Sorry for being quiet here lately. We’ve been hard at work on several things, the first of which we announced this morning. The new Top Links listing is a ranking of the most popular links of the past 24 hours from the blogs that we index. It’s based on a a new links database backend that you can search using the Citations page. As Google has proven, links are the currency of the web. There are a lot of interesting features we can provide our users that involve link analysis. But we first had to create an entirely new and seperate backend to index all the links from all the blogs that we index. That’s tens of millions of links right now, and it has to scale to much more than that over time. It was not a small job, and we’re not entirely done yet. So watch for more features to be rolled out over the next several weeks and months.

So I guess that Google’s new Gmail web-mail service isn’t a hoax after all. Kudos to them for the publicity stunt of announcing on April Fools. More importantly, it sounds like they’ve got the right idea about storage, giving each user 1 gigabyte of storage. I think this is absolutely the correct thing to do. Economically, it doesn’t cost Google much to provide this (storage approaches free over time, and most people won’t use up that gig, at least not immediately). And it really ties the user to Google’s service. If I’ve got a gigabyte of old email on Google, that’s a very strong incentive to continue to use the service. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo and MSN/Hotmail respond to this. They’ve both made a business out of charging extra for more than a very small amount of storage. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, modified slightly. When designing a service, assume hardware is free. Assume processing power and storage are infinite. Because they approach that over time, and limiting them does your service more harm than good. In addition, I think at this point you can also assume that bandwidth is free. That certainly wasn’t the case in the mid-1990s. But there’s now a glut, you can get very good deals on bandwidth these days, and it’s only getting better.

Wow, a flurry of Bloglines related activity today. First up, Jeremy Zawodny posts that he’s switching to Bloglines. Thanks! If you or any other user has any suggestions for how we can improve the service, please tell us, by either using the comment submission form on the web site or by sending email to support (at) bloglines.com. Next, we’re mentioned briefly in the latest Wired magazine, in an article on RSS. Also, an interview I did for nPost has been published. I was interviewed by Nathan Kaiser and I’m very happy with how it came out. Finally, I have to point to this review of Bloglines by the Tao Of Dowingba. If I may quote from the review:

For kicks, I just figured out how much usable disc space Bloglines has between all the machines that run the service. With the recent addition of a couple of servers to support some upcoming features, I believe we’ve passed the 1 terabyte mark. That’s in usable disc space, not raw. All of our various databases run on RAIDs, so the raw disc space number is actually much higher than that. Of course not all of that disc space is being used right now. We have a couple of backup machines that are pretty much empty and disc usage varies widely by what the particular server is being used for. I continue to be amazed at how far technology has progressed in just my lifetime.

I attended the Future Salon presentation by Dave Sifry on Technorati last night. This was the first time I had met Dave, and he struck me as one of those instantly likeable types. It was a good presentation and I have a lot of respect for what they’re doing at Technorati. Even though there is some functionality overlap between Bloglines and Technorati, which will probably increase over time, I think we serve different audiences. Anyways, Dave had some very nice things to say about Bloglines, and I was quite flattered.