I got a gmail account yesterday and it is cool. Google has implemented some really cool features into gmail to make dealing with the email client easier. Stuff like they split out all replies into seperate emails but still show them all to you on one page, a reply field already attached to a message, lots of javascripts to make stuff work smoother, less submitting of pages.
Anyway, how I got it was funny. I bought it on ebay for $0.99. I had tried in the afternoon 2 days ago but invites were going for like $20. It was ridiculous (although considering they had been going for over $50, I guess it’s not as bad). Then I thought I’d look again yesterday morning and they were going for like $6-15 at 8:00am. However, for some reason ebay wasn’t keeping up very well and were showing all of the listings at $0.99 on the listings page. So to find out that they were not cheap, you had to click into the auction. A bunch of them were at like $1.75, $2.50, … so I bid $3 on like 5 of them because I kept getting outbid. These auctions were all in the last minute! There were tons of people bidding on them.
Then, all of a sudden there was a flood of listings that were ending so there were like 10 listings that had less than a minute left. This went on for probably like 5 minutes, all of them at .99. I kept clicking on them but they had already ended, and they were ending at .99 with someone winning!!! I was ticked! I had just tried so hard to buy one for $3 and now there were tons of people getting accounts for $.99. so I kept trying but kept getting auctions that had ended. I was frantic. Then I decided to try one that was like 10 down from the top of the list. I clicked in, it was at .99 with 18 seconds left. I hurried as fast as I could to put in my $3 bid. As soon as you get the bid in it takes you to a page that has a button to check the status of the bid. I clicked immediatly and it said the auction had ended and I had won!!!
So I made the $.99 payment through paypal and in like 5 minutes I had the invite. That was cool.