Gmail not open yet. The truth about the false digg story.

Yesterday, I posted a story on digg claiming that Gmail was open for registration with no invitation or cell phone activation code. The truth is I was wrong, Gmail is not open yet to most of the world. It’s only open in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Egypt.

What happened is that when I was about to check my gmail yesterday, I found a “Sign up for Gmail” link on mail.google.com. I was able to create a new Gmail account with no invitation or cell phone registration. Happy with the news, I submitted it on digg. The thing is it only became open in Egypt where I live and I wrongly thought it’s now open worldwide. There was no way I would have known that it’s still closed for the rest of the world.

You can see that I’m excused here. I wouldn’t have imagined that Gmail registration is open for Egypt only. A North African country that wouldn’t normally get any special services/treatment from a big name such as Google. What happend is that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was visiting Egypt and signed an agreement with the Ministry of Education. He also announced that Gmail was now open from within Egypt.

Googling around I found out that Gmail has been open in Australia, New Zealand and Japan for a while now.

The funny thing is that the story got dugg very quickly. People dugg the story without checking the link which obviously led to the Cell phone registration page instead of the signup page which people in Egypt get. The even funnier thing is that several tech blogs reported that story without checking for themselves. This says much about how stories get dugg by thousands without checking it first. Many reported that the story was inaccurate, yet thousands dugg the story.

I’m sorry for the false story. I never meant to fake it, it’s only that I wrongly assumed that Gmail is open worldwide.