Wednesday, June 16, 2004

googlemail

There's been a bit of a viral meme gmail frenzy recently - I saw this Free Gmail Invite! get over a million hits since lunchtime (yes, a few thousand were from me) which may mean it's going to go public soon. Maybe this 'Invite' thing is to get those with web-power on their side at the launch - being a bit taken aback at some of the negative publicity they got on April 1st.

Well, I want one anyway. I want in early so I can get stu@gmail.com (though I know it will get a gazillion spams a day being dictionaryword@wellknownprovider.com) - don't wants to be stuartd32653565!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hehe, it's fun to sit clicking refresh and watching the page counter tick over! Each time the page reloaded the hit counter had jumped about 500 numbers! Which makes me think the odds are stacked against us... I mean, its only spewing out numbers *below* the target, and (at time of writing) the page has been viewed 2,712,111 times... You do the math!

Anonymous said...

Ooops, in case it changes, the target was 54,023 :-)

A.

stuartd said...

At lunchtime a refresh was more or less real time - a single increment. By the time I went to bed the units were hundreds even thousands.. all gone now of course. There are other gmail lotteries (including short story competitions!) if you're prepared to navigate blogspace to find them. One of them I have a 8/34 chance of winning at last count though I am prepared to wait until public release now.

stuartd said...

I tried using the "Auto-refresh" Firefox extension but either it didn't like FF 0.9 or the page author saw it coming..

Anonymous said...

I actually refreshed the page ten times before I noticed that if I'd won it would have notified me via a pop-up window. I turned Safari's pop-up blocker off after that :-)

stuartd said...

Doesn't Safari allow you to whitelist sites for popups?