I’m concerned about the possibility of Google turning to the dark side (a la Microsoft) what with their practically limitless potential to mine data, compromise privacy and manipulate access to information. We’ve already seen their ‘don’t be evil‘ policy conveniently forgotten in acquiescing to Chinese censorship.
But my goodness they’re developing some extraordinary applications at the moment: tools that are innovative, efficient and a joy to use. And so I’ve decided to go Google for most of my online (and many previously offline) activities. What really convinced me of this choice is the Google personalized homepage, which can now function as a virtual office, accessible from anywhere with internet access, including mobile phones.
The first step involved setting up Gmail to manage all of my email accounts, then switching to Google Reader for my RSS feeds. With this accomplished I’ve ditched Mozilla Thunderbird.
Then I replaced Time & Chaos, by setting up Google Calendar, Google Notebook and a to do list.
Finally, I set up Google Docs & Spreadsheets to (almost) replace Open Office.
I’ve organized my Google personalized home page so that all of these tools are available at a glance. Of course it’s best to access this using Firefox, with the Customize Google extension enabled.
Although many of these Google services are still in beta, they mostly work flawlessly. The only serious annoyance I’ve experienced so far is that the personalized home page works better at google.com, rather than google.com.au, which doesn’t display the calendar properly. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. (UPDATE: fixed with a new GCal module.) For now I’ve set my homepage to https://www.google.com/ig although I occasionally get redirected back to google.com.au.
I’m sure this is all old news to some of you, but if you haven’t yet tried going Google, I highly recommend that you give it a go!
