Back on April 30, 2008, I wrote a speculative post: When will Gmail hit seven gigabytes?
As in, when will the space allotted to each Gmail account reach 7,000,000,000 characters (yes, I know that’s not really seven gigabytes, and I explore that in the post).
Here’s what I predicted:
The Fourth of July, give or take a week.
Actually, if they’re adding space at a steady rate–which is a huge “ifâ€â€“then it should be either July 4 or July 5, 2008.
I also promised that, if I was wrong, I would double my monthly contribution to Gmail.
I was wrong. And, as a result, I’ll send Google $0, which is twice the usual $0 that I’d send them.
“Give or take a week” ain’t going to do it. Right now, the magic number is at something over 6,893 megabytes. It might (or might not) reach 6.9 gigabytes (let’s just use “disk gigabytes” as our measure, shall we?) within a week.
The lesson here? Google’s magic number doesn’t grow at a constant rate. It’s been growing more slowly over the last nine weeks than it was during the period I observed it. It could start growing more rapidly. Since my insider’s knowledge of the Gmail magic number is precisely the same as my insider’s knowledge of anything else at Google–that is,
Just because I live in Mountain View (where the Googleverse is located) doesn’t mean I know anything about Google’s inner workings.
Oh, and as for Google somehow duping librarians…sorry, but I don’t buy it.
Sure, Google’s librarian-outreach project stalled pretty rapidly–but I still don’t see that Google duped Michigan, UC, Harvard, or anyone else. I still see Google Book Search as increasing demand for library books by providing expanded search capabilities…and I wish Open Content Alliance (by which I mean the Internet Archive) would get their act together on providing a suitable complement, particularly now that Microsoft’s dropped Live Books (which I thought was a superior product to Google Book Search, at least in terms of usability of the public-domain results).
And with that, enjoy the long weekend. Oh, and if you’re one of my two readers anxiously following the “will he or won’t he?” story…more about that later, but the short answer is “Probably.” And a couple of thoughtful remarks at Anaheim have a lot to do with that short answer.
