Mmmm Google.
There was a time before Google, in case any of you were ever wondering. My first encounter with Google’s search engine was around the year 2000 when my friend told me about it. At the time I was searching the internet via some crazy search engine called spider or something. I can’t even remember what it was for sure, thats how it relates to Google’s search engine even back then when there were approximately 10 websites on the internet..just kidding about the amount of sites.
Anyways, years past and I really never stopped using Google as my search engine. Then came Gmail. Ohh man, that was sweet. Before that was obviously hotmail, yes I used it and I will always regret that fact. The gmail transition was phenomenal. The features that gmail has are amazing and they are just getting better. Chat, Threaded Discussions, easy reply, contacts everything about it I like. I use gmail for all of my mail from at work, at home whatever, I just have them all dump into a single account and use the advanced filtering and searching to find anything I need. Some people use multiple gmail accounts to manage all that stuff. I find that to be too difficult so I just use the one.
Now, on top of gmail there are Calendars, Docs, Picasa(Awesome photo organizer, Web Albums, personal home page and my personal favorite Maps. All of these use the same login that gmail uses and all the services are just packed with features that are easy to use and very handy. What I really enjoy about Google is there openness about everything. They have and API for just about anything you can imagine(An API is just a way for people to make their own programs that use google stuff to do cool stuff. People do all sorts of crazy things with it like this http://lifehacker.com/software/google-maps/play-risk-with-google-maps-135951.php).
In the good words of my Esteemed College Billabeen Hosbein
“I welcome our new overloards”
You might as well start using their services if you are not already, I’ve got plenty of gmail invites to go around if you don’t feel like signing up via their site
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount