After Midnight by moe. w/ John Medeski, Trey Anastasio, Sam Bush, and Jennifer Hartswick
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/moe2005-02-10.DPA4021s-splt.v3.flac16/moe2005-02-10d3t06_64kb.mp3]
Follow up to Don’t Be Evil
So for about a week now I’ve been using Gmail for all of my email (5 addresses, one place to get em all), Google Reader for my RSS feeds (34 of them), Google Calendar for events (there isn’t much happening, so there is very little there), and Google’s startpage as one stop for all of that. Google has some other nifty services, but either I already used them or I don’t need them (like Google Earth and Maps, which I’ve used since they came out).
As a startpage, Google works pretty well. I’ve got semi useful widgets and links to places I want to go. One cool little thing they’ve added is page themes, which actually change with the time of day. I like that.
Gmail is incredible. I don’t know what more I can say about it. That’s untrue: I recieve email from 5 different email addresses (three of which Google checks and recieves via POP3, the other two are fowarded), automatically sort them with filters, and can search through them easily. I can also send email from each one of those email addresses, including my uconn address. And all this is available to me anywhere with an internet connection. I only wish I had done this earlier.
Reader is another story. Google Reader needs more work before I can sing its praises. It does adequately replace Sage (the firefox extention I had previously used to view RSS feeds), lets me organize feeds into folders and allows me to read more posts quicker than before. But it is in sore need of some features. I’d like to see a search, so I could find specific things in my feeds quickly. Maybe even a smart folder feature (a la OSX).
But my main complaint about Reader is one that I’ve already complained about before. I feel even more distant from the sites I’m reading. Even more so than when I was using Sage. As a result I read my feeds less. I don’t know what Google could do to help this, or if there is anything they can do. But that doesn’t make it any less of an issue.
Google Calendar seems nice, but I haven’t had too much of an opportunity to play with it, being summer and all. It will be tested more in the fall.
As for the other services Google offers, they mostly don’t do anything for me. I don’t use blogger because I’ve got a blog that I can hack here, I don’t much like Picasa (viva Flickr!), and although SketchUp is fun, I have no use for it.
I’ll make new posts concerning this as things change.
I’ve also tussled a little bit with the Google Apps Suite. Since that is a bit more niche, you’ll have to check the extended to read about that.
Google Apps Suite (I don’t know if they call it that, but I will) is this cool little service that lets you center Google Mail, Calendar, Documents, and Startpage around a domain name. If you already own a domain name, you can just configure it to point to the DNS servers Google will give you when you sign up, or you can register a new name through them ($10 for a privately registered domain name is pretty good). For my test, I registered somjuan.org with them. The intent was that this would provide the framework for a bit of interaction by people who frequent the site (idea obviously from zefrank.org, but with a Google backbone).
While some of that is possible, much of what I was hoping would happen didn’t. It could be because I’m using their free service (there are small business, enterprise, education, and ISP editions, all with a few more features but cost money), but I was a little let down.
I can make up to 200 users, who can access email (a @somjuan.org address), share documents with other users, share calendar information, and make their own startpage. That is kind of cool, but there is one fundamental problem with it. This gives me NOTHING that people couldn’t do on their own. Using Google’s services, I could find any friend with a google account, and share my documents and calendar. And anyone with a Google account can already make their own startpage. The only thing that makes the Google Apps Suite special is that they would log in to the services on somjuan.org with another username (which in my opinion, is a disadvantage).
The multiple username thing is my biggest turnoff from this suite. I’ve already got a Google account, I really don’t want another one to access the same services. I understand that there is a difference (the domain name) but that doesn’t really matter to me. I would like Google to let users merge accounts (not only Google Apps accounts with normal accounts, but multiple Google accounts as well). The second thing that turned me off is that the Apps offer me GooglePages so I, the admin, could make static pages on the site, but users cannot. So that makes this account even worse than a normal Google account.
They are constantly adding and updating services, so perhaps it will get better, but for now, it isn’t a great solution.
And if anyone does want a somjuan.org account, just email me or post a comment. It might be worth it for the email. Maybe not. (I’ve currently got my somjuan.org email fowarding to my normal gmail account)
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