Seduced by the Dork Google Side
What started off as an innocent distraction w/ a RSS reader is turning into a case of full-blown Googlitis. After initially, trying out some of the below mentioned services and not liking them, I realize I’m slowly converting — one service at a time, back to Google.
The reason: Google seems to be listening.
Here are the 5 services I’ve recently converted to:
1. GReader
As I’ve already blogged about it – this is the service that started it all.
Why switch to GReader?
2. Gmail
As you can see in the sidebar to your right, I’ve shifted from my email from yahoo! to gmail (as of Christmas 06)! Moving forward, please contact me at:
mario.sundar@gmail.com
Why switch?:
* Free as opposed to $19.00 that I was paying Yahoo! for Premium email services
* POP Service — the sole reason I resorted to paying the $19 fee was the ability to access my email via Outlook AND I could get POP access for free on gmail
* Storage capacity: ~2.8 Gb on Gmail vs. 1 Gb for Free Yahoo! Email
* Combined with Google Calendar, you can add an event directly from your email, making your time management more effective
* Labels – opportunity to tag conversations multiple times, so if you receive an email from a friend during the 06 holidays, you can label it under “friends” and “holidays 06”.
* Email threads as conversations — being a blogger I love the idea of viewing emails as conversations as opposed to contents in a folder. Here all back-and-forth email with a particular contact and subject line is grouped together as 1 conversation
* Superior search — sorting emails via folders is so old-school, it makes much more sense to not care how much email you receive and instead just search for keywords. Quite a paradigm shift in the way you process email.
* Speed – loads much quicker than Yahoo! Mail
3. GMaps
I tried Google Earth when it was launched, but after a few trial runs of the slow-loading application, I realized there wasn’t much value add to me personally and moreover it was tied to the desktop. And, at that time Yahoo! Maps offered me the capability to store locations and map from point a-b-c-d.
So, why switch?
* Gmaps has just introduced the a-b-c-d mapping service
* It also has added the capability to save all my locations online. Moreover, when I last checked, Yahoo! Maps restricted my ability to store more than x locations via my Yahoo! account!?
* Integration w/ Google Blog search — Try searching for mario sundar under Gmaps and you’ll see events/locations I’d blogged about!
* Speed — much faster than Yahoo!Maps flash animation
4. GCal vs. iScrybe
I tried Google Calendar and like it’s integration w/ Gmail. However, there’s a new calendar service in town called iScrybe!
So why NOT switch?
1. iScrybe rocks (check out brief demo here — you’ll know why?!)
Sign up for iScrybe beta invite, here
5. G.lic.io.us
Google bookmarks was my first attempt at web bookmarks (even before delicious) and I loved it except for the fact that I needed to access it via the toolbar. Since then I’ve grown accustomed to delicious’ simplicity and prefer the delicious toolbar to Google bookmarks.
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In all the above cases, I initially tried out the Google service and didn’t like it. Much to my surprise — months later, Google is back with a must-try service after having listened to their users. The keywords here are listen and evolve.
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