I for one welcome our Google Overlords.
First it was webmail. Dreamhost, which hosts not only our many websites (zoiks, SFF, Pure Shift, BS/OD, BCinDC, and this one) but also our Zoiks email accounts, was being really flaky. I can deal with it if my homepage goes down for a couple of hours now and again, but when my email starts hard bouncing – the kind that gets you removed from mailing lists and, as I discovered, Twitter notifications – that’s simply unacceptable. After it happened for the third time in as many weeks, we switched over to Gmail for our webmail hosting. It’s still the same zoiks.org address, but now it doesn’t suddenly disappear on a semi-regular basis the way Dreamhost was. So everything was hunky-dory.
Note: I’d like to point out that we’ve been very happy with the Dreamhost webhosting. Our websites actually have hardly gone down at all, and the price is excellent. It’s just their email hosting that sucks.
Then I discovered Google Reader. I’d heard of it long before but sort of poo-pooed it since I was already getting my syndicated feeds on my LiveJournal friends page. I was visiting LJ several times a day as it was; why did I need to visit yet another site to get my blog feeds? But then slowly people started drifting away from LJ until only a handful of my friends were updating with any regularity. It was then that I started noticing all the extra little inconveniences. The interface is a pain in the butt for photos: if they’re large they either screw up your layout or the image is just a clickable generic icon, meaning you have to open each entry (or each photo) individually to see it properly. In addition, the LJ friendspage only sorts as newest first, so if you miss a couple days you have to scroll down until you see something familiar, then read bottom to top, which leads to lots of extra scrolling. To top it all off, it’s entirely too inconvenient to add a feed. First you have to know the URL of the RSS feed (which is not always obvious), then you have to find the page where you can add the feed, which I have always had to locate using a FAQ search. So while LJ is really great for reading other LiveJournals (and I still do visit daily for that purpose), it’s not so hot as a reader for external blogs. When I switched to Google Reader I immediately went subscription-happy, with all its handy single-click functionality.
My most recent discovery is Google Bookmarks. I’ve been using Yahoo Bookmarks for quite a while so I can access and add to my bookmarks from anywhere. Between work, home, and travel, I long ago discovered a need for bookmarks not tied to any one machine, especially since I tend to bookmark stuff and blog it later (especially during the couple years I couldn’t see my blog, much less update it, from work). The problem with Yahoo is that it’s kind of a clunky interface, never retains my preferred sort scheme (alphabetical as opposed to by date added), and insists on every blog having a title typed in. I know that they now have a Yahoo Toolbar with a button for adding pages, but I don’t want the Yahoo Toolbar. I don’t use Yahoo for enough to make it worth it. I also have trouble staying logged in. Even if I check the “leave me logged in for 2 weeks” box when I log in, I am constantly being asked to re-enter my password. Security, schmecurity, it’s annoying. Luckily, Yahoo Bookmarks has an easy export tool, so I was able to get everything transferred over – labels and all – in one swell foop.
Google makes my life easier. I worry that I’m becoming too dependent on it. People used to say that Microsoft, McDonald’s, or Disney would eventually rule the world. They were wrong. It’s Google. And will we submit willingly, one awesomely useful app at a time.
I agree with you 100%. Google already runs my life. Gmail and Google Reader FTW. I also use Google Contacts and Google Calendar for organization and sync them both with my phone.