Google - Use it

I'm not all for big internet companies in general, but Google has changed my mind, at least with respect to them. I used to have a Yahoo email account, one that I signed up for back in the early 90's. After a while of using that I figured out how to use PoP3 to check your email using a windows application. Then Yahoo discontinued that service (unless you paid for it). So, I dropped Yahoo.

Then I got myself a hotmail account. I thought it was pretty good. I could use it for email as well as instant messaging. The only real downside to it was the fact that your email could only be accessed via HTTP. That got old pretty quick. After we dropped our dial-up internet service (which required an MSN username), I told myself no more online email systems.

I then registered my own domain name and paid for web hosting. This enabled me to setup my own email addresses at my own domain name. I still use them to this day. The downside is that I have to have an email client to access it or go through a painful login process to get to their hosted email clients.

Then I was introduced to Gmail, Google's email service. I signed up for a gmail account way back when it was in beta and the only way to get one was if someone who had one sent you an invite. At the time the only people who had that were the über geeks aka computer science and engineering students at the university I was at. This email service has grown to exceed any of my expectations. After a while of using it they added IMAP access. Now they have PoP3 access, enabling me to download all my email to an offline backup. The filtering system is amazing. I now have all my email addresses (as of right now--8 distinct email addresses) forwarded to my gmail account, allowing me convenient access to everything. They even have a decent mobile application that lets me check my email on my cell phone.

After a while of using Gmail I started to branch off and try other Google services. Now I have my homepage on my web browser set to iGoogle, a Google search page with other nifty little tools you can place on their, such as RSS feeds, games and interfaces to other Google services (calendar, notebook, etc). iGoogle also gives convenient links at the top to other Google services I use a lot like Google Documents (online word processor and spreadsheets), Google Maps (also available in a mobile application), Google Video (aka YouTube now), Google News (aggregated news feeds from tons of sources), and Google Calendar (good scheduling calendar, highly useful in remembering birthdays, anniversaries, etc).

Just recently I discovered Google's Blogs aka Blogger. Apparently, as a computer science student, I totally missed the ball on this one. It turns out tons of my friends already have blogs (and have had them for years). In fact, this blog is run by Blogger. It's very convenient to be able to post to the blog without the annoying admin interface such as in WordPress. Blogger also makes it very easy to have multiple contributors to a blog. After blogging for a bit I wondered how would be the easiest way to keep track of all my friends blogs and how to find out when someone posted something new. At first I was putting all the feeds on my iGoogle page, but that started getting crowded real quick. Then I found out about Google Reader, an RSS feed aggregator that shows multiple feeds together in one nice little widget on my iGoogle page. This tool makes keeping track of news, blogs, online comics, or anything else with an RSS feed very simple and easy to do. I think it's safe to say that I'm a Google convert...