Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Lycos fail to get the point

Macworld have reported that Lycos have announced the launch of their own 1GB mail service in competition with Google's Gmail, which I've previously reviewed here.

Alex Kovach, Lycos Europe vice-president, makes a great deal of this service, which he seems to assume will be much better than Gmail because it doesn't have advertising, use spyware or store deleted messages. Don't get me wrong, but he's comparing apples and oranges, not to mention being faintly misleading as to the best of my knowledge Gmail doesn't use spyware or store deleted messages either. The hoohah over deletion seems to be a misinterpretation of Google's conditions of use for Gmail making it clear that even after mail's deleted it may still exist for a time on backup tapes, which isn't exactly a shocker, and as far as spyware's concerned... well, I don't see a mail service doing a keyword scan on mail before it's displayed to display the right targeted adverts as spyware. The tinfoil-hat brigade might, and there are plenty of kneejerk rentaquotes out there willing to froth on command, but for Lycos to imply that they're occupying some kind of moral high ground seems highly dubious at best.

Ultimately, Lycos just don't seem to get the point. The 1GB-of-storage thing (well, a hard-drive-manufacturer's gigabyte - 1000MB) is really just incidental to how Gmail works. It's a highly different webmail service to anything that's been done before, and the point of the huge amount of storage is that it just means users don't have to worry about deleting mail and tidying their inbox in order to keep it manageable. It's the searching and tagging facilities for navigating huge piles of mail with ease which make Gmail a winner (not to mention the clean user interface), and that doesn't change whether the mail quota's 50MB, 100MB or 1GB.

Anyway, Lycos are offering this service as a chargable option, so it's not that surprising that it's advertising-free. That's the reason most people pay for services like that - to get rid of the banner ads. Nice try, guys, but there's a whole lot more to building a Gmail-beating webmail service than cranking up storage limits. I detect a little panic here - could it be Lycos rushed this service to market in order to get there before Gmail comes out of beta and is opened up to all comers? C'mon, chaps. Get some imagination. If you can't compete on functionality or don't have the imagination to do so, don't try and compete based on cheap tricks and half-truths.