Gooogle

First, on a personal note - They got engaged! Congrats, Sowmya and Mahesh!

Google's yet-to-be-widely-released email service, gmail has got everyone talking. People seem to have a love-hate with no middle ground -relationship with it. On the one hand, gmail is passing out disk space like candies - 1 GB compared to Yahoo's 4MB (or thereabouts), Hotmail's measly 1 or 2 MB, Yahoo premium's 100MB - and establishing a clear, convincing lead over is competitors. It supposedly has cool sorting, searching (duh!), better spam filtering and a lot many more features. Of course, most of the subscribers won't use all those useful features. That's besides the point. All the surrounding hype has sparked off websites like gmailswap where the havenots are trying to win an account from the haves. (Here are some samples - "In exchange for gmail...": "a lovely and talented soprano (i've heard her!) will sing for you" , "9000 ladybugs" , "borrow car for a week", "a smile and heartfelt thanks", "a slide rule (with instructions)" ...). On the other hand, there is the anti-gmail lobby. Their complaints range from "I don't want google reading my emails" to "protect privacy" to "don't ad-spam me" etc. One such anti-gmail website is gmail-is-too-creepy. (catchy name though!).

Talking about the google ads, I was reading an article about Independence air in the Post a couple of days ago. Its the new low-cost airline starting operations from Dulles International Airport after breaking away from United Airlines. Obviously, now it is a rival to United. And the ad that google threw up on the page? You guessed it - fly United!