A GMail-based blog With 1000 MB of entries

Jean-Luc R. writes "Via mediaTIC blog. Gallina is a GMail blog tool created by Jonathan Hernandez that uses GMail messages as "entries" (so 1000 MB of entries!!), replies to conversations are the "entry comments", uses Libgmailer (gmail-lite project) to connect to GMail. It uses XML/XSLT and by the way it's a GPL software. You can download it there. See the Gallina Demo Blog as for an example."

hmm

people are making so much use of gmail for different things
i wonder when ill be able to run off a remote OS installed on a gmail account

Re:hmm

Actually, I've realised that one untapped source of data storage space is in Slashdot comments. Untold gigabytes of free storage space at our fingertips, just waiting to be tapped!

I've decided I'll be uploading an encrypted backup of my hard disk with my new SlashdotFS. Yeah, it's slow, yeah, it's against untold numbers of terms of service, but who cares. It's free, and it's huge!

---slashdotfs.v1.337---
48101bbdd897877cc62b8704a 293a436
55bc3937bb9c3b6a010b11d3887fed42
6894952 b2cd2b995d6153149867fb861
8a22d33414aae8228a623f0 1da53ed6a

Re:hmm

After running that block of data hrough decryption, I've determined that block of hex is a picture of petrified Natalie Portman and hot grits.

Re:hmm

I bet Oreilly is writing up Gmail Hacks as we speak....

Google is going to be upset

Google was pissed at third-party tools which check emails. Now I wonder what Google is going to think of a program or script which uses the Gmail email directory as a sort of web-hosting deal. I'm not too optimistic about Google's response. :-(

Not so sure

Many of Google's other functions, like the search, they openly published interfaces to via web services and such. They explicitly disallow in the GMail TOS using web-fetching "screen scrapers" like this thing uses, but I'd imagine their main objection would be not so much the loss of control as that they don't want to be locked into a specific set of HTML-- if they significantly change their page layouts then any program which fetches and reprocesses GMail web pages will break.

But this bloggy thing is a very cool feature and Google might well publish a public web-services interface to GMail as well to allow things like this to happen before the end.

Re:Not so sure

Google does, it's called blogger [blogger.com]. And it has an email account you can email to update your page.

Re:Not so sure

but I'd imagine their main objection would be not so much the loss of control as that they don't want to be locked into a specific set of HTML

I think you (like many other Slashdotters) give Google too much credit. Don't confuse "don't be evil" with "be good all the time." It's not that they don't want to break 3rd party apps when they change HTML, it's that they don't make advertising revenue when people screen scrape their content. If the COGS (Cost of Goods and Services) of Gmail began exceeding advertising revenue, Google would have no choice but to cripple the service or shut it down unless they found a better way to monetize it.

Of course, to play devil's advocate to my own argument, Google may be angry at 3rd party tools like this not because they want more money, but because they don't want such a great service to be ruined by people who break its business model.

Odd.

I don't see it on those pages. However I signed up for a GMail account a few days ago, and that was definitely one of the clauses of the clickthrough agreement I was presented with at that time. It appears their clickthrough agreement is different from their posted TOS policy? I guess you'd need to find a gmail invite in order to read the clickthrough...

Re:Google is going to be upset

Well what response should we expect from Google? Euphoria? For any company, even Google, it would make absolutely no sense to essentially provide free hard drive space to anybody and everybody on the planet. Of course they are not going to like it.

Re:GMail will fail.

You really have no idea how cheap storage is (and is getting) and how much advertisers are willing to pay for googles targeted ads.

The question is not the storage, I would think, as much as the bandwidth. GMail's business model does not include the idea of, say, 10k people accessing a single gmail account to view content, which may or may not include Google's adverts.

gmail has terms of service that disallow this

from the just because you can doesn't mean you're allowed dept. http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.ht ml

Web-server?

C'mon folks, you're not trying hard enough. Give us a GMail-based web-server and I might start being impressed. And not just plain HTML, that's too easy, I want Javascript and CSS 2 support at least!

For those real hackers out there, I also need GMail-based p2p, IM, PVR and espresso-machine.

New gmail auth?

How are they getting past the new gmail authentication?

Re:New gmail auth?

There isn't any 'new GMail authentication', at least not in a form that would affect this program.

If you have GMail, you probably won't have noticed anything different in your login screen. The only time that their extra authentication measures kick in is when someone tries to log in to an account tons of times in a short period with the wrong password. It's not meant to block all external programs, just prevent automatic password-guessing type attacks.

