A Week Without Google. The Google Operating System weblog (which is an excellent and highly useful blog and the link takes you to it) is taking a week off. It's asking the question - if Google took a week off, how would you cope?
The obvious problem would be to lose access to the search engine. However, that's not actually a very big deal since there are plenty of others out there and it's easy to switch to something like Exalead for example. So, no problem there. I would however lose access to my saved RSS searches that appear on Pageflakes, and I wouldn't get my daily email search results sent to me, which would be a nuisance. However, it wouldn't take too long to reproduce these over at Live, Technorati, IceRocket or any of several others.
I wouldn't be able to access my Gmail account(s) (I have, at last count 5 different ones) and that would be a bit painful. However, my main contact email point which is on my website feeds through to my primary email address, which is not Gmail, just mirrored there, so that wouldn't be an issue.
Wouldn't have access to things like YouTube. No problem since I use Trooker to pull video content in for me. Couldn't use the RSS reader, but I prefer Bloglines, so that's not going to be a pain either.
Couldn't access my Google documents and presentations. No particular problem there since I keep copies of all my documents on my hard drive and presentations on Slideshare so once again that wouldn't be a disaster.
No Google maps or Google local. That would be an irritant, but I'd shift to multimap or one of the others.
No iGoogle. No problem - I use Pageflakes with Netvibes as a backup. Chat? I use MSN Messenger and Plugoo to talk to people, so not a problem with that either.
All in all then, I don't think I'd miss it that much. How about you?
The obvious problem would be to lose access to the search engine. However, that's not actually a very big deal since there are plenty of others out there and it's easy to switch to something like Exalead for example. So, no problem there. I would however lose access to my saved RSS searches that appear on Pageflakes, and I wouldn't get my daily email search results sent to me, which would be a nuisance. However, it wouldn't take too long to reproduce these over at Live, Technorati, IceRocket or any of several others.
I wouldn't be able to access my Gmail account(s) (I have, at last count 5 different ones) and that would be a bit painful. However, my main contact email point which is on my website feeds through to my primary email address, which is not Gmail, just mirrored there, so that wouldn't be an issue.
Wouldn't have access to things like YouTube. No problem since I use Trooker to pull video content in for me. Couldn't use the RSS reader, but I prefer Bloglines, so that's not going to be a pain either.
Couldn't access my Google documents and presentations. No particular problem there since I keep copies of all my documents on my hard drive and presentations on Slideshare so once again that wouldn't be a disaster.
No Google maps or Google local. That would be an irritant, but I'd shift to multimap or one of the others.
No iGoogle. No problem - I use Pageflakes with Netvibes as a backup. Chat? I use MSN Messenger and Plugoo to talk to people, so not a problem with that either.
All in all then, I don't think I'd miss it that much. How about you?
There are other online office options that you could use while google is away for a week. Such as Peepel :)
Thanks steve
Posted by: stephen kelly | August 05, 2008 at 09:38 AM
I think my answer to this a year or two years ago would have very different to my answer now (being almost the right side of my librarianship masters is a big help!) but there are so many good alternatives now, from search engines to applications. That said, I have come to really appreciate all the extras that Google does now, including the Calendar and Picasa. I think branching but out really works for Google. I don't think I've reached a firm conclusion there! I would miss it but I'd cope. (I also suspect there are ways it's used that aren't immediately obvious such as providing the search capabilities of individual websites).
Posted by: Sarah Hammond | August 06, 2008 at 03:22 PM
Further to my comments of earlier, it looks like some people have to go without Google, whether they like it or not
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you/
Posted by: Sarah Hammond | August 06, 2008 at 06:08 PM