Thursday, August 09, 2007

Google Reader and other good tools

There's a reason why Google is awesome. Every time I think of a feature that one of their tools needs, shazam, there it is just a few weeks later.

I really like Google Reader. I was reading about 20 blogs regularly, and it was hard to keep up. I can't believe I wanted so long to use a reader/aggregator. I just wish more sites would feed their entire post. Some only feed summaries or even just headlines. But still, it's a great tool for reading many blogs. It's even better when people include a few photos in their blog. Those are like a nice little surprise in the blog reader!

Google Mail (Gmail) is a great mailer. It's free, there's a ton of disk space (more than 2 GB, the spam filters are great, forwarding, etc. etc.

I'm experimenting with Google Groups for our cub scouts. I think it's going to work nicely. I've also starting using Google Calendar - you can share your calendar with others, so my wife and I can post appointments and view each other's calendars.

Don't even get me started on Google Maps. This (mapping on the internet) is clearly one of the most useful tools of the internet age. One of the features that I wanted has been implemented - you can actually change the route between two points. Google Maps determines the route for the two points that you enter, but suppose I want to avoid a certain road. Now you can just drag the route to another road, and you can add multiple destinations.

I'm also using Google documents to share spreadsheets and docs. Works fine although it hasn't been that useful so far.

- schneid

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I heart Google, too! For years their advance search page has been my browser home page at home and at work.

One thing I could never figure out, though, is why they don't have a clear form button (and I poked around their support area to ask them, and it was next to impossible to e-mail a real person at Google). Maybe they don't spend time programming something that is essentially a tool for lazy folks like me, but you'd think a media powerhouse like Google would have figured out something easy like that.

Speaking of technology, do you like any of the bookmark storing/sharing services out there? I've experimented with del.i.cio.us but what I really want is one interface where I can store all my bookmarks in folders and subfolders, just like in my Firefox browser, and also be able to access it from anywhere and have some of the neat tools like displaying most frequently used bookmarks. (I don't like how the del.i.cio.us interface looks--it's a little cluttery.) I've been meaning to poke around the Firefox add-ons site to see if anything like this exists.
--Mika

schneid said...

I think Google has a widget for bookmarks, and I guess I would use that with iGoogle. I had a list like that years ago on Yahoo, but it's just so easy to find everything now that I don't feel compelled to have one master bookmark list.

- schneid