"The Mountain View, Calif.-based Web giant on Friday plans to double the free storage on Gmail from 1GB to 2GB, said Georges Harik, Gmail product management director. After that, Google will add a yet-to-be-determined amount of extra storage daily, with no plans to stop," reports CNet.
""One gigabyte did seem like a lot, but it turns out there are a lot of heavy users of mail," he said. "They send attachments, share photos. It all adds up." He said Google discourages customers from using Gmail as a vast storage locker for music and video files. He said Google does not disclose the storage patterns of its users, but said a small but not insignificant number of users were close to exceeding the 1GB limit."
The increase is announced here.
Update: Guardian Unlimited also covered the story, Gmail celebrates birthday with extra gigabyte, and there are lots of comments on the Newsblog.
Comment: Nice, but I bet the vast majority of people are still using less than 5% of their Gmail storage, so giving everybody 100GB wouldn't make any real difference.
Much more important is the announcement that Gmail now supports a standard HTML interface instead of downloading masses of JavaScript. At long last, people with antediluvian computer systems will be able to use Gmail, and this includes Guardian journalists!