Wow!

Can I now mount my blog using gmailfs?

Seriously, this is getting silly. It's supposed to be an email system and it's going to be financed by google targeting ads specificly to their users (based on their emails, but who cares about privacy anyway?), so I don't think google will let these things survive.

Now I could understand if someone developed a technique that allowed for bigger attachments (pr0n anyone? ;-D)but a blog????

Gmail lite project

I don't really care much about blogs, especially the notion of a a gigabyte of it...anyway, the Gmail lite project page is a good read. The author is amiable and does a good job explaining why he was interested in and did the project.

Cheers,

Erick

Just wait

It won't be long til google flips out, and changes their protacols again, they are so paranoid about 3rd parties using their storage for other means.

Use it for email

If google built a blog tool that oculd hold 1000MB of data, someone would figure out how to get it to store email.

I'm a bit concerned that everyone seems to want to find a way to fill up their Gigabyte on Gmail. If storage becomes the main feature of Gmail, people will eventually open up 500 accounts and built a Gmail array for their file storage. This will force Google to lock down their application, and those of us using it for EMAIL will suffer.

Re:Use it for email

If storage becomes the main feature of Gmail, people will eventually open up 500 accounts and built a Gmail array for their file storage.

The delay and throughput of internet-based file storage is just not worth it, and with the gmail interface in between it would be even slower. People are doing these things for the novelty factor, but as soon as they figure out that there are easier ways to get the same things done, they'll move on, and this won't be a problem anymore.

Besides, if you're using gmail for personal storage, you can just email yourself the files you want as attachments. And if you're using it to host stuff, you're going to have to run elaborate scripts, which waste tons of bandwidth uselessly copying data, and since bandwidth is more expensive than disk space, it would be more cost-effective to just get more disk space on your webserver account than to use elaborate gmail-interfacing scripts.

Oh great...

... so now we'll have spam blog entries!

This is all well and good, but

I thought Google already provided a free blogging service? [blogger.com]

flexibility vs reality

There are several applications that are trying to use gmail as its backend. GmailFS, this blog, and probably exist several more right now. If google open up a bit more their API, other applications and uses around gmail could grow exponentially.

But even google with all its servers have limitations. Would love to see gmail grow in kind of uses it could have, but simplicity and speed are some of its strengths that it could lose if it is abused.

1000MB may sound like a lot...

1000MB may sound like a lot but at current hard drive pricing that is only about a half dollar if you buy a 100GB drive. Why do people go to so much trouble to redirect GMail for other uses? If people do things that make their advertising less valuable then they will strike hard on everybody and that only hurts us normal users if they make it harder to login or use as an email service.

Harrumph

Anyone who needs a gig of space to write down what is on his mind has a bigger problem than finding space online.

Online MP3 Storage

Having gotten an extra account invite from google, and not knowing anyone who was interested, I decided to start a new account myself, and email mp3's to it. In the emails I include the artist, album, and lyrics. I group styles using the "label" feature.

So now I have 1gb of online, searchable mp3's.

Re:Online MP3 Storage

and an address where the RIAA can send you Cease & Desist, and subpoenas to. ;-)

Do you really want to entrust your data to others?

Email. Blogs. Mountable drives. And all built on GMail. I'd be quite concerned about becoming too dependent on the good graces of a third party for maintaining my data. I recall the number of people who got caught flat-footed when free email services and photo hosting went belly-up with little or no notice. Not to mention putting potentially sensitive material in a convenient place for hackers to target, or law enforcement or aggrieved spouses to subpoena.

Uh oh!

So when do the cease and desists start coming in?
The post-IPO google isn't the type of google that would be happy with this kind of thing. (And if you say there are no post IPO pages, just take a look at the recent furor over parodies, and just a couple of days ago, I noticed an image ad for Picasa (TM) on google image search.)

What is so cool about these hacks ....

Is that they force us to look at Gmail in many different ways beyond the "Jesus Christ, look at all that space" factor.

When I started using Gmail I really liked the threaded messages feature and the search engine. Having to use labels instead of folders was (and still is) annoying, but I still place more value in the threading of the messages so all is well.

Some of my friends put more value in the fact that they can pretty much forget about their mailboxes getting too big and their PC choking on it. The mailbox here can be almost a gig and all your PC sees is just a web page.

Some friends also discovered that it is a great way to store memos, since is is very easy to pull them back between the labels and the search engine. I liked the idea so much that I sent myself every shareware license and CD key I have as separate emails so I can easily pull them.

