During the last ten years there have been few changes in the way we use computers. Almost everybody has moved from ‘console like’ interactions to GUI, but the way we treat information is pretty much the same. The web added new text files but we kept filing them in a similar fashion.
Google was a welcome addition to the growing list of search engines, but it did not change the way I would look for information. It just improved it through making the results more relevant and a terser interface—a welcome departure from the old ‘information portals’. However, Gmail (Google mail) has changed the way I use email; not at work but at least for my private addresses.
I have disposed of hierarchical folders and just ‘archive’ mail, some times attaching labels (keywords, tags, whatever word you may prefer). I still delete email, despite of Gmail’s suggestions, mostly due to me following GTD. I have now set up my Gmail account as a ‘catch all’ address for all my personal email addresses (around five or six of them).
Gmail already features integration of simple rich text format in documents. This could easily open the door to the creation of simple documents (which include most of the content creation normal people do) in addition to emails. Of course this would not satisfy ‘power users’, but would be more than enough for the majority who never uses equation editor, sections or even styles. Spell checking can already be provided by browser plugins (e.g., SpellBound—the spell checker not the movie). Other plugins could provide support for text editing with syntax highlighting for the programmers out there.
Apart from a good interface the other feature is the shear amount of disk space allocated to users. With 2GB I already use my email account for basic synchronisation of my computers at work and at home. It is just matter of emailing myself the attachment. From that basic usage to proper synchronisation it should be a small step.
Blurring the barriers of search
The second Google product that has started to change my habits is Desktop Search. The structure of my hard drive contains a huge number of hierarchical folders (with five or six levels of nesting), in an attempt to keep data organised in a meaningful way. Of course I often tend to forget exactly where is a particular piece of information. Desktop search extends the Google interface to my computer, indexing the most common file formats1. If I can not remember where I put the PDF file discussing the use of ConTEXt I just type ‘context latex filetype:pdf’ and the file is at the top of my search.
The idea of getting rid of the hierarchical structure is not new. I used before The Brain and tried Life Streams, but I find the search engine interface much more convenient. The Brain had a ‘cool looking’ interface, but it was not as easy to use as Google Search. Life Streams used time as interface, but I tend to remember keywords and file types over when I was actually doing the work, particularly for long gone projects.
I would love to know what other products Google has in the pipeline. Already including search, email, pictures and blogging—and with the possibility of easily including basic word processing—Google is looking more and more as a competitor of Microsoft’s desktop dominance. In fact, it probably would not need to directly compete with Microsoft, but only to side step it. Microsoft would still dominate the business user’s market, which tend to use more features and would be less inclined to put files in Google’s hard drives.
Nevertheless, Google could offer Gmail to small businesses, allowing them to have a similar interface but putting their logos and using their domains instead of Gmail’s. I would love to use something like that with my own domain name. Large corporations are still too keen in ‘collaboration software’ with invites to meetings and booking rooms and silly things like that, which would not be difficult to implement but would add clutter to the clean interface.
Anyway, many home users would have enough with Google tools, so why would someone pay for MS Office for typing letters? What would you miss as a home user? May be a simple spreadsheet, nothing complex, but an array that supports simple mathematical operations (even some financial functions). I guess that it would be possible to have something like ‘Google Calc’ and say bye to Office.
1 In fact there are already plenty of plugins for this product. Because desktop uses file extensions to identify file types, it may miss some less common extensions. There is already a plugin that lets the user to specify additional extensions for text files (Larry’s Any Text File Indexer) . I used it to include my .tex (LATEX) and .as (ASReml) files.
