Gmail is counting... up!

Gmail was one huge April Fools joke back in 2004. Announced on April 1, in a time when most online users were piddling around with 2MB on their Hotmail accounts, Google announced the service which gave users a whopping ONE GIGABYTE of space. It was no joke. Although it was limited to Google friends and family at first, the system started giving out invites to users who could invite others. In an ingenious "covert" system, Gmail has now spread across the entire internet and now there is nobody who doesn't have an account or know anybody who does. (For fans of logic, in that last sentence, the "or" takes precedence over the "doesn't").

Skip forward to April 1, 2005, and Gmail is talking about an interesting scheme to achieve Infinity Plus 1 space. Now, they didn't say they were giving it away, just that they are working towards it. THIS IS NO JOKE EITHER...

The first thing was, we suddenly got upgraded to 2GB! That was very generous. But then, a counter appeared on the main page, which was counting up. We thought it was a little javascript joke which would disappear the next day. But it's not... sure enough, the counter is, slowly, counting higher and higher, and the space we have available is increasing. Hence they are, in fact, working towards Infinity+1.

From a quick test, one can see that it's increasing at a rate of about 400 millikilobytes per second (where 1 millikilobyte == 1.024 bytes). This projects to a rate of 400*1.024*60*60*24/1024/1024 = 33.75 MB per day. Which is quite a hefty rate.

These calculations are confirmed by the fact that now, just over one and a half days into this new game, we have 2053MB available. I really hope this continues... Well good on Google anyway.

(And lets hope this isnt some wierd continuing joke which will eventually be relegated back to 2GB. Or 1GB. As the wiki seems to think it is.)

"Another accurate usage [of infinity] is an infinite loop in computer programming, a conditional loop construction whose condition always evaluates to true. As long as there is no external interaction (such as switching the computer off, or the heat death of the universe), the loop will continue to run for all time."
- Wikipedia: Infinity (As of Apr 3 2005)