Here's the things that Google does for me, besides serving search results, ads and YouTube videos:
Gmail + Gmail Calander + Contacts + Syncing
Recently I found myself switching a lot between my home desktop computer, my laptop and my computer at work, and on each, between Windows and Ubuntu. You know you're doing something wrong if you have to reboot into windows to access this or that email, or when you brought your laptop for holiday but have to copy your friend's email addresses from your phone's address list.So I switched to Gmail. This is the first time in my life I'm changing my email address, and I'm taking at least a year for the transition. I have a symbian phone (Nokia E71) and although it's crappy compared to the iPhones and Androids on Steroids it does support Google's sync. This allowed me to transfer my contacts and calander to Google and keep them synchronized from now on.
I set up POP-import so Gmail checks my old email account for me and places these mails in a seperate folder, to ease the transition. Next I transfered 13k mails from Outlook to Gmail. I did it the easy way:
1. Set up IMAP access in Google
2. Connect to the IMAP account from Outlook
3. Drag your email folders from local to Gmail (you might have to play a little bit first with folder names and labeling depening on your demands)
4. Wait (> overnight in my case :-D)
So now I have my all my contacts, all my email and all my calander items on every computer that has internet access. And I can search them...fast! Without having to hear the heart-breaking sounds of my harddisk crunching away when indexes are being rebuilt.
Google Docs
It's not Office, it's not even OpenOffice. But as long as you have internet, it's there. I have a few documents / spreadsheets that I have to access from different places, such as technical notes on a system that I have to read and change on location. For this purpose, Google Docs has proven to be very useful to me.Blogger + Google Analytics
Having a Gmail account, setting up a blog at Blogger is quite easy. A well placed JavaScript script enables me to use Google Analytics to give me statistics. Google Analytics can do a lot more, by the way. It is a powerful tool for any webmaster.AppEngine
AppEngine is amazing. I have recently started to use it to built web applications. In Java (it also supports Python, which appears to actually be more popular). And they are fully scalable. I admit it hase quite a learning curve, partly because it doesn't use SQL but Google's Bigtable. But I think it's worth it, although I have to see how it holds when going live. It's free as long as you don't exceed your quota's. But unlike your regular php-mysql site hosted at randomcheaphost.com it can handle heavy traffic bursts very well (same holds true long term traffic increases by the way).Google Apps
I think the naming is confusing, Google AppEngine (appspot.com) vs Google Apps, but once you get the difference it's fine. Google Apps is Google-for-your-company (< 40 accounts is free, so personal use is deffinately an ooption). Google tools such as Docs and Gmail are accessed / addressed with name@yourdomain.com and different tools can be added (or blocked). You can also link an exsiting URL to Google Apps, although you have to change DNS records for that.If you want to link your own URL to your AppEngine application, you can not go around Google Apps. That's how I use it at the moment, but it won't be long before I will be reading email sent to name@mycompany.nl via Gmail.
There's a lot more that Google offers, but at the moment I don't need it.
Maybe later.
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