Via BoingBoing comes this story which grabs me because of its truthiness. If you use a hotmail.com account, you cannot be considered to be an “Internet Expert.”

Basically this post retells the story where a Human Resources department was selecting for a position that wanted someone with “ample experience using the Internet.” One of their criteria for weeding out unqualified applicants was to remove everyone who had a “@hotmail.com” mail account from consideration.

I really like this idea; the same could probably be said of those people who advertise their mail address as @<cable modem or dsl provider>. But I wonder how long these kinds of things will hold. It’s widely considered that people with ‘@gmail.com’ accounts are fairly tech-savvy. But, particularly now that Google is opening it up to everyone, not just invites, how long can the ‘@gmail.com’ domain be considered a quick-and-dirty measure of Internet knowledge?

Yes, certainly ‘@hotmail.com,’ ‘@msn.com,’ and ‘@aol.com’ can serve as a useful barometer of a lack of sophistication among technofiles. As long as it’s not done the other way. I know of people with ‘@gmail.com’ accounts that I would not consider to be Internet experts, and ‘@yahoo.com’ is somewhere in the middle. You can probably also make a judgement that people that own their own domains are fairly sophisticated, but that can also mean (and increasingly so) that they have a son or daughter or brother or sister or aunt or uncle that is the savvy one.