How much of your life is Google’d!
“It starts out as a convenience, becomes a habit, then a necessity, and finally an addiction.”
That is how Robert X.Cringley succinctly sums up the Google phenomenon!
Here is a partial list of the Google’s on line services – or staple offerings in addition to the Numero Uno status on web search (you don’t search any more, you merely Google it!):
- The ubiquitous Gmail (still Beta!)
- Online productivity suite – Docs, spreadsheets, presentations..
- Picasa web albums for storing and sharing images – may be a shade less popular than the professional looking Flickr of Yahoo!
- Blogger – that ushered in a “push-button” publishing revolution
- YouTube – the video service that has made itself a generic term for anything video; (and you are living in a “Youtube era”!)
- Orkut, the social networking app – though lagging behind Facebook and Myspace in popularity
- Google apps and labs – the production suite of geeks – Android, Gear, Ajax API’s, App engines, OpenSocial – the list is endless
- Google maps, Google Earth – mind-boggling stuff!
- Google Talk – mark my words, it will beat Skype soon!
- Adsense, the intelligent ad-inserting service that has turned blogging profitable – “pro-bloggers”, anyone!
- And Feedburner, Notebook, Calender, Reader, iGoogle, …
And when Google servers experienced a brief outage last week the sky almost fell on many addicts.
So much for the perils of getting too dependent on Google, or, any one particular service.