Happy Birthday Google

For those that don't know, Google just turned 10 this week. Still pretty young, especially compared to the other kid on the block . . .



Microsoft seems to be getting older by the day (I know we all do, but some of us age better than others, Seinfeld humour being of the 'other' variety). As much as I'd like to comment on the commercial, I'll focus on the birthday boy and mention a few of their more useful services, many of which are competing directly with the 800 pound gorilla mentioned above.

Gmail

Gmail, can't effuse enough about this one. I don't bother with Outlook anymore. I prefer web based email regardless since it allows me to check it from anywhere and reduces my risk of contracting a virus. Add to that a far better search function, the ability to send emails from different addresses, huge storage space, and the best spam filter I've seen.

Gmail also marked the first time Google took a run at Microsoft. Though it seems ages ago now, it used to be that you'd expect to pay $5 a month for a decent email account through Yahoo, Hotmail, or other providers if you wanted more than 5 megabytes of storage. Google came from nowhere and offered up to a gigabyte for nothing. I currently have a limit of 7 gigs and it increases every second. They changed the way we think about web based email for the better.

Google Calendar

Another free application, google calendar has the advantage over a number of other calendars in being very shareable as well as slick. It's very easy to set up five to ten cascading calendars so that your class schedule is in one, meetings in another, and personal dates in one more, so that one can be shared with certain people and others kept private. Also, it's very simple to embed the calendar into web pages and export the content for other applications if needed.

Adwords and Adsense

Two halves of the same product, adwords and adsense are what generates most of google's revenue. Adwords is a program that allows you to advertise your business to web users through the sponsored links you'll find in most of Google's services as well as sprinkled liberally through the internet. Adsense allows owners of websites or blogs to make money by publishing those same ads on their sites. I'll be adding a new post shortly about adwords since to me, it's something that I think all business owners should be aware of, so I'll leave it at that but encourage you to check it out.