e-mail to compete with offerings from Yahoo and MSN's Hotmail.

"If they were to go the e-mail route they'd have to provide an offering that competes with free (e-mail). Anti-spam is one form of strong differentiation," said Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Moreover Technologies, whose personalized search company Outride was acquired by Google in 2001.

[Brian Turner]

Google registered most of the variants of the domain name, and someone else got "gogglemail.com".

I did managed to register for myself "googlemial.com" though. See if it's worth anythnig in traffic.

[becki]

Don't you think that Google could see you for cyber squatting? Or do you think you can get away with that?

[altyfc]

I would doubt it'd be worth anything, and I imagine you could be "had" for it. Nice to see Google are offering something on this front - let's just hope that they do a better job of preventing spam than Hotmail does at present.

Aaron

[Brian Turner]

I do think that Google would more likely set up mail as a subdomain, ie: "mail.google.com". The registration of domain names is probably more to protect itself from misrepresentation.

My own registration is actually just for capturing wayward traffic - if Google ran e-mail services from "Googlemail.com" then I could hope to expect a certain percentage of the traffic to mis-spell and end up on "Googlemial.com".

I wouldn't think of buying the domain simply to sell, though - that would be pointless. And too close to cybersquatting.

I'm simply the sort of person who would have bought "mydomain.com" or "your-domain.com" for the traffic possibilities.