The blog thing will probably break by the time it hits production, but it tells us (and Google too) that Gmail is so versatile that you can do all these crazy things with it.

Now Google can look at it and go uhm, maybe this is faster than whatever it is we are doing to store Blogger entries, and it also takes care of the post comments! And since you are already giving people a Gig of space, you can in theory claim that your *hosted* Blogger option is now free and allows you to share your 1GB of Gmail space. Then later plug the whole thing into an Orkut that doesn't suck and also into Google Groups.

hrm

i cant get it to work ... any luck?

Eh

GmailFS is still a much cooler hack.

Imagine a bootable linux distro, upon boot asking for your Gmail login info then automatically mounting it as your home directory. Instant linux box wherever you go and have a internet connection.

Fucking cool.

Good God

If you want a blog that's associated with Google, you could always just mosey on over to blogger.com. Last I checked, there's no limit with them as to how much storage you get and it's probably a bit easier than getting this running. Yes, this is kinda cool and innovative, but couldn't this creative/technological skill go toward something that everyone would benefit from, like, say, easy sound/3d in Linux?

For fucks sake

Stop doing shit like this. Yeah, it's "fun", yeah it's "cool", but it's gonna piss Google off so much that they'll just put more and more limits on the service which piss off the majority to stop the minority.

I don't know about you, but I want to READ MY FUCKING EMAIL with GMail, not use it as some file storage solution, file system, blog client and kitchen sink. Leave it be. Google is generous, they've released APIs and other fun shit to do with their service, and they've been nice enough to let people try their beta service. If I lose that service because morons like fucking with it to store their porn, I will be MAJORLY pissed off.

Don't be so fucking selfish and stick to the friggin' ToS already.

Google will be forced to be smarter

Google will realize what Yahoo realized years ago - your users are not necessarily friendlies. Many will exploit and manipulate services for their own purposes. A few years ago a company was linking Yahoo IDs to provide a backup system for his entire company's data via Yahoo Briefcase.

Google will need to start doing this - just stating an abuse policy is not good enough, they will need to start detecting abuse and counteracting, otherwise they will go broke trying to buy enough drives to make the exploiters happy.

What I want

is a gmail block device driver. That would be neat. Thank you for listening to an old uncle.

Is this really a good idea?

Oh, sure, let's use a blogging script which uses a webmail service as its database. It can fetch data from this service by internally connecting to the web site, parsing the HTML, and pulling out the relevant data.

Uh.

Seriously, people, install a fucking SQL server. Not only is this going to be extremely extremely inefficient for you, but you are basically taking a nice service provided to you free by a nice company and exploiting the hell out of it. I am quite certain that if this thing gets a lot of use, Google will implement measures to break it. And I'm guessing Slashdot will whine when that happens, and I will be disgusted.

Really... When your girlfriend offers you a blow job do you forcefully ram your dick down her throat until she vomits? Why on Earth would you do this to Google?

RAIGA

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Google Accounts.

google RAID.

any takers for this newly-starting project?

jesus christ

JESUS people, it's a goddamn EMAIL SERVICE.

What are you all DOING?! You're out of your Minds!

*ala William Shatner*
HAVE ANY OF YOU EVER EVEN KISSED A GIRL?!

taking over the world plan

Oh my god, heh, I just told myself the answer for this question of why give out invites to current users and not just have a beta signup or something.

So they can get to everybody. An invite isn't something you sign up for, it is something given to you, current users would give it to their close friends and relatives, who are prolly not technical users and know nothing about current tech news and development of something as bland as a new email service, but thus letting people know of how good it is, and making sure the word spreads out that much farther. wow, no wonder google mostly or only employs phd's...

smart aren't they? also, google is still free, and I saw many people say they would be completely willing to pay for it on slashdot just because it is pretty much better than any other search engine that is currently available, and it is so damn fast. But Google doesn't need to slow down their conquest of the internet market, by doing something like making their services fee-based, at least not yet. First something as unimportant as a search engine. then an email service. next an efficient and elegant messenger with most features you need and enough userbase from gmail and google to make it the most popular messenger in the world. then a web browser with all these features integrated into a slick and resource efficient application, along with it a security package guarding your internet experience.

then an operating system.

then manufacturing it's own line of computers. most common type at first, but after maybe making it's own type of a portable computer system.

sounds like Apple, in the way that it is so popular right now with the iPods, but only iPods, and the way their products are so elegant and clean and efficient. ut much less expensive than Apple, currently at least.

