While I understand that they do tailor their ads to the information in your email, it was my (perhaps naive) understanding that the particulars of your emails were not used outside of determining those ads. Am I wrong in this?
Anyways, I have a couple of ideas kicking around in my skull. Right now I'm trying to get some work so I can fund them with my salary though. One idea relies on ads for money, because no one in their right mind would pay for such a simple service. The other two are direct sales things.
Also, after reading the article, I became curious about which "fucking awesome" products the author (you?) is selling. I didn't see any links on the page to them.
My main products now are:
http://letsfreckle.com/ http://jsrocks.com http://yearofhustle.com/
EDIT: I also do in-person (and soon, online) JavaScript training (http://jsmasterclass.com)... and I have quite a lot of free not-for-money sites you might recognize, including http://twistori.com and http://everytimezone.com
EDIT: I am a linkwhore.
The fancy word for that is "meretrix" (or the Latin "meretrice" for maximum pomposity). A word like that suits your style, even if the definition doesn't :-)
The reply button only shows up after some amount of time, which increases with nesting level.
They are also clearly trying to cover ALL the bases, to have everybody sucking at their proverbial info-teat. They want you to store your calendar, docs, contacts, phone, videos, status updates, internet reading, spreadsheets, etc., etc., all on their servers.
Did you know they used Goog-411 to collect spoken phonemes to improve their auto-captioning of YouTube videos (so they can search them)?
This is clever… and largely unknown… and slightly scary, since it shows on the kind of game they're playing.
OK so this is totally off-topic. My point is, if you don't have the capital of Google, or their 30-level thinking, charge money! You can make a really good income. :)
Source?