In an effort to appeal to the college crowd, Google.com executives have revamped some of the Web site's most popular features in an initiative to make them appeal more to students' needs.
Debbie Jaffe, Group Product Marketing Manager for Google, held a press conference last week to announce some of the features Google hopes to market to university students.
"Google is truly dedicated to helping students," Jaffe said.
Google focused the conference on free products the company is offering such as GMail, the company's free e-mail server, Google Talk, its new instant messaging service and Google Scholar, a search engine targeting university students and educational research.
Although Google has been offering the GMail service as an invitation only e-mail service provider, recently they opened up the service to provide invitations to all university students.
Sophomore Matt Younts prefers his GMail account to his Ball State account because of the space.
"It holds a lot more - I don't have to worry about not getting messages because my Inbox is too full," Younts said.
Through the GMail service, students have 2 Gigabytes of space, compared to the 24.4 Megabytes offered through Ball State's e-mail service.
Students also have the ability to forward e-mails sent to your bsu.edu address to GMail, and then the ability to send GMail e-mails that appear to the receiver to be sent from students' Ball State e-mail addresses, so users can take advantage of the benefits of GMail, while still maintaining a university affiliated e-mail address, according to Jaffe.
Younts said, "It would help if you didn't want people to believe you had multiple e-mail accounts and have to guess which to send certain e-mail to."
He said he believes Google makes more of an effort to make things easy on students. "It simplifies e-mail - it also remembers every recipient's address you've used - and it also organizes chains of replies into one message," Younts said.
Jaffe said the company is basing their efforts to appeal to the college market on feedback it has heard so far.
"These particular products are very useful to university students. We've gotten feedback from students who find these tools particularly useful," Jaffe said.
Read More
Three Air Jam teams take home the win
October 12, 2012Nineteen teams shimmied, shook and flipped for a sold out John R. Emens Auditorium on Thursday night during the 25th annual Air Jam.
Bill Clinton Speaks at North Central High School
October 12, 2012Former President's Speech Could Have Effect on State Senate Race
