Happy Birtyday. Google turned six. Have more wisdom than a 60 year old.

Google Code Jam

Google is organising international coding contest in collaboration with Topcoder (http://www.topcoder.com). With a total prize of US $50000. Registration for the same has already started and will end at September 15. For more informatio visit http://www.topcoder.com/googlecodejam

Solutions for the practice room questions can be found at http://codeing.blogspot.com

Exclusive blog for codes

This blog is deviating from its theme. I have created a new blog where I will only post code and related stuff. Only opinions here :). New blog is

http://codeing.blogspot.com

Google Strategy on Gmail

Have you ever asked question to yourself, why Gmail is so popular?
Before even its official launch there are tons of pages and numerous sites dedicated to Gmail. E-commerce sites were used just to get a gmail account. Which is free. People not affiliated with Google has already created Gmail compatible software components. You can see how desperate people are for Gmail after reading some messages at http://www.gmailswap.com.

So what are the reasons behind this hoopla!!!

Is it just because we love Google or is it 1000 MB quota. Answer to first question is definitely positive but it can't be the reason for Gmail's popularity. Also 1000 MB quota is being offered freely already by http://www.rediffmail.com and that has not even slightly decreased Gmail's popularity. And again I would like to remind you that Gmail is beta still.

Answer to all above conundrums is following two factors-
1) People's biggest shortcoming and inclination is to become distinguished from others around them.
2) Google's PhD folks really know great things about complexity of human behavior.

Google very cleverly made Gmail ELITE only by inviting some hardcore techies for beta testing. But Google also provided them with INVITE feature. What that means that these chosen few can invite anybody they like to test Google. Really a great strategic move by Google.

Can you imagine techies to change there email-id which they are using for years for all there contacts for any new service. But Google did it because invited people enjoyed being elite, being separate from others. And therefore they changed their email-ids quickly to @gmail cause it can very easily act as a show-off.

I do not know the exact numbers but I am sure by millions must have signed up for Gmail. A exact-match search at google for "@gmail.com" returned 377000 results.

So even before its launch Gmail is 1/16 of Hotmail. As "@hotmail.com" is returning 6,290,000 results.

What say?