Week 11: GoogleOverlord

I've been aware of Google's slow rise to the status of beneficent overlord for awhile now, I guess. First it was just a search engine, and that was fine. And then there was Gmail and GoogleMaps and Goog411, and even though Google started satellite spying on my apartment building, I didn't worry about it. And now there's GoogleBooks and GoogleReader and GoogleDocs, and, let's be honest, we're only a few small steps away from seeing Google take over the world. The creepiest part is that all the different applications talk to each other AND to other applications, so Google harvests my information from Blogger for my RSS feeds on GoogleReader, and Gmail grabs all of my friends from AIM for Gchat, and basically google controls my entire life on the internet. But they do it so WELL. Google's tools are just so well designed, and they're FREE, so OF COURSE everyone uses them, me included. I think this will probably be fine, because Google doesn't seem like a particularly evil corporation, as far as corporations go, but if we're going to hand over our lives to them, I guess we should at least do it knowingly.

As for GoogleDocs, I wish I'd known about this when I was teaching. It would have been so much easier to shoot drafts back and forth with students on GoogleDocs rather than dealing with endless attachment nonsense. I also don't own PowerPoint, and I used to make presentations using OpenOffice's software, which, at the time I was using it, was total junk. GoogleDocs seems much better, though OpenOffice has probably improved a lot in the last couple years as well. In any case, I can definitely see how this would be useful for library staff collaborating on documents, presentations, etc.

I also cannot tell you how many library patrons we've had who have come in with endless problems related to usb drives/floppy discs/cds/email attachments, and now I want to beg them to create a Google account and use GoogleDocs. It won't solve all of our problems, because a lot of patrons don't have internet access at home and therefore need a usb drive/floppy disc/cd, but this seems like a great place to back up material to avoid the whole "I worked on that for six hours and now it is *pffft* gone" fiasco.

Ok, Google, I will continue to use all of your enticingly well designed tools, but I'm keeping my eye on you.