Gmail (Invite-Only Launch)
Photo credit: Logo: Google, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Google's email that launched with a then-unthinkable gigabyte of free storage — so much that people assumed it was an April Fools' joke. During the invite-only beta, a Gmail invite was a genuine status symbol.
Gmail launched on April 1, 2004 as an invite-only beta, created by Google engineer Paul Buchheit under the internal codename 'Caribou.' Its headline feature was a full gigabyte of free storage — hundreds of times what Hotmail and Yahoo offered at the time — which, combined with the April 1 launch date, led many to assume the whole thing was a prank. It wasn't.
Because it was invite-only, scarcity became part of the appeal: getting a Gmail account meant being handed an invite by someone who already had one, and spare invites were traded and even sold online. The product also rethought email itself, grouping replies into conversation threads and pushing search instead of folders. Google doubled the storage to two gigabytes in 2005 and kept raising it from there.
Gmail opened to the general public in 2007 and finally dropped its 'beta' label in 2009, by which point it was already one of the most-used email services in the world. But for a certain kind of mid-2000s internet user, the memory is the invite — and the flex of that gigabyte.
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