Tonya and PQBON's WebLog
OK, I'll admit I was late to the Google search game. It was the in search engine when I was still using yahoo. Actually, for a long time I was a yahoo boy. I was a my-yahoo beta tester some time around 1995. I had a yahoo email account as soon as they offered it. I preferred Friendster to Orkut and I've been using flickr for over a year (although since getting married I just haven't had time to take and process many pictures nor had a good computer to do it on!). However, recently Google has introduced things that have done a great job speaking to me. Google maps has always been cool. Things like the combined satellite view has always put it to the head of my list. But recently Google labs has released some great tools.
I've been using the google tool bar for Firefox for a while now. It has many great features, including a good spell checker! But it has some cool features that I use but less often (I suck as spelling!) like malware site warnings, extra info on sites (cache copy, similar pages, links to the page), active page data mining (phone numbers, addresses, etc.). My biggest complaint is the fact that it doesn't play nice with the built in search abilities of firefox. I would rather it work with it rather then replace it awkwardly. Rating: XXX (the feature I use most is just an incidental feature)
Speaking of Firefox - I've been using Google firefox browser sync. I now have my desktop at Microsoft, my Intel laptop and my home laptop syncing some of the browser configuration. I had problems with installing it on one computer. I had to delete my entire browser profile and start over, but lucky for me, that browser config was copied from a different computer (that may have been the problem). Now, all three computers have consistent bookmarks, and cookies. I've chosen not to sync history since I'm not sure I want my work system to log my personal web browsing on my work computer, nor do I want my work histories at home where someone could use them to map intranets that I have access to. Rating: XXXX
I have fought and resisted RSS for years now. Yes, I know everyone is doing it. I know every site has an RSS feed these days, even sites that don't need them. However, I have been unable to find one that really met my needs. I tried Flock, I tried aggreg8, Pluck, and a bunch of others that didn't work for me. I've finally found google reader. It allows me to use n (where n is currently about 3) computers and still not reread things I've seen before. It also allows me to filter if I want to. I'm at the point where I use it for every site other then Fark. The problem with fark is that the RSS feed still requires you to go to the fark item to open the external link. This makes reading fark with an RSS reader useless in my book. Google reader is much like an Apple application. It does what it does well, but don't try to customize it because you can't. However, there are some interesting features. Google reader re-syndicates your RSS as an aggregator. It lets you tag your threads and filter on tags so you can read specific site groups. There aren't too many other features. However, the golden feature for me is a global read unread list. Rating: XXX
Over all Google is doing a good job in inserting itself into my life. Hopefully they will continue to promote applications from the lab to full supported permanent apps. Their firefox extensions are usefull and so far well written and stable. Hopefully they will continue to provide more.
Posted by pqbon at June 10, 2006 11:51 PM