With technology flying at us faster than a kid driving home with a copy of Halo 3, it can be awfully hard to keep up to date. Anybody with an internet connection can “plug in” as Thomas Friedman likes to say, and have access to all the readily available information that the internet has to offer. Most everybody now knows that Google has a search engine and some now are becoming aware of their email service, Gmail. These are both great services that has brought Google's stock beyond that of giants such as IBM, but they offer much more than what immediately presents itself.
Google has a site at labs.google.com where they juxtapose projects and services they are working on and allow users to test their capabilities. Amongst the projects are quite a few that can make every day life much more convenient. Their free 411 service is great simply because of the fact you don't have to pay for it and it performs exactly the same as the for profit AT&T 411 service. The maps project they offer is on par with any other similar service from Mapquest or Yahoo. It even merited a “Double True” in the skit “Lazy Sunday” so that should be enough said. They're working on a transit application that allows you to punch in a start and end address to which it will map your entire trip using only public transit systems as a means of travel.
One of my favorite programs they have going is the mobile phone integration of their projects which allows you to gain access to the massive Google databases straight through your phone. Point your phones web browser to mobile.google.com and you can check your Gmail account, view the latest Google News and access their maps application. All of this is designed and formatted specifically for your mobile phone. You can also search Google's databases using text messaging. For example text “Quiznos 94928” to 466453(Google) and it will send you back all the Quiznos listings in that zip code with the address and phone number. You can also search for weather forecasts with a simple search term such as “weather santa rosa”. Among the other available search features Google SMS offers are movies, glossary, flights, directions, translation, products, sports, stocks and many more. Again this is done through text messaging which means your phone does not need to have a web browser to gain access to all of these features that are literally at your fingertips.
A revolution known as web 2.0 has spurred the creation of social networking sites such as Youtube, Facebook and Myspace. Now the users control the content of these sites and anybody with a webcam can become a celebrity. News has also experienced a huge migration to the online domain so stories stories can be up to the second and readily available without a tv. It can be extremely hard to keep up to date on all this new content. This is where a new method of listing these in one convenient location was created. You use what is called an “RSS feed” meaning Really Simple Syndication (go figure). A website with an RSS feed enables users to subscribe to their headlines using applications such as Google Reader (google.com/reader). Once subscribed, any updates or news stories the site posts are listed in your reader in realtime the moment they go up. Using your reader you can subscribe to as many feeds as you please and organize them into different folders. You see a list of all the new content posted on each site you've subscribed with a headline that you can click on to view a summary or proceed to read the article in its entirety. What this creates is a up to the second online newspaper, with a display of content that only you have chosen. You by default only view the headlines of each new development so you don't have to view summaries and full articles of the stories that don't interest you like a normal newspaper.
The iGoogle.com homepage is where all of these applications come together in a innovative interface with a simple and easy to use layout. The homepage is a place where you can place boxed widgets arranged as you please to suit your preferences. There are widgets to view your most recent feeds, a Gmail widget to see your latest emails, a clock widget, Einstein quotes widget, and every other kind of widget you can imagine. All of this is presented to you in an intuitive layout on one page, so you can stay up to date on everything from one simple homepage. You can also add tabs to have multiple home pages without having to refresh the page, and of course change the themes and color arrangements to customize the look and feel of the site.
With all of these resources at our disposal the only problem is being aware of them and knowing how to use them. With an iPhone being a near laptop replacement and Google SMS/411 freely available to every text enabled phone in the United States, you can access more information then ever before in places you would have never guessed. All you need is wifi or one bar of signal. What does all this mean for an SSU student? You can now check movie times using your cell phones text messaging or call Google 411. You now have what could be called 'Google Yellow Pages' in your pocket everywhere you go. You can find the phone number of the nearest chines restaurant along with its address using only text messaging or a free 411 call. You can add the SSU Newsroom to your RSS reader and stay by the second up to date with the happenings at SSU(tinyurl.com/2t6yyq). You can translate words, get weather information, check flight times, currency conversion, pretty much anything you may find useful you can do with any cellphone now. You have all of this information available to you for free, get in the know and don't let a lack of internet access slow you down. Up to the date information can be found at labs.google.com
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