Let it never be said that Dr. Wade doesn’t hook me up. Oh, but he does. John Beimler hooked him up with a gmail account, and I told him that I had signed up but never gotten one, and then he convinced John to use an invite on me. So, I am the proud owner of a gmail account. And I don’t want it getting spammed, so I won’t tell you, but there’s a ross and a white and a @ and a gmail and a .com in it. And no spaces.

Look, I know that everyone is up in arms about Google’s aggressive mining of our personal data. They don’t like that Orkut owns the pictures that we choose to put up there, they don’t like that Google’s planning to robotically snoop our e-mails to deliver targeted advertising data, and they don’t like that they had to sign away their first born to get Orkut or gmail accounts. To this I say, fine, don’t use the service. Just about everything I wrote for three years is public record if you look hard enough because I work for the state, and if I were really all that concerned with data integrity, I would never have used a yahoo mail account in the first place. At least Google is up front about what it is, and they’ve suckered the technorati into participating by making it invite-only. Everyone wants to be part of the in crowd.

Seriously, folks, gmail is the best webmail client I have used thusfar. The address book is way easy, the quick respond feature is way handy, the threadlogging is way… well, I haven’t really used it yet. But it might come in handy. Anyone who is developing their own webmail should be looking at gmail, because the features are nice.

I just don’t plan to say anything that I don’t want repeated.