As I found out recently when I got a strange, and at first unintelligible notification in my Gmail inbox, telling me that I my account was at 95% of its capacity, and that I had better do something about it. And, indeed, I was at that spectral threshold, with my inbox holding something like 15,000 messages.

How, you may ask, did I get to this crisis point? Didn’t I ever delete old messages? Well, no – and with that, I was actually following Google’s recommendations, or at least buying into their marketing hype. When they first started the service, Google said that there would never be a need to delete another e-mail message – and I didn’t. Of course, I kept checking how much space I had available, at first – but, it seemed, every few months they kept upping the 2 GB of space I was initially given. Then came the other productivity services – Google Docs, Google Calendar, Picasa, using Gmail as a disk drive/ storage service, inviting yourself from your Gmail account to open other Gmail accounts, etc. I was hooked – Google really was like the golden goose that kept on giving!

But alas, the shine has worn off those golden eggs. When following the “critical message” link Gmail gave me when I neared the limit, Google suggested that I delete messages – or buy disk space, in order to accommodate my growing Google cloud “family” (Google storage space is used for all the company’s services, including Google Docs, Picasa, etc.). The price? Between $5 a year for 20 GB of storage, to $256 for 1 TB of space.

Aha, so that was it all along, Cynical Me said – the Google freebies, the ever-increasing storage space, were nothing more than a “bait and switch” scam to get me hooked, so I would be willing to shell out five bucks for more space! What made matters worse is that mass elimination of messages in Gmail is a bit tricky – unless the messages you want to delete are from the same address, have the same subject, are under a specific label, or have an attachment, you may find yourself either sorting through thousands of messages you want to keep and those you don’t, or having to download close to 8 GB of mail to your computer, so you can use your desktop e-mail programs tools to delete the content you don’t want. Even I, who get indignant when I’m asked to pay for anything (especially “free” services) almost gave up; I was actually reaching for my credit card, when I finally figured out a quick, efficient way to put my account on a diet (I managed to get down to 46% of capacity).

Alright, it’s only $5 – but the whole incident got me thinking. With the economy the way it is, and Google seeking to maintain its attractiveness to investors, a gradual slide by Google from “free” to “fremium” is not out of the question. So many people have Gmail now, that collecting $5 from each one could net Google a pile of money that other companies would have to charge many tens, or even hundreds, of dollars from their far smaller customer base in order to amass. And certainly Google’s $5 storage price is low enough to tempt users who don’t have the time, patience, or technical skills to do a major cleanup of their accounts.

Five dollars is indeed pretty cheap, and the company does have a lot of useful services, but look at it from the consumer’s (ie our) point of view: Google made most of its considerable fortune selling the aggregate information in our searches and e-mail messages, and  some would call Google’s squeezing users and others who are now at its mercy as just plain greedy.

I don’t think “greedy” is a word I’d use in connection with Google – after all, they do provide a lot of beneficial, free services, and they are in business to make money. And I don’t think the day will ever come when Google starts charging onerous fees for its basic services. We may be able to discern the Google future from the current behavior of Israeli banks: The fees charged by banks for the basic services are relatively low, but if you need a special “favor” done – like getting a bank statement from three months ago – expect to get hit with a big bill!

In the same way, Google could start charging you to access archived messages that have attachments larger than a certain size, for example. When you need your data, you need it – and if you need to pay Google to get it, you’ll pay. Apply that logic to other currently free services –  for example, maybe they’ll try to charge businesses for using Google Docs, or allow only “light” personal users free access, you begin to see how a Google ex-post facto monetization runaround can get to become just a bit annoying – and something you might want to try and avoid before it happens. The folks at our local banks, so good at figuring out ways to charge you for “taking care” of your money – meaning that they get to invest your money on their own behalf, and keep all the profits for themselves – can no doubt help Google with creative suggestions on how to stack up the fees, and still allow the company to maintain its “free” services.

If you ask Google (many have) about the possibility of its charging for services, the company’s standard answer is “We have no plans at this time to charge for services” – the key words (to use a phrase Google understands intimately) being “at this time.” Note that I haven’t even mentioned the other possible issues with a total dependence on Google’s (or any other company’s) cloud, like service outages, data erasures, viruses, identity theft, etc. – all well-known issues. There’s no reason why the “backup, backup, backup” philosophy we all learned in Computers 101 shouldn’t apply to on-line, as well as off-line data; “they’ll never let it happen,” whether its data loss, identity theft, or fee-based access, applies – until they actually let it.

My suggestion: Take advantage of “at this time,” and back up your Google cloud data locally. An old 40 GB hard drive (which you may have lying around) will do the job – all you’d need is an external case with a USB connection to turn it into a backup drive. Set up an overnight download to pull your messages from Gmail to your local computer, and archive the data on your storage drive. Or, you can use a program like BackupGoo, which will fetch your Gmail and Google Docs. I know the cloud is the future – and in fact, that future is already here. But backing up your own data will help ensure that the clouds you float on will be the white, fluffy ones – instead of those threatening, dark thunderheads.

