A little over two years ago I wrote a post titled, Is Google Big Brother, right after attending the NYS educational technology conference, NYSCATE. Basically I was concerned about how a for-profit company may use personal data in ways we are unaware of.
Now, looking at my Google Dashboard to check out the Google services I use, what I see is:
Buzz, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Gmail, iGoogle, Reader, Tasks and 15 other services from the Google mother ship.
So much for being paranoid – while I was not watching, I was assimilated. Hook, line & sinker. I rely on many Google services to manage my daily life (especially Calendar, Tasks, and Gmail). All the work for the degree I’m working on in educational administration is produced, shared and stored in Google Docs. While I have resisted the Twitter rage for various reasons (though I did recently sign up for a Twitter account), as soon as I saw Buzz, I jumped on board. Maybe I was just finally ready for the microblogging world – who knows. As with many of the Google services, Buzz seems to put lots of pieces together in the right way.
The Google cloud rocks – I will still continue to read the privacy policies and have offline versions of critical documents – but you can count me one of the Google Army now.
Resistance IS futile!Creative Commons image courtesy of zsoolt on Flickr.