Some of the A-listers have been picking a fight with Google for some time. Why? Who knows, but I wouldn't rule out simple pettiness after they realized the guys who owned Google don;t think of themselves as a public service and want to cash in, too. This coming from several folks who have already made their bundles.

Seth, I too find this rather odd. While the Gmail terms of use are ugly, there is little that appears non-typical.

I find myself flopping sides on the Google issue. In the past, Where the net.consensus was to trust their good intentions, I've been wary. This probably is the result of being burned by Yahoo when I trusted them with personal information which they later repurposed for spamming.

I'm still wary, but I'm not sure they deserve the hammering they are taking.

I just think its sexy!

At risk of being a bit petty, I think sometimes the "A-list'ers" want to mimick brick-'n'-mortar journalists.

And what are those journalists doing? They're engaging in Howard-Dean-Style "Tear down what we've built up... and quickly!"

"Google is koooool!" is so last year. And the A-listers have to write about SOMETHING, right, besides the tried-and-true?

Besides, as a blogger myself, I'll admit that it's often both more fun AND easier to be indignant and rail at some Great Evil(tm) then to say, "Hey, everything seems to be okay..." The former sells papers / attracts blog hits, the latter? Zzzzzzzzz ;)

And by the way, I've been beta testing Gmail myself, as I outline here in a recent blog entry:
http://www.bladam.com/archives/0404141832.htm
... I think it's pretty darn neat.

Personally, I just don't get the hand-wringing about privacy. Gmail parses, displays, and stores your e-mail. Guess what? So does every ISP out there! Hello, McFly!?

Six degrees of separation: (1) Gmail is run by (2) Google which owns (3) Blogger which recently adopted (4) Atom as a replacement for (5) RSS which is designed by (6) Dave Winer who is an A-list Weblog-site-type-person.

And what Adam said. People have been in denial about the possibility of unencrypted e-mail being read by every server it passes through. Gmail just makes it slightly more obvious.