Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Kari to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Kari’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most is raising the right issues on underlying market trends as well as purely technical considerations. Kari, the floor is yours…  

I’ve been putting off writing about Google, because, well, it‘s omnipresent. Everyone uses it. Everyone knows it. And it knows everyone. Anyway, I feel a strong need to pay tribute to this force. For a while, I was staying away from using Google’s services, but about couple of months ago I decided to just say “Eh, fuck it” and embrace all the things Google could help me manage my Internet journeys better.

It was Google Apps for Your Domain that finally lured me in. I had registered a domain name about a year ago for a simple reason, as a joke to my friend. He’s running a forum on a certain domain name and I bought a domain name, which was a bit of an imitation. I’m not going to name it, because it’s just a small forum for friends of his and it’s in Finnish, but let’s just say that if his site was called moghul.tld, then my site would be called caliph.tld. Sooo…. long story short, the joke was funny for a while, especially when the only function of my domain was that I forwarded it to his site – which caused funny Google-anomalies, like my “site” being more highly ranked than his. I also used the domain to have a classier dynamic DNS-name for my laptop for the rare occasions I’d need to ssh to it, let someone ftp some stuff out or I’d need to demonstrate some crappy RoR-project.

But then came GAYD(ar?), or Google Apps as it’s know called. Until now, I had stayed even away from Gmail as I was happy with having my e-mail hosted by a friend - it was IMAP and I got SquirrelMail for web interface and, well, I probably had more than 2 GB allocated for me anyway. But, I had a domain and I wanted to take a look at GAYD Beta, because all new and shiny just happens to interest me. But seriously, every private domain owner should consider off-loading some of their services to either Google Apps or Live Domains. It just makes your life easier, for free.

And now I have taken Google Apps to full use. Homepages, Mail, Docs, GTalk/Jabber, … I got it. The difficult part was to find a free, reliable DNS-hosting that supported SRV-records so I could get my GTalk work with rest of the world (Hint: Editdns.net). I have to say that the package is amazing. Google Talk and the whole Jabber movement is slowly gaining momentum, but is still far from critical mass. Google Talk is a good example where Google didn’t go and invent its own but rather sponsored an existing high potential open solution, giving it a major push at the same time. The other thing that I find really great is localization. As a Finn, I’ve grown not to find even the most popular services in Finnish, while pretty much everything is always available at least in French, German and sometimes even in Swedish.

Now, I use Google Reader for my RSS-feeds… daily (okay, hourly). I use Google Toolbar at work daily, because it’s the only way of having a sane web experience with IE6. I’ve used Google Docs to write to this blog for a while now (I mean, I can copy and paste and it keeps all formatting and hyperlinks! How cool is that? Only downside is that it doesn’t work properly with Safari and you also need to break intergalactical laws to use it with Safari…). I use Google Earth and Maps at least monthly. And sometimes I even use Groups.

I put the new Google Analytics for test drive. The amount of data you can gather is amazing. I had previously used Google’s Webmaster Tools to monitor simple stats how Google indexes my site.

I just found out about Google Notebook and I’m not yet sure how I could benefit from Google Calendar. I used to have a blog on Blogger in 2002, but I’m not going back. Picasa? I prefer Flickr. (Yes, Yahoo!, you too finally got me to get an account. I do admire some of your stuff.)

But what about privacy? Am I not afraid of Google spying on me? Well, in short, yes. But did I have that privacy before? I think I can trust Google better than my previous providers. Nick Carr (or someone else? Ironically enough, Google Reader doesn’t have search) had a good post about that a while ago …okay, I’m beginning to see the need for Google Notebook, but then again, I use del.icio.us. I can’t find the link anymore. And no, I’m not interested in Google’s Web History…

In summary, the portfolio of tools Google offers is amazing. The best part of them is that you can pick and choose as each is a self-standing service and interoperable with other apps. Anyway, if you’re interested, I can do a more in-depth review of any of the services above.

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