Singing Loudly

I saw this story about Gmail while browsing through the New York Times website,State of the Art: Google Mail: Virtue Lies in the In-Box. (Subscription required). Essentially the article details the good and the bad of gmail. On the good are things like autocompleting addresses (which does work amazingly well), filters (I still haven't tried), labels instead of folders (I didn't realize you could give one conversation mutiple labels until I read this), and conversations instead of a lot of messages. The bad, thus far, are things like not being compatible with Apple's Safari browser, not working in Outlook, and not having signatures.

Of course, David Pogue, after using the service for awhile, agrees that the privacy advocates issues were far overblown. I think that the ads have been useful. For him, they appear in about half of his conversations, while for me it seems to be 1/3. When they do appear they are on point and unobtrusive.

Hotmail is pretty much a forgotten service for my purposes. I'm curious to see what will happen to yahoo and hotmail when gmail goes live.