5 Useful Google Apps aka 5 Reasons Why Google Controls My Life
Google is more than a search engine. It’s true that they are known for having the best and most popular search engine but Google is a big company that hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products. In this article I’ll show you 5 great Google online applications and you’ll understand why I’m saying that Google now controls my life.
Bookmarks
A bookmark, also called favorite, is a saved link to a Web page. Most of modern browsers supports the creation of bookmarks. The list of bookmarks is saved internally by your browser, allowing you to quickly get back to a Web page later. The problem is when you use more than one computer (for example one computer at home and another at your company) and you have bookmarks on each of them. Keeping all bookmarks always synchronized is not an easy task. For this problem, Google has the perfect solution: why you should store your bookmarks locally on you browser, if you can store them online?
With Google Bookmarks, you can save your bookmarks and navigate to them in seconds. Unlike browser bookmarks that are stored on a single computer, Google bookmarks are stored online, in your Google Account. This means you can access them from any computer with an Internet connection.
Calendar
Nowadays, people use technology to make their lives easier. One of the most common examples is keeping a digital Agenda of future events. Your mother’s birthday, your wedding anniversary, an important meeting, etc are always stored in the Agenda. Also, most of these applications allow you to set up a reminder (like an email) a few days before the event.
With Google Calendar, it’s easy to keep track of life’s important events all in one place. It allows you to share your schedule in order to let your co-workers, family and friends see your calendar and view schedules that others have shared with you.
By using Google Calendar you will never forget another event again, because it allows you to set up custom reminders. You can choose to be notified by email or get a text message sent to your mobile phone.
Docs
Digital documents are now part of our lives. Whether at school or at work, somehow we are forced to deal with text documents, presentations or spreadsheets. Could there be an online program that allows you to create or edit these types of documents and store them online, for free? The answer is: Yes! Its name is Google Docs.
Google docs allows users to create and edit text documents, spreadsheets and presentations online. The documents can be imported through the web interface, or sent via email. It allows you to save your documents to a local computer in a variety of formats including: (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Microsoft Office). It also automatically saves your documents to Google’s servers to prevent data loss, and a revision history is automatically kept.
Gmail
Gmail is an email service provided by Google. Currently, it provides more than 7 GB of free storage. It allows you to send messages up to 25 MB, including attachments, which is larger than many other mail services support.
It has a effective and powerful spam filtering system. When any user marks an email as spam, this provides information to help the system identify similar future messages for all users. In fact, in more than five years of using Gmail, I’ve seen fewer spam messages in my inbox, compared to other email providers. Gmail also offers virus filtering by preventing you from sending an executable file as an attachment.
Gmail also allows you to organize your email messages by using labels. Labels are similar to folders, but also allows you to add more than one to a single message. By giving colored labels to important emails, you’ll be able to view your inbox and quickly find your stuff.
Reader
A web feed (or simply feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. This is a very convenient way of staying up to date with the content of a large number of sites. When you subscribe to a feed, you don’t need to visit a website in order to read the last articles or news. Simply add the feed to a feed aggregator and you will be able to get the last updates.
Reader is a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines and blogs in a single location for easy viewing. It’s capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline.
Google Reader also offers “Play”. Play is a fast and fun way to browse interesting stuff on the web. It presents a slideshow interface which displays popular items one at a time. It allows you to like, share or star the items that are being displayed. With this information, Google will show you similar items the next time you visit Play.
So, do you understand now the reason why Google controls my life? All my email messages go to Gmail, I use the Calendar in order to organize important events of my day-to-day, all my bookmarks are stored in Google Bookmarks, my web feeds are stored in Reader, and I have a lot of important documents (specially text documents and spreadsheets) stored in Google Docs. All I had to do was to create a Google account, for free!
Bonus: Google+
Google+ is is a social networking service recently released by Google. Clearly is Google’s biggest attempt to rival the social network Facebook.
Google+ main features are:
Circles, which enables users to organize contacts into groups. Organization is done through a drag-and-drop interface. This system replaces the typical friends list function used by sites such as Facebook.
Hangouts, that are places used to allows group video chat (with a maximum of 10 people participating in a single Hangout at any point of time).
However, unlike Twitter and Facebook there is not yet an API that enables software developers to interact with Google+ by programming