Along the way probably Google will make a bad decision or in one of the processes I described something better than a Google's product would be released and would gain popularity and the plan would fall through. but Google probably isn't stupid enough to create a plan that isn't fault-tolerant. the course of this plan may take 15, maybe 20 years, and then Google will control humanity and make a cluster of human brains integrated with computers to find out the meaning of life?

oh wait, that would be evil

Gmail should remain invitation only!

Although this may be a little off-topic: I think google should keep Gmail invitation only, as it is doing with orkut. I don't see any downsides, that is unless you refuse to communicate with any other person on the internet. But then why would you be using email?

Death of Gmail?

I'm surprised that nobody's pointed out that this could seriously call into question that survival of Gmail. A few people mentioned that Google might clamp down on the service if it is abused for purposes other than email. But how are they supposed to do this when monitoring people's mails would be a serious invasion of their privacy (although it is intriguing to note that their privacy policy [google.com] doesn't state explicitly - AFAICS - that no one will do this)?

I think this could turn out to be a serious miscalculation on Google's part. It would be quite trivial to write a web app that front ends Gmail with a virtual file system to which you can upload and download hierarchically structured folders and files. The system could even seamlessly encapsulate more than one account so you could have multiple Gbs of storage available totally free, with huge bandwidth and no maintenance.

I imagine that Google's estimates of required storage assumed some relatively moderate average consumption for each user. This would make it really easy to eat up more space than they expected. This, combined with the fact that they won't get any advertising revenue from accounts using this trick, might make it difficult for them to continue the service.

In case someone does not know

"Gallina" means hen (in Spanish), and it's also used in the sense that one use, in English, "chicken".

gmail invites

First 6 people to email me get invites darcon at gmail.com

... more gmail invites ...

First 5 people to Jabber me get gmail invites. JID: [e-mail].

Don't worry if I'm not there to respond, I'll know in which order the messages came. Don't forget to include your name and e-mail address.

Could someone send me a gmail invite?

See, I have no friends... (really)

To all those worried about their gMail accounts...

Let me see if I understand you all: You're pissed that someone playing around with the underlying tech of gMail is going to cause you the *disaster* of losing your oh-so-vital e-mail!?!?!?

Let's all just agree right now, that anyone worried about their gMail (and thus obviously unable to run their own Internet-accessible mail server) is SO clueless and SO *user-like* that they are NOT to comment on gMail hacks...

Insert the various tired-out cautions here: It's a free service (you didn't think it would last forever did you?); What, you didn't back up your e-mail locally (are you nuts, it's not like you were paying them to...).

This guy is just one of many blurring the whole distinction between file systems/datastores/mailservers/etc. and what in the world is the harm in that? (That's kinda how gMail came about, isn't it?

If you are so worried, go get 10-12 yahoo accounts and don't worry/be happy--I haven't noticed anybody hacking yahoo's webmail service...

What's the point

Google offers a free blogging system, blogger.

Wouldn't suprise me if they linked the two systems at some point.

Obligitory GMail invite reply...

First 6 people to email me at [e-mail] get gmail invites. Meh.

Re:Sick of gmail

It's a classic marketing device - the "ha, ha, you can't have it!" technique... Builds up a huge expectation momentum, provided you have the resources, and Google certainly does.

Yeah

What, Google create an free, optional service that you aren't personally interested in? How dare they?

Re:Sick of gmail

Gmail is invitation only because it is in beta and they want to scale up their size slowly. When it is completed, it will be open to everyone. And good luck not using Google; a lot of other search engines use Google indirectly.

Re:Sick of gmail

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - September 6, 2004 - Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that they are discontinuing the popular beta trial of their "Gmail" personal e-mail service. "When we realized that Slashdot user thammond had pledged not to use the service, we decided there was no point in continuing," said Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products. While the service had appeared to be gaining momentum as an alternative to other free e-mail services, thammond's pledge, announced today on the popular technology news site Slashdot, made it clear to company management that there was no future in the offering. Existing users of the service will be notified early this week and Google assured concerned shareholders that "future innovations will be submitted to thammond for approval prior to release in the future."

Re:Sick of gmail

That's because Gmail is currently in BETA. They want to test it with a lot of accounts, but they still want to control the number of accounts so their system doesn't get overloaded before it's ready.

Having an invitation system seems a good way of getting a good number of test accounts.

I suggest you read the FAQ [google.com] as it talks about this and POP access etc.

Re:Sick of gmail

Ah yes, I remember the morning I got my gmail account. We had just returned the hounds to the pen and stabled the horses when the ambassador arrived with my invite. I was worried it would be over run with riffraff, but after reciving assurances from the Kennedys that invitations were strictly for the better class of people, I joined up, and golly I'm happy I did.

