Google Mania
I've become addicted to everything Google lately. I now have a Google Homepage, keep my diary on Google Calendar, plan trips with Google Maps, chat to people with Google Mail, manage my photos with Google Picasa, share my photos on the web with Google Picasa Web, and generally waste a lot of time with Google Earth... then there's Froogle for shopping, Google Groups taking over usenet, and soon there is even going to be a Google rival to PayPal. No doubt it will have a better interface than PayPal and integrate neatly with everything else to. I should really be using Blogger instead of MySpace for my blog too... but I like MySpace's "current playing" feature too much, and it's a great idea for keeping in touch with friends in fun way. If only they could design it as well as Google.
Google seemed to have dominated the internet applications domain like Microsoft dominated the o/s applications domain... however, everything Google does it does really really really really well! Their web sites are just so slick!
Google Homepage is inspired. Why have a boring blank search page when you can fill it with all the RSS feeds you want to read? At a glance I can see the latest news stories that I'm interested, the weather for my town, my friend's latest blog entries - every time I want to do a Google search.
Google Mail has even managed to tempt me over to web e-mail - even though it supports POP3 access! I never though web e-mail could be so slick, so well designed, and so just darn useful. Originally I was looking for a free account, where I could both download my e-mails via POP to my e-mail client, as well as checking my e-mail on a webpage when I'm travelling. Google does all this without obvious adverts (it reads your mail and gives you a list of "appropriate" links which is highly amusing), and *without* suspending your account if you don't log in regularly via web interface. You get 2.7 Gb (yes that's gigabytes) of mail box space, and you can even send e-mail via SMTP.
The two really cool killer features are that it displays a list of all your friends with Google Mail accounts who are on-line right now so you can talk to them via their very neat IM chat windows. Secondly it integrates with Google Calendar, which I'm using as my main diary from now on, whereby it automatically reads your e-mails and if there's say an invitation to a house party on the 15th July it understands it and asks whether you want to put this event into your diary. It's all very, very cool. Google Calendar is a topic in itself - it's another very slick Google app, that allows you to share your calendars with your friends - e.g. my flatmate maintains a diary of all of her visitors on Google calendar, which she shares with me. It's so much easier to use than any diary software I've ever come across - on a desktop, a PDA, anywhere... I'm still flabbergasted that it's a web application!
There's now Linux versions of Google Picasa and Google Earth too. Picasa makes the task of organising your photo albums, doing basic edits/improvements, adding captions etc. a complete breeze which is vital when you've got thousands of photos to deal with. You can even directly upload them to Google Picasa Web now too to share them with your friends, though they only give you 250Mb storage space (a bit poor compared to the 2.7 Gb mail space I've got and don't ever use!).
Google seemed to have dominated the internet applications domain like Microsoft dominated the o/s applications domain... however, everything Google does it does really really really really well! Their web sites are just so slick!
Google Homepage is inspired. Why have a boring blank search page when you can fill it with all the RSS feeds you want to read? At a glance I can see the latest news stories that I'm interested, the weather for my town, my friend's latest blog entries - every time I want to do a Google search.
Google Mail has even managed to tempt me over to web e-mail - even though it supports POP3 access! I never though web e-mail could be so slick, so well designed, and so just darn useful. Originally I was looking for a free account, where I could both download my e-mails via POP to my e-mail client, as well as checking my e-mail on a webpage when I'm travelling. Google does all this without obvious adverts (it reads your mail and gives you a list of "appropriate" links which is highly amusing), and *without* suspending your account if you don't log in regularly via web interface. You get 2.7 Gb (yes that's gigabytes) of mail box space, and you can even send e-mail via SMTP.
The two really cool killer features are that it displays a list of all your friends with Google Mail accounts who are on-line right now so you can talk to them via their very neat IM chat windows. Secondly it integrates with Google Calendar, which I'm using as my main diary from now on, whereby it automatically reads your e-mails and if there's say an invitation to a house party on the 15th July it understands it and asks whether you want to put this event into your diary. It's all very, very cool. Google Calendar is a topic in itself - it's another very slick Google app, that allows you to share your calendars with your friends - e.g. my flatmate maintains a diary of all of her visitors on Google calendar, which she shares with me. It's so much easier to use than any diary software I've ever come across - on a desktop, a PDA, anywhere... I'm still flabbergasted that it's a web application!
There's now Linux versions of Google Picasa and Google Earth too. Picasa makes the task of organising your photo albums, doing basic edits/improvements, adding captions etc. a complete breeze which is vital when you've got thousands of photos to deal with. You can even directly upload them to Google Picasa Web now too to share them with your friends, though they only give you 250Mb storage space (a bit poor compared to the 2.7 Gb mail space I've got and don't ever use!).