I can fight it no longer…. Google now has a complete hold on my life. My entire digital world is now somehow connected to google. I used to use a few google products here and there and held on to other digital offerings elsewhere but after buying a Android phone and absolutely falling in love with it I’ve given in and migrated everything to google. I’m sure many of you are familiar with some if not all of the products I’m going to describe below.
Email – I recently migrated all of my MIT email to gmail. I held off on doing this for a long time but my phone integrates with gmail so well I just had to make the switch. Now all emails that get sent to me will automatically be forwarded to my gmail account
Photo’s – I’ve been a fan of picasa webalbums for a really long time. I used to upload a few pictures here and there that I wanted to share with the world, now I’ve started using them as a complete backup system for my photographs. Each new account gets 1 gb of storage space which I filled up a few months ago. Back then I decided it was worth 20 bucks a year for 20 gb of online storage. I know there are many other services that offer more for less, but I love webalbums and I love how seamlessly they integrate with picasa. Another reason why I decided to stick with webalbums is because if at anytime I decided to cancel my account google will no delete my content, I just won’t be allowed to upload new content. Other providers to give you the same guarentee (last time I checked flickr said they would delete your content after 90 days, or something like that). To make things ever better I got an email from google a week ago saying they had upgraded my account from 20 gb to 80 gb, and that the storage was valid for all my google products not just photos.
Calendar – I’ve been fighting with Evolution (a linux mail/calendar client) for 2 years now. Everytime I get my calendar setup something happens and I have to set it up all over again. I finally got everything working and stable a few months ago but then I realized that I couldn’t share calendars from my work computer with my home computer, if I wanted to do that I’d have to use google calendars as a middle man. So I migrated my calendar to google calendar and have been happy with that ever since. It also integrates very nicely with my phone.
Voice – A few years back google bought a company called Grand Central and used them to create a product now known as google voice. The idea behind google voice is that you don’t give out your home, cell, work phone numbers. Instead you give out 1 number, your google voice number. Then depending on what time of day it is, who is calling you, and many other parameters that you can mess with, when someone calls your google voice number the call gets forwarded to one of your many different phones. I personally don’t use this feature what I do use is their voice mail product. When a call doesn’t get answered it gets sent to voicemail. After a person leaves a message google voice then transcribes the voicemail into text which i can then read on my phone using the google voice application. (You don’t need the google voice application you can have the voicemail emailed or sent in a text message to you). The transcription isn’t perfect but its good enough to get an idea of who is calling me and why. Think of it as visual voicemail mixed with email. Its a really slick product.
Contacts – I didn’t know this product existed until I got my android phone. As you use different google products and interact with people contacts are created. Everytime you tag somebody in a photo a contact is created. Everytime you write a person an email another contact is created. Whenever I add a person to my phone another contact is created. What google does so well is merges these different contacts into a single contact. That means that when I take a picture of Aubrey and tag her in picasa webalbums that photo is then associated with any other contact information I have on her.
Documents – For a while now you could use google docs to do anything you could do with microsoft office. I use docs all the time when I need to create a quick document that I either don’t want to lose or want to share with other people. I’ve used google documents for: a family directories, my lab notebook, a gradebook for a class I teach, christmas lists I want to share with people, etc…. The uses are endless.
There are many other great google products out there that I haven’t even tried yet, but most of the products I’ve used I’m very happy with. Do any of you use products that I don’t have listed above that you absolutely love? Please share them with me!
Bridget
/ December 9, 2009it’s true, broseph…Google is slowly taking over the world as we know it. And I think I am ok with that.
Love my google voice.