Thursday, October 28, 2004

Google Stuff

They have come out with Gmail, Google Desktop and are rumoured to be coming out with a browser.

They also have some sort of partnership with Picasa that lets you view photos but also lets you post photos onto your blogger/blogspot account. I also find linking to pages cached in Google as a nice way of ensuring a questionable link/page doesn’t disappear.

Google worship can be bad; worship of anything can be bad. While I can’t find the exact quote I seem to remember Linus Torvalds saying something like “the worship of anything can cultivate a closed mind”; very true very true.

And then there is the ever present Privacy Issue. Valid yes, but he seems to gloss over the fact that at least for the Google desktop, web/anonymous information options can be turned off (perhaps he glossed over it because it wasn’t the core issue).

And lastly lets revisit all the applications made to work with google stuff like the gmail pop access stuff. I finally gave them a try, the only one I really liked was the FreePops program. I tried it, worked quite nicely... until gmail started sending me warning emails saying my account would locked for 24hrs. Yikes! Well, needless to say I stopped pretty quickly but my account hasn’t been locked that I know of (I was logged in and haven’t logged out yet, that was yesterday). So kiddies, lesson learned (crap), the interesting news is that lesson wasn’t totally learned, this program also works for a ton of other freemail accounts like yahoo mail, tried it there, worked like a charm!