I just got back from Los Angeles last night. The weekend went very well with lots of networking and interviews getting done, I also did a lot of networking and it was funny, as soon as I asked someone their email address and they began saying “firstname.lastname” I knew it was at gmail.com.

On the flight I was pondering just why it is that everyone has the mature email address at gmail. I mean, 99% of the time that’s the way it is. Then I realized why: It came about when Generation Y was entering the work force.

Hotmail and Yahoo may be as old as the Internet, but that means we all have emails like “masterblaster1968@hotmail.com” (my apologies to whoever has that email address.) They were the geek names, the identities we used online when the idea was anonymity. The Internet has grown and matured and now it is used to build your real name for school and employers.

Yahoo, a few years ago allowed their users to change their name, which is when I got a mature yahoo email address as well, but I never use it. Why? I was already established in Gmail.

Gmail simply hit the nail on the head when many of us didn’t realize the board was loose. The right interface, great storage, and the better features were all factors in a major coup for a market many considered to be a solved system.

Now sadly the Gmail interface is falling behind. We rely on tools like Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail firefox plugin, and other such apps to increase it’s usefulness. Rumor is that Google is working on an upgrade but we haven’t seen it yet. Now we’re hearing things of a company called zenbe.com (I’m working on a review of it actually) and Xobni for Outlook.

So, is Gmail the king? No, it will be dethroned. But it was a major stepping stone for the realm of email, moving us past limited space into lifetimes of email, from folders and into tagging, and more!