Seriously, it took me 5 min after I read about gmail to get an account. Have you no friends? There are _millions_ of invites out there.

Re:Sick of gmail

From what I remember they are working on allowing you to access it all via POP. It's BETA, what do you expect? You can't expect them to give an account to everyone who wants one, i think a lot of what they're doing is trying to slowly roll it out so they can test scaling and such while they do the testing of the interface and stuff. by slowly rolling it out they get an idea of just how the 1000 megabytes of space grow from user to user and can try to balance things better.

As mentioned already it seems they do it to create a bit of hype. Is the hype all it's cracked up to be? Eh, not really but it DOES work really well and I use gmail over yahoo now for my email, it also makes organizing my mail a hell of a lot easier in terms of mailing lists and such (that's really all i use it for, all my normal mail goes through my websites email addresses).

You just need to calm down and chill, if you want a gmail account ask and i'll gladly give you one of my invitations.

Re:Sick of gmail

You're just mad because no one invited you. =)

Re:Sick of gmail - NOT

Dude, its in BETA. Its not ment to be for everyone yet. Its still in testing.

Also, how else do you think they will finance it? 1gb of email with no Ad's? Maybe they will release POP3, but with inserted ads, who knows.

Hotmail has ad's - but no one goes mad about that - surely you don't think those ads are not targeted???

You want a gmail invite?

If you want a gmail invite you just have to search on Google. Google is giving invitations away a lot more now to current subscribers. Visit my website [technicallyincorrect.org], I have 5 gmail invites left to give. And I'm giving them away for free, no strings attached. Gmail is still in beta too, so that's probably why it's currently invitation only. Not sure if they have plans to make it open to all though.

Btw, POP access is currently in the works, though IMAP would indeed be nice. I'll make a suggestion.

Re:Sick of gmail

Other companies have their operating systems, programs and services tested on their users, I think you might know the one. There's a reason why there's a "send bug report" button now every time IE crashes. Google takes its time to let the service grow with its userbase in case of size and functionality. Which I personally prefer.

Re:1000 MB????

Technically, it's not a gigabyte; one gigabyte is 1024MB. And commas are deprecated. =P

Re:1000 MB????

grown up land? try the US, the world would use 1 000

Re:Sick of gmail

But it does have some revolutionary features to it - they've tried to change the way you store and manage your email. They've replaced folders with labels, archiving, and threading - not to mention the spam filtering is top notch and the interface is splendid.

Re:1000 MB????

Oh, and here in grown-up land, we also put a comma after the thousands. "1,000" please.

So that's what they told you in school? Silly US kids, believing any shit. In grown-up land people know how to count, so using a comma to say "hey, I've got 3 zeroes here" is redundant.

"1,000" is for lazy bean-counter types that sound hollow when hit between ears. But that's OK, you can be on the first ship escaping from that terrible future catastrophe. We'll be right behind you in the next one. Honest.

Re:1000 MB????

I'm not necessarily lazy, but I have to say, I'd prefer to use 85,840,734,641,021 over 5840734641021. Especially if I have to quickly add 1000000 to it or transcribe it by hand to some other medium.

Of course, I tend to prefer using tools that help keep me from making mistakes.

I've worked on documents where people have written things like "4,24,120 incidents". It was a great flag to me that something was wrong and I was able to check it with them. If they had simply written 424120, I would never have spotted the error.

Commas might be deprecated and spaces prefered in the world community, but in either case, I think they're helpful in reducing errors.

Re:1000 MB????

Gigabyte is sometimes interpreted as 1024MB (although technically that's a Gibibyte) so they've done it to prevent confusion ;)

Re:Sick of gmail

Aww, sounds like someone hasn't been invited to the party... ;)

Google just gave me a few invites, I'd be willing to give you one if you think it might help sweeten that sour taste in your mouth.

Funny thing is, I hardly even use my gmail account because I've had my mac.com address so long. What I've done, though, is to use gmail like an email archiving station. Just a simple, "If sender of message is in my address book, forward the message to my gmail address" rule. Requires no interaction at all, I don't even know it's happening but all my "good" email is auto-magically archived.

Blah blah, I ramble. Seriously though, I'll send you an invite if you'd like...

Re:1000 MB????

1000 MB != 1 GB
1024 MB == 1 GB

Re:Gmail invites here...

.... and the spam rolls in .... :P

Re:6 invites

all gone!