Related articles

• Search Google Docs and Google Sites in Gmail (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
• Sync Your Google Docs To Multiple Machines With Insync (makeuseof.com)
• Back To School: Google Docs (inflectovita.com)
• Coming Soon: Google Docs Editing on iPad, Android (technologizer.com)
• Search Google Docs & Gmail Simultaneously with New Labs Feature (readwriteweb.com)

Can it be? Would a multinational corporation voluntarily give away, for free, some of its most powerful programs and best-known brands – some of which have had a near monopoly in their particular specialties?

The company in question is Adobe, which last week released on the Internet, for free, a Web version of its Photoshop software. Photoshop, of course, is Adobe’s top-drawer, photo-editing software; after nearly 20 years, it is still the most used program for photo editing, selling like hotcakes every time a new version comes out.

If you’re a graphic artist, Web designer or photo editor, you use Photoshop on the job (and if you’re one of the very few who don’t use PS on the job, you still have to know how to use it). Now, if you want to use Photoshop, you don’t have to pay the big bucks for PS CS3, the latest version; just surf to http://www.photoshop.com/express/index.html https://www.photoshop.com/express/index.html> , upload your photo, edit, save, download and you’ve saved yourself a pretty penny. The site says it’s for US residents only, but I didn’t have any trouble with it.

And it’s not just Photoshop that Adobe is “giving away.” There’s also an on-line version of Adobe Premiere, the company’s high-end video-editing and -mixing tool. Surf to http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereexpress/ to check out the product, and follow the links to either the MTV or Photobucket site from that page.

You upload your videos to your accounts on those sites, where you can make use of the Premiere Express software. You can even get free (albeit limited) access to some aspects of Adobe’s PDF-making software, Acrobat. At http://createpdf.adobe.com/, you can upload a file in a whole bunch of formats, like MS Word, Powepoint, plain text – even Pagemaker (!) – or insert a URL for a Web page and turn it into a downloadable or e-mailable PDF. You can convert five documents for each e-mail address you submit, but if you’ve used up your allotment, the site suggests you sign up with another address. Here’s a chance to use up all those Gmail invitations you have; just invite yourself to open a new account and you’ve got virtually unlimited access to on-line PDF making.

Sounds too good to be true – like, there has to be a catch, doesn’t there? Well, that depends on what you’re looking for. First of all, the PDF converter definitely works as advertised, and has helped me out in a couple of pinches where I had to send a document or Web page as a PDF to someone.

True, there are plenty of third-party programs that you can download and use for this, but this is Adobe (the people who created the PDF, after all), so you can be sure that whatever you generate using their service will be a “real” PDF, readable by Adobe PDF reader, which is the standard program for reading these documents. Not that the documents generated by the others aren’t 100 percent compatible as well, but why take a chance if the PDF’s “mother ship” is giving it away for free, with no installation necessary?

As for Premiere Express, it reminds me a lot of Apple’s iMovie or Windows Movie Maker – simple, basic and very easy to use. Never having used the full version of Premiere, I don’t know what I’m missing by using this clearly limited version (the on-line version can’t be the same as the one http://tinyurl.com/6ohp2m). And again, it’s Adobe – so how can you go wrong?

But Photoshop Express is a different story. Having had a lot of experience with PS, I can safely say, What were they thinking of? PS Express gives you a limited number of tools, similar to the ones you can get with Apple iPhoto, Google Picasa or a whole host of on-line photo-editing software. It’s basic, with almost none of the sophisticated tools the “real” Photoshop is famous for. That’s not to say it isn’t very good at what it does; for each of the 17 actions you can use on your photos – red-eye removal, touch-up, sharpen, hue – there are six or seven preset changes you can select (there are no variations). On the other hand, you can’t make a selection in the photo (changes are made to the whole thing at once). It’s a nice, elegant, basic photo-editing site, but it’s not the Photoshop you grew up with.

My question is, Why would Adobe attach the Photoshop name to this Web site? It’s not like the program needs more name recognition; “photoshopping” as a term to edit photographs is practically in the dictionary already (http://tinyurl.com/5k7qjj). Surely they could have come up with another name for it? I don’t mean to be nitpicky, but it’s not like there is even a continuum of “lite” (PS Express) to “medium” (Photoshop Elements, http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/) to grown-up Photoshop. Obviously it’s aimed at casual users, such as those uploading photos to Flickr or Facebook (to which you can directly link from your PS account).

On the other hand, the whole idea of putting a version of Photoshop on a Web site shows that Adobe has a sense of where the future is going, and that’s to on-line applications.

It could be that the company also has a master plan to add more Photoshop-like features to the site (after all, it’s in beta and barely two weeks old). There was a bit of a flap over the digital rights Adobe claimed for photos uploaded to the site, but that seems to have been resolved (http://tinyurl.com/5vw32n.

Photoshop Express is by no means the only on-line option for photo editing; there are a couple out there. If you can live without the cachet of a major brand like Photoshop, you might find Fotoflexer (http://fotoflexer.com/) more versatile, with more sophisticated tools (many of which were found in earlier versions of the “real” Photoshop), but still easy to use. Fotoflexer offers more than 75 tools, as well as the ability to work in layers, add text, animations, distortions and lots of other fun items; it’s also free, and with links to all the sites where you would save photos (Myspace, Picasa, etc.).

As Adobe invented most of the tools on the Fotoflexer site anyway, I am looking forward to a beefed-up (and still free) Photoshop Express site real soon.