Two Good and a Bad

I thought of writing on 3 Google tools I happened to use recently. I am not planning a techiezation of my blog, so all those people who love the non-technical nonsense I write (oh, I love that illusion, I still cant digest the fact that people don't like my blog), I will be back with some non-technical stuff soon ;)

Writely

Its been more than 3 months since I had read about Google taking over Writely. They had stopped the new sign ups, till their merger with Google is complete. However, those who had already registered before this, had an option to send invites to others to join. Somehow, I was getting restless to try out Writely, so googled a bit yesterday and found someone, who sent me an invite. So, here I am, writing this blog using Writely.

You must be wondering what exactly is Writely?

• Writely is an online word processing tool. (Well, why do I need that, I have MS Word, you might say! Hold on, I am not done yet)
• You can collaborate, so that multiple people can edit the document, providing visibility to everyone.
• You can publish the document, so that others can see it.
• It integrates with blog. Whatever is typed here can be published as a post to your blog easily.
• You can upload a word document from your machine and edit that in Writely. And you can export the documents edited here into RTF, Word, OpenOffice or HTML format.
• Lastly, and my favorite is, you can see the different revisions of the edited document.

Writely has many googlish features like auto saving of documents at regular intervals, use of AJAX, tags - and of course the obsession with 'beta'.

If you want an invite for Writely, leave a comment in this post, along with your mail id (I promise, this is not a trick to get more comments in my blog ;))

Google Pages

I always felt I was homeless in cyber-space and I knew for certain that I don't need a palace! All that changed when I opened this blog account. I could give my blog address wherever they asked for my web site. Still a blog is a blog is a blog, and not a web site. But, I had no plans of registering a domain name for myself. I am not at all a "happening" kind of person and I wont have interesting things to tell very regularly. Add my incurable laziness to that, having a web site is not at all feasible. Google Pages solved the clash between my "wants" and "needs".

Google Pages helps you build up your own web site, and you don't need to know HTML! It provides a space of 100 MB, and you can even upload files (a video footage you captured from your new mobile, or a speech by you which can motivate the generation Y or a PDF document you want the world to see etc)

If you are willing for a professional web site like having a blog in that, huge space, guestbook, look and feel of your choice etc etc, I dont think this is for you. But, if you are an uninteresting yet greedy soul like me, this is for you! Check out my new unfurnished cyber home.

Google Desktop Search

Last week, I had installed Google Desktop Search , or Google Desktop 4, as they prefer calling it. There was this biggest motivation for trying it. Windows XP has probably the most screwed up search feature, of all the Windows versions (The option "A word or a phrase" does not work most of the times. Not to mention the irritating dog that pops out to tell that no search results were found. Oh, I hate dogs!) The last time I had tried Google Desktop (I think it was version 2), indexing was hopeless. They claim that its better in this version, but I could not try it because of their most favorite feature - Google Gadgets (Is it not the same as plugins in older version?)

Want a clock on your desktop? How about a calendar, a WiFi indicator, a TV, or anything else you can dream up? This is what Google claims.

Tell me, how many times in a day would you look at the calendar? (You can always click on the system tray time icon to see the calendar)

Its okay to see a jazzy clock for the first time, but it gets annoying after sometime. Do you really prefer knowing the time from a heart shaped clock? (For all those die hard romantics, Valentines Day is still far away, use Windows system tray clock instead)

There are so many other gadgets which are very primitive like winamp plugin, RSS reader etc. And there are some useless plugins like Weather forecast, chinese checkers, latest news, Word of the day etc.

As far as I am concerned, a good software or tool (and even persons ;)) should make it difficult for me without them. But, it did not take even 2 seconds for me to decide that I am uninstalling Desktop Search from my machine. For once, even Google showed that they are mortal!