Chndru - 5:18 pm on Jun 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

Gmail team must be thinking hard, as what benefits would they get by releasing it?

I have sent out a couple dozen invites, most of them wouldn't have signed for Gmail. I explained Gmail to them and they are now glad to have Gmail. And email is such a hard thing to migrate. And given Yahoo is upto a fight, it needs more persuasion than just 1GB and search.

I think, they gonna just keep it invite-mode for a while, just to be a hard-to-get and mystic to folks. As long as they keep piling up the invites, everyone will invite their close friends, and it will keep growing exponentially for a while, not to mention preventing potential abuse (by signing up multiple emails and using for storage).