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Google's New Toys

You can tell its mid-spring. Robins are tending their nests, dogwoods have finished their show and Jazz is starting up at Ecton Park. But on the web, you have Google Press Day, with its surge of updates and new gizmos from Mountain View. While most of us know (remember?) Google as a Search company, they are also a prolific R&D organization, thanks to tremendous technology infrastructure, huge quantities of data, and a policy encouraging engineers to spend 20% of their time on inventing. So, here is a grab bag of new offerings or updates from Google this spring.

Google Finance
http://finance.google.com  

Google Trends is the first graphical zeitgeist tool I’d consider addictive.

It would be easy to yawn at another finance portal, but not this one. Google finance, dreamed up in Bangalore, India, is just much more enjoyable to use than Yahoo! and the others. Normal company searching and interactive, stackable charts are expectedly excellent, but true Google power kicks in as company charts are shown cross-referenced to 4500 news and blogs. Yes, blogs.

Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends

Google Trends is the first graphical zeitgeist tool I’d consider addictive. The line charts show the world’s curiosity evolving through time using the lens of search volume. Numeric call-outs offer correlated headlines from that time period to perhaps explain spikes. You can superimpose multiple trends like in Google Finance, but this time using search volume data – a great teaching tool about society’s shifting attention as it relates to media.

Google Notebook
www.google.com/notebook

This is like a shopping cart for browsing the web. It’s nowhere near the first snippet saving utility, but Google’s implementation is non-invasive and fast. It’s now on my indispensable tools list, replacing Furl. It resides unobtrusively in lower corner of your browser tray as a plug-in (rather than a pop-up or separate browser window.) When you see something to save, simply click the icon and select-to-save. Like Furl, I find it priceless when researching the web quickly in “surf-mode” and then use your notebook when ready to assemble thoughts.

Google Reader
www.google.com/reader

This has been out for a while without getting much attention. A perfectly decent lightweight personal web-based news reader it never really offered as much as other tools on the market. But new upgrades have given it a boost.

Multiple feeds grouped on your reader can now be forwarded to your Google personalized home page as a single list, like a summary. This is a great way to organize the clutter on your Google home page. More importantly, it available for mobile devices and this is terrific. The sparse, well organized setup is perfect for displaying RSS and Atom feeds on small devices. .

Google Calendar is like the springtime introduction of a great new sports car. It looks wonderful and the interior is sweet, but only the four cylinder automatic version is ready.

Google Calendar
www.google.com/calendar

Google Calendar is a nicely designed web based calendar using the latest in drag-and-droppable web technology. Public enthusiasm for this “Beta” is very strong, but lots of folks are playing wait and see. Its event calendar publishing functions are going to fill a major vacuum on the web.

One big time saver is that Google scans your Gmail for dates in messages. So when your Woodsongs show notification arrives in Gmail, you click “add event” It doesn’t have to specifically be a “meeting invitation” like it would in Outlook.

Adding an event can be done with natural language so rather than filling a form, you can type “Planning meeting June 14th 8 am” in the new event field and Google will handle insertion.

Shared calendars are color coded and superimposed with your main calendar – no flipping. Team members’ calendars, for example, can be viewed or hidden without refreshing the screen. Meeting invitations are fluidly transferred like most good workgroup software I’ve seen. One big problem is that email and SMS notifications cannot be sent from anything except your “main” calendar – I’m pretty sure this will get fixed soon. In addition, synchronization to PDAs is difficult at best right now.

Event Publisher features with enable companies, schools (please!) and other organizations to publish schedules to calendar subscribers. If you subscribe to a public calendar, items will be superimposed over your personal calendar if you wish. Nice for juggling work and home life.

Despite all of this, Google Calendar is like the springtime introduction of a great new sports car. It looks wonderful and the interior is sweet, but only the four cylinder automatic version is ready. We have to wait until fall for the V8 and Stick Shift model.

Perhaps one of these will save time or enhance your productivity. But every single one of these tools exists to expand Google’s advertising properties. I still think these things are terrific even with the ads (they haven’t dampened the usefulness of Gmail one bit in my opinion.) Just keep that in mind…and if the ads bother you, remember… “there is no such thing as a free launch.”

©Scott Clark - Originally Appeared on Business Lexington Magazine
http://www.bizlex.com - Please subscribe to this terrific magazine.

 

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