Web in Focus

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Sum­mary:

How to be overly depen­dent on Google’s prod­ucts and ser­vices.

Episode Top­ics:

Google Apps (domain hosted):

• Gmail (hosted at your domain, like john@​example.​com — not john@​gmail.​com)
• Con­tacts (a fea­ture of Gmail)
• Tasks (a fea­ture of Gmail Labs)
• Google Talk (text, voice and video — works with AIM)
• Google Cal­en­dar (shar­ing, con­tacts, meet­ings, iPhone)
• Google Docs
  • doc­u­ments (some down­falls but great for shar­ing info in real-​​time, collaborate)
  • spread­sheets (some lim­i­ta­tions but decent for basic functions)
  • presentations
  • forms (cre­ate sur­veys, dis­trib­ute on web or email and auto­mat­i­cally col­lect data in spreadsheet)

Google Gears is not a prod­uct — per se. It is more of an add-​​on that enables local stor­age of your web appli­ca­tion data for work­ing offline. It enables con­tin­ual access to email and cal­en­dar data, even if you are flying!

Web­site Tools:

• Google Check­out (alter­na­tive: Pay­Pal, mer­chant accounts not needed)
• Blog­ger (alter­na­tive: Word­Press)
• YouTube (enables easy embed­ding of video into your website)
• Google Maps (enables easy embed­ding of maps into your website)
• Google Ana­lyt­ics (eas­ily imple­mented, necessary)

Google Adwords (adver­tise on Google searches, designed to work with Analytics)

Find­ing Tools:

• Google Reader (alter­na­tive: News­Ga­tor)
• Google News (#4 in May 30, 2009 Hit­wise report)
• Google Alerts

Google Wave (con­tin­u­ing to push the way we think about communication)

Didn’t even men­tion non-​​Google services:

• Ama­zon Web Services
• Yahoo’s Flickr
• Twit­ter (for real-​​time search) — challenging Google in real­time search
• Face­book (another effec­tive adver­tis­ing platform)