Comscore released their site information about webmail providers, and the real winner was Yahoo Mail, which not only cemented its lead as the number one webmail provider, but also extended its lead over its rivals. The other big news was the growth of Gmail, which is on a pace to surpass Windows Live/Hotmail by the end of 2009.
People in the Internet and tech world have a tendency to think of the beta tag as something cool, like a product so cutting edge that it hasn’t even left that mythical beta stage. Of course the poster child for this is Google’s GMail product, which is still in beta and appears to be ordained to never leave that status. But perceptions within a community are often different than the perceptions outside a community, and that is often the case in business development partnerships with traditional media, where “beta” all too often means “not ready.”
