Gmail: Google's approach to email offers users lots of storage (2.5 gigabytes), a different way of categorizing emails in the form of a conversation and Google search to find archived emails. Gmail also features ads and related information based on the content of the email.
Google Talk: A service that allows users to trade instant messages (IM) and make voice calls. Chat history can be saved and searched. Gmail users can use the IM capabilities from within Gmail, but to make voice calls users have to download a 900K client program. Note that the IM capabilities are not currently inter-operable with many other services like the dominant AOL Instant Messenger.
Other players include
E-mail: Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Netscape Mail
IM: AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger
VOIP: Skype, Vonage
What this could mean for marketers
When Google first started beta-testing Gmail in 2004, its whopping gigabyte of storage instantly set a new standard for free email accounts and sent its competition into a tizzy. Before Gmail, free email services like Yahoo Mail offered a mere six megabytes. Then Google raised the storage bar again to 2 GB, and then again to 2.5 GB.
At the moment, Gmail seems to serve two purposes for Google. First, it extends the company's reach even further into the media habits of its users by enabling them to use Google for everything (search, news, blogs, RSS feeds, email, IM, voice calls, maps and more) all with the same starting point of the Google home page. Second, it vastly extends the available inventory of pages on which Google can place its contextually relevant text ads (see "AdWords & More") next to emails. Some privacy activists have expressed concern about Google crawling the contents of user emails for keywords against which it places ads, but Gmail's convenience and ease of use seem to have trumped privacy worries.
As for Google Talk (IM and Voice), this is Google's move into a new field, currently dominated by Skype (recently acquired by eBay) on the free side and Vonage on the pay side. While Vonage once dominated the paid-VOIP landscape, it has quickly become a commodity as every cable and telephony company rolls out its own, similar service.
How marketers can take advantage of any VOIP -- Google's or otherwise -- continues to be a guessing game, although one early answer is United Virtualities' HotRecorder, an advertising-supported desktop application that allows users to record VOID calls as MP3s, among other things, and which recently announced that it works with Google Talk.
Google's habitually open APIs mean that the company clearly invites marketers to develop sites or applications that can sit on top of Gmail and Talk. Entertainment marketers might use this to enable consumers to talk with each other about a new film, TV show or video. Similarly, a CPG company might develop a sponsored desktop application around a sporting event that either emails data continuously to a Gmail account, or allows users to trade IMs with a sports journalist.
Google has worked hard to make itself the easy choice for such initiatives, and the sky's the limit
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