Solidify The Empire.

Check me out. I'm using Google Docs and Spreadsheets to write a blog post. Integration of services much?

This may come perilously close to a post all about how I love Google so much, but I'll try to keep it in perspective. There are so many services out there under the Google name its almost overwhelming. Let me see how many I can name off the top of my head.

gmail
docs and spreadsheets
picasa with picasa web
desktop
domain services
pages
video

Whew, that's quite a few here are the ones I missed that I also have access to:

google/ig
analytics
maps
base
checkout
notebook
calendar (duh)
blogger
browser sync
co-op
personalized search
reader
talk
webmaster tools

Alright, I'll stop listing things off. But those are all user services, like you log-in and have an account. There are still plenty of general services like sets, trends, and scholar. And those are just the ones I know about, there must me a bunch of super-secret ones lurking in the shadows.

I've come to the revelation that I like all this stuff because I'm willing to spend the time to figure it out. I enjoy using them because I do use them. I was trying to use YouTube last night and had a less than superior time with it. Yes, I mean actually uploading videos; contrary to my previous declaration. Mind you, its not that I have an overwhelming desire to have content there, I just figured I'd see what the deal was. Personal edification, all that. I got it done and it didn't take me 10 hours or anything, but it didn't make sense. I don't know what a channel is and I kept going to the home page, which is different from the user page which is different from the videos page. It took 3 clicks to get back to uploading after I finished the previous one.

Now, I'm not saying that YouTube sucks. And I'm not saying I'm not smart enough to figure it out. I'm saying I don't want to spend enough time to do it. I don't want to have a 'channel' that holds my favorite videos (or whatever a channel does). I want a site to host my video and easily categorize them like Picasa does for my pictures.

So maybe its not that Google is so great, but that I'm willing to figure out all the different services and learn what is what. I bought tickets for Casino Royale yesterday, and I did three web searches (each time landing on a yahoo movies page ) before I went to my IG page and clicked into the Google movies listing. I'm just more comfortable with Google because I use Google. I'm sure Yahoo! is great for Yahoo! people, but I don't want a Yahoo! Id or an MSN id or an AOL id. With so many competing companies, I'd rather stick to the one with the most useful and widespread products. And that's what Google has been doing, scooping up services, making their users wonder why people use anything else.

Wikipedia- List of Google Services