Via Slashdot: Some dude created a filesystem on top of GMail. Okay, so we knew something like that was going to happen, and I admit it's kinda cool...

But for the love of god, why?

If you're going to do something like that, make a FS on top of IMAP. IMAP is a lot more powerful (i.e. you can store meta-data, use folders, upload data) and efficient (FETCH BODYSTRUCTURE anyone?) than screenscraping GMail JavaScript code will ever be.

I'd like to point out the difference between GMail and AWS. With GMail, Google can't do anything that's really cool and generally useful (i.e. open up GMail using web services, or a new mail management protocol) as long as they rely on ad revenue. To make money from ads, they need your eyeballs. If people create custom apps, they have less eyeballs to sell. Amazon on the other hand, can get away with opening up their systems (i.e. through AWS) because they don't make money from eyeballs. They make money from selling stuff.

If you ask me, the long term trend in technology is to make ads less and less viable as a source of revenue. Unless corporations (evil or otherwise) use increasingly restrictive means (which, I suppose is likely), the trend in technology is to make it easier for consumers to find what they need, when they need it, without having their attention commoditized. If you want examples, TiVo and friends is one (cut out commercials), and the move from radio to portable music devices is another. RSS and blogs are yet another (get news without ads or commercials).

So is GMail not a sustainable business model? It's sustainable as long as they don't mind being evil, and keep it closed on the one hand while shooting down 3rd party apps with the other. But if they want to be nice, they'll have to charge for it. And that's exactly what's going to happen.

The one downside of an insanely stable OS is that... well, sometimes you get carried away.