Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Google vs the world

I have gone google. I have switched to blogger beta, Gmail and Picasa photo album. I think they are great and much better than the previous services I was using. Now I will tell you why.

Flickr vs Picasa. I thought flickr was great. I still do and will continue to put my recent photos there. However on Picasa I have soooooo much free storage space - its great. I have all my old photos that have long dropped off my limit on Flickr. My trip to Lapland and Kate and Martin's wedding. You can find them all here. I know I could just pay for a Flickr pro account but I am tight and don't want to! The only problem with both is there is no upload tool for Linux (which is what I am using in Cameroon). However Picasa are developing one so they win! I can also load photos in to Picasa then use them in my blog. Two birds with one stone.

Hotmail vs Gmail. Gmail is great. So much storage space. It automatically threads messages. This is great as people have a whole conversation by email then I have to spend ages opening and reading the messages one by one. Now I just open one message and read the whole conversation. I can star messages which I use to remind me who I have to reply too. It saves sent messages which Hotmail did not and caused me bother.

Blogger vs blogger beta. It is much easier to edit your page settings. Add pretty things like a map of Cameroon. Spell checking works better, I think (which is handy as I use it a lot!). I prefer the way my history is displayed. The only problem is I cannot comment on non-beta blogs. They are working on this. I have to comment as 'other'.

Well this post is a bit geeky really. But I thought I would share my new love of google with you.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

There is plenty more Google goodness than that! Check out the calendar, personalised desktop, RSS reader and google maps to name just a few.

Ann said...

I'm glad to hear what you have to say about Blogger Beta. All of this stuff is so new to me that any insights I receive from others are very welcome! Richard, got anything else to share? Joseph?

Anonymous said...

I have privacy concerns with Google. They're indexing a lot of your stuff. Hev said that Picassa automatically finds images on your machine to upload.

This suggests to me that Google's indexing your machine (or at least that your enabling it to do so by installing the image uploader client.)

I can't be bothered to read all the terms of use smallprint to find out what the exact situation is, so I may be wrong. The problem is *no one* can be bothered to read all the terms of use smallprint, which might turn out to be a big mistake...

Josh and Heather said...

My favourite Google application would be Jo's worst nightmare. Google Desktop. Be careful not to install the Google 'toolbar of info' and simply install a small Desktop searcher Window. It will index your entire computer and allow you to search your whole computer for files, pdfs or anything by simply typing in key words in the document or title. In seconds! It's revolutionised the way I now never say, 'where did I put that file 6 months ago...'.

Anonymous said...

What you want is a Mac Josh. In newer versions of the OS you can search your machine with Spotlight in just that manner. Haven't got it myself, but everyone seems dead impressed with it, for exactly the reasons you state.