Google lifts its invitation-only gmail account restriction

I recently blogged about Google’s Google Book Project. Now get this, Google finally opened up Gmail to newcomers just a few hours ago. They finally decided to drop its ‘invitation-only’ restriction.

Gmail, which is now the 3rd largest email hosting company, currently has approximately 60 million users. And with the existing 2.8GB (and growing) mailbox capacity, powerful email search capability, and its tight integration with different, extremely useful Google apps, such as Google Talk, it will definitely keep its main competitors, namely MSN’s Hotmail (approx. 236 million users) and Yahoo! Mail (approx. 246 million users) on their toes.

You can take a gander at what the impact will be for us ‘netizens’. This will most likely mean an improvement in the overall global webmail service offering, which spells good news for us!