Gmail Nearing Full Launch

Google is beginning to slowly roll out its Gmail service.  Since Monday, approximately 1 in 20 users to the Google.com homepage have been allowed to register for accounts.  Previously,tto get a Gmail account, a user had to be invited to the service by either Google or an existing Gmail user.

Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products said that

"Based on the success of this one-in-20 scope, we'll be ramping it up over the next couple of weeks"

Gmail surprised the webmail market when it announced in April 2004 due to its then unprecedented 1G-byte inbox storage, prompting hotmail and Yahoo! mail to increase their inbox storage capacity.

However, not many ISPs have responded.  It will be interesting to see  how ISPs respond when Gmail is fully rolled out as in my experience, the Gmail users that I know use Gmail as a second account to store files they need on the move, and not for email, and continue to use their ISP account as their main account.