Why Gmail is Mature

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!