Thursday, 31 May 2007

Living in the cloud

Firstly, to follow up on my last journal entry regarding Facebook - I'm hooked! It's so much fun to be able to see what your friends are up to.

As detailed in previous entries, I've started to move so that my calendar, contacts, to-do list and notes are synchronized to my Yahoo! account, and therefore online. I've also spent more time sending email from Gmail. Recently I received an email with a .doc attachment and Gmail offered to open it with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This proved to be a very pleasant way of easily checking out a document without having to have Office or Openoffice.org installed.

Unrelated to email, at work, I was using Thunderbird for RSS feeds, but got frustrated when I couldn't access them from home. Which led me to investigate the new, improved Google Reader. It's very impressive - even down to the keyboard shortcuts that include some vi-like functionality :-) I exported my RSS feeds from Thunderbird into Google Reader and added a whole bunch more. It's a highly addictive way of browsing for news.

I realised that these small steps were moving me to storing all my non-private (confidential) data onto "the cloud" which I could then access from anywhere. There are nagging doubts about the data mining that Yahoo and Google can do, but so far they are providing genuinely useful services.

I'll update the journal with my progress, but until then, back to Facebook... ;-)

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