I could have gotten a GMail account a long time ago. Being a nerdly person myself, I have a handful of nerdly friends who started using GMail back when it first came out. They offered me invites right, left, and centre, and every time I would refuse. I was, after all, quite content with my deirdrakiai.com e-mail address kindly provided by Dreamhost.

Now, GMail is ubiquitous. You can get invites from anywhere, almost defeating the purpose of a small elitist beta-test in the first place. (Some say they might just do the invites forever, to track down spam and that sort of thing.) And, when everyone’s doing something, I tend to try and stay away from it, being the true non-conformist I am. (For example, I developed severe allergies to Hotmail around 1999 or so, and haven’t touched it since.) Therefore, you’d think that I’d be strong enough to resist the GMail hype. Well… you’d be wrong. I caved into the pressure last night.

But wait! There’s more…