Google Mail now open for signups
Google Mail (GMail) has up until now been open to signups by invitation only. It seems they’ve opened up their process a bit and if you have a mobile phone, you can signup using that. It’s interesting I was reading last night how the invitation process was perhaps a clever way to keep the spammers out.
The way this works is you enter your phone number, and receive a text message with the invite number, you then enter your invite number AND phone number and complete the process. This currently works with US mobile numbers only.
One thing I see about this that’s troubling is that many cellphone companies charge for incoming messages and … what if someone wanted to run up another persons cell phone bill…
Outside of that I think it’s an interesting approach (should prevent automated or other bulk registrations (or at least slow them down).)