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Google Products You Forgot All About
Googling Yourself writes "Lifehacker has an interesting blog post on the 'Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About' that includes stalwarts like Google Trends and Google Alerts and a few others that may not be quite so familiar like Google Personals, Google's WYSIWYG web site creation tool, and Flight Simulator for Google Earth."
Actually I didn't forget any of those. Instead:
* I didn't know about 5 of them.
* I haven't needed to use 4 of them.
* I've stopped using the one I did need and know about (Notebook) due to Google's habit of changing their functionality which can infringe on someone's privacy that they didn't want.
I doubt very many people thought those were fantastic features, and then simply forgot about them.
Google should really do a driving simulator based on Google Earth, similar to the flight simulator. You could drive around any city virtually, which would be pretty useful if you wanted to learn the streets of a city you were visiting. I'm sure there are a ton of other possibilities too, which I'll refrain from spelling out in detail since I've played a few too many hours of Grand Theft Auto.
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
I guess the one that may be very useful (at least for me) is Google Alert ...
Remember : you just type a web search phrase and Google send you an Email each time there is something new on the web for this research.
Yes, it doesn't really work in realtime as we may want to, but it's still a killer feature for the web imho.
And other "forgotten" apps are quite crappy. I hope Google will still develop Google Alerts : it deserve it.
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You haven't lived 'til you've done google earth with a Space Mouse (or whatever they're called these days - I've got one of those old fashioned ones).
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