Just Google It

Well, it looks like Google’s got me. Up until this week, I’ve never used Google for more anything other than a search engine. For my NMDL class, I investigated Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Earth, Google Groups, Google Calendar and Google Reader. I’m impressed. They all are very practical tools and FREE. I don’t believe Microsoft offers anything for free.

Since I’m new to Google, and apparently behind in the times, I have to rave about Gmail. I just signed up for a Gmail account. I got the feeling from my professor, Derek Mehraban, that email addresses are trendy and that Gmail is currently the hottest one. The last email I signed up for was Yahoo in 1999, when I was a sophomore in high school. I think I’m going to like Gmail better. There are a lot of shortcuts like Quick Contacts, Keyboard Shortcuts and Gmail Search to make navigation easy. Another cool thing is Conversation View.

Conversation view is when Gmail groups related messages to create conversations. So when you open a message in a conversation, all of your messages will be stacked on top of each other, allowing you to quickly retrieve related messages and view all your messages in context. But, the thing I liked the best was Google Docs.

 

 

This technology allows you to set up a link for a document and then invite people to visit and review. This way you can gather all the comments on a document at once. Being in Marketing, I send out a lot of documents for review and approval. This could make my job so much easier. I can’t tell you how much time I spend retrieving and compiling comments from others.

 

I’m officially a Google fan.

 

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