I finally managed to experience GMail firsthand today, nearly a month after it launched. GMail has received a lot of press, and there's no point in repeating the obvious. My impression is that Google is not after Yahoo's share of revenues from advertising on an email service. By crawling your mail, they can find out what you are good at. Through owning your address book, they will find out who your contacts are and the nature of your interaction with them. Essentially, Google is trying to capture and leverage the human capital, relationship capital, and ultimately, social capital of their users. Want to find a Java expert? No problem. Need an honest car mechanic? Easy. You get the idea.
No doubt, it is an ambitious task. I think that the launch of GMail means that Google is getting ready to release other technologies that are needed to make the above work. This probably includes instant messaging, calendaring, Orkut, a wireless service, as well as a few surprises.
It is difficult to know which information sources are reliable, but there seems to be a growing number of stories reporting that women and children die from sniper fire in Falluja. Even if only a fraction of this is true, it is still terrible.