Google GMail dominating the email market

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:55:00 +0200

Google's GMail was launched in April 2004 and only in February 2007 Google dropped its invite system to open up to the general public acc. to Wikipedia's history of GMail. That's some five years of operations up to now.

It kind of amazed me how many people I know have GMail as their primary mail provider. So I took the chance today to get a bit of statistics to check my gut feelings:

A friend of mine selected some (mostly American) bloggers that have indicated specific interests in a topic related to his Doctoral thesis. This sample ended up to be 1,375 people. These folks have 295 different email domains. Only.

A whooping 46% of the (rather random) sample use GMail, 12% Yahoo, 8% Hotmail and about 3% AOL. While Yahoo has some foreign domains in the sample (yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.ca, see mostly American bloggers above), these add up to around 0.1% of the sample so it's not really significant.

This data is in no way representative, but still wow. Google basically has a monopoly on search and now seems to have a close-to-majority footprint in personal email.

I guess the dominance is currently larger in the States than in Europe or Asia as GMail has only gradually learned languages beyond English.
Large local providers should also have some foothold in these markets. Similar to the Comcast and SBC customers still significant in sample depicted above. Just the local providers in Europe and Asia will be somewhat stronger (for now). Google is also aggressively targeting corporations with hosted email and apps now so one can expect further and accelerated growth in that area. Quite a number of companies are considering using hosted email instead of the conventional mail system they have operated on site for many years now.

So while Gina Trapani recommends "Break Google's Monopoly on Your Data: Switch to Yahoo Search", may I humbly point out: It's becoming quite impossible to just keep your emails between the recipient and the addressee these days.

Even if you personally do not use GMail, Google can (technically) still profile you because a huge chunk of people you communicate with send from GMail and receive and store your emails there.

Nearly all email that is sent also passes spam filters before delivery. Google bought the Postini spam filter in 2007. That anti-spam service is used by many enterprises and even city governments, see here.

So time to consider (unencrypted) email as what it has always been: The digital equivalent of a postcard.
Just now Google has become the postmen. All of them, every second shift. You should hope they're not nosey. Or send letters.

Google Pagerank fuss

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:30:00 +0200

For a few weeks SEO types now moan, argue, analyse or celebrate (please submit links in comments section ) Google apparently reducing the pagerank (tm Google) of their sites. I guess creating unique content is a too labourous option. Whatever, if you were Ryan Stewart you could even spit out some epicaricacy.

So with all this fuss, I wanted to find out the pagerank (which previously never had any relevance to me) of some (of my) sites. I would not want to install the Google toolbar because I'm not into software that does "something" to my PCs, so I looked around for other options. Wading through masses of pages that offer Javascript to be embedded into your pages to show a pagerank image inline (no thank you), I found two viable options:

http://seopen.com/seopen-tools/pagerank.php
SEOpen allows you to check the pagerank of a single URL
http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank
iWebTool can fix up any webpage for you so that it'll show the pagerank next to every link on the page

Give it a go. Some interpretation help: Pagerank 10 is the max., 7-9 is quite good, 4-5 means Google knows you, new pages start off at PR0.

Daniel Lange's blog (Entries tagged as google)

Google GMail dominating the email market

Google Pagerank fuss