There’s a rather interesting post made by TechCrunch this weekend regarding Gmail overtaking AOL and has become the number 3 largest web mail service in the U.S. The post was citing recent estimates made by comScore. My initial reaction was -Really? All the while I thought Gmail is the largest web mail service? The post was citing latest estimates by comScore wherein Gmail has gathered 37 million unique visitors in July, surpassing AOL, the no. 3 web mail service with its 36.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. So now officially, the three search giants are also the three major players in the web mail service. It’s about time.
Quite interestingly also, TC’s post has elicited tons of comments coming from all three camps – Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail users. The comments are quite interesting to read as well.
Some users are highlighting the privacy threats posed by using Gmail, while other have gone as far back as tracing the history of Yahoo getting ahead of the web mail battle.
Other points raised were regarding email storage capacity, less spam attacks, and what-have-you’s.
And here’s another interesting point, this issue came right after Google has announced that Gmail is now out of beta. The signal has been sent – Gmail is ready for battle. And Google is out to conquer the web mail arena the same way that they did with Google Search.
So, which web mail are you using? As for me, I’ve stopped using Yahoo Mail for my online business transactions in favor of Gmail. I still maintain my Yahoo Mail account but only for personal use since most of the groups I participate in was created under Yahoo Groups. Yahoo Groups is still the most used online discussion group and remains one of Yahoo Mail’s strongest points. May be Google should also start looking into Google Groups to compete effectively with Yahoo Mail.
