Ask Jeeves Joins Gigabyte-Plus Hit Parade, Ends Site Submit

Ask Jeeves has announced that they've upped the mail storage on the email of their three portal brands -- My Way, Excite, and iWon -- and that Excite Gold Users will get 2 gigabytes of storage. This will begin in September. This comes at about the same time as Microsoft's announcement that they're upping Hotmail's free storage to 250MB and their paid service to 2 GB and a few weeks after Yahoo's announcement that they'll offer 2 GB storage to paid e-mail users (details on both at News.com. )

Now, the expansion of mailbox space will come as a great relief to many users of free e-mail, especially to Ask Jeeves users who apparently had to deal with a maximum of 6MB before. But the expansion to 2 GB for paid users by these services, with subsequent trumpeting, has to me the tone of a whoop-te-do contest.

It's like those AOL disks that offered you umpy-zillion free hours. Yeah, neato. Except who needs it? Right now the majority of users in my opinion will never need 2GB worth of storage. Perhaps later, when we all communicate by video and three-dimensional talking avatars. But not now.

I would be much more impressed if I got an announcement that a free or paid service was offering a very intelligent spam filtering service (so that newsletters that readers actually requested don't end up in the spaham filter), an aggressive virus-filtering feature, an extended autoresponder service, extended delivery service for mail (via RSS feeds, perhaps?), and third-party tools to make using the service easier/more useful (like the third-party services for importing existing mail into Gmail, etc.) Yes, that's more difficult than simply adding storage, but man, would it make a mail service stand out.

In other news, Ask Jeeves is discontinuing Site Submit, which was a pay-for-inclusion program for Ask Jeeves and Teoma. From their press release: "Throughout 2004 Ask Jeeves will continue to make improvements to Teoma's ability to comprehensively crawl the Internet, thereby making the Site Submit program unnecessary. As a result, Ask Jeeves will no longer offer any paid inclusion programs." How many PFI programs are left? Looksmart? Does Yahoo's Directory count?

It's still too early to tell if Ask Jeeves can compete with the Yahoo/Google/(MSN) epic currently beginning to brew, but it's going to be fun to watch them try.

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