http://iain.codejoust.com Iain's thoughts, ideas, interests from CodeJoust Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:05:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 http://iain.codejoust.com/2009/03/google/ http://iain.codejoust.com/2009/03/google/#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:16:00 +0000 admin tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794691018199660376.post-6152191377758113012 Google,
What a name it is today.
They started out small as a search company and grew… and grew… and grew…, The rest is history
Recently, they have branched out from their internet search business and added some new tools. I will outline some of these tools, their benefits, and why to use then versus other tools.
The first is Gmail.
Gmail is the best webmail client in my opinion, It allows for you to access your mail using another client (outlook, thunderbird) or online, I’ve never received ONE piece of spam using it, and it has chat to put the cherry on top.
In comparison, Yahoo! mail only allows you to access it in your browser and their interface is rather slow and clunky compared to Gmail’s lightweight and fast webmail client.
Another service is Picasa Web albums, it is a great, simple, and fast service to share photos, you do not need Picasa to use it, but having Picasa is great also. It is a simple, quick, free and efficient photo organizer.
Finally, They also have Google Reader, a browser based RSS (news feed) reader.
For this, I prefer to use My Yahoo for its superior content, but google is quickly catching up with iGoogle.
Oh, and I nearly forgot about Google Docs, an online based office alternative.
It is great for lightweight and free document work, although I do not wish to trust it with all my stuff, preferring to use Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.
I like to use it for quick email editing, web publishing (the code it exports is clean and simple) along with group document sharing. I think there are better alternatives to it though, but like most of Google’s offerings, its easy, quick, and simple. (not to mention integrated with Gmail.)
They also made a good decision allowing for one google sign in to be used everywhere.
This makes it easy and fast to sign into many services, while not sharing it with other companies (I think that was one of Microsoft’s Paramount mistakes with windows live id)
Oh, and I forgot to mention blogger, but I’ll save that for a later date.
P.S., Chrome looks promising, but isn’t anywhere near a polished browser of Firefox.

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