I was an early user of Google and many of the tools and apps they rolled out over the years. 149 posts going back to 2002. In no particular order:
Talk, Google+, Reminders, My Activity, Glass, Picassa, Gmail, Chrome, Goggles, Voice, Docs, Buzz, Tasks, Reader, Living Stories, Wave, Maps, Earth, Spreadsheets, News
I’ve previously posted about creating a Gmail account in 2004. Google launched the service on April 1st of that year and I created my account (invite-only at the time) on April 21, 2004. In those 20+ years I accumulated more than fifteen thousand emails. Google’s pitch was their search was so good you could just keep all of your emails and they’d help you find it. And it worked pretty much as advertised. But I rarely needed to find an old email. And my ALL MAIL folder just got bigger and bigger. If memory serves, I downloaded all/most of my Google stuff a couple of times during those 20 years but never had a need to use those backups.
Most of my computing these days happens on my iPhone and my MacBook. But given my lengthy history with Google (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar), I’ve never migrated over to Apple for these tools. Until now.
I was very impressed with Apple’s approach to AI (“Apple Intelligence”) and to get the full benefit I’ve decided to go all-in. Starting tomorrow I’ll be using Apple Mail and Calendar. Not sure yet about switching from Google Drive to iCloud. I have a lot of files in Google Drive (850 GB).
As for deleting 20+ years of emails? Felt great. If I experience any regrets, I promise to update this post.
In May of 2004 I received an invitation to beta test Google’s new email service, Gmail. Google had acquired Blogger in early 2003 and sent invites to users. We were allowed to invite two friends. As I recall, people were selling such invitations. It was early enough that I was able to get “stevemays@gmail.com”
For reasons unimportant, yesterday I created a second Gmail account, my first ever. I decided to use the name of a character from one of my favorite novels. I searched for more than half an hour, picking the most minor and obscure characters I could think of, and never found one that wasn’t taken. I finally gave up and went for nonsense: poontangmeringue@gmail.com. And decided I didn’t really need a second account after all.
Google says they have 1.5 billion active Gmail users. I’m a little surprised poontangmeringue was still available.
Google Docs launched in June, 2006 and Google Drive didn’t come along until April of 2012. (I’ve always been a little fuzzy about the Docs and Drive) I’ve found docs going back to 2010 and I put everything in Google Drive. Today stumbled on a feature I hadn’t seen before.
If you put sub-heads in a Google Doc, you can scroll to those headings with the little scroll button in the iOS app. Just pull the little button to the left. Very handy on a long document.