Friday, October 30, 2009

Google Rocks

So... yeah, I'm kind of Google's little bitch. Gmail, Google Voice, Blogger, even Google Wave now; I know the derogatory name for guys who are way into Macs and whatever the derogatory term is for someone way into Google, well, that would be me. I'll go with GoogleBitch for now.

The reason for a non-travel related post here is this: I received an email about a private movie screening of that new Clooney movie, "Men Who Stare At Goats." We really want to see it, and free is a good thing; therefore, I copy the info about the screening and paste it in an email to the wife. ("Therefore" used to avoid another "so.")

After sending that email, I see in the right hand column of Gmail something that looks like this:

Add to calendar
Men Who Stare At Goats
Nov 5, 2009
7:30 pm

I click on add and BOOM, there is the screening in my Google Calendar with the date, time AND the theater where the screening is going to take place. It knew how to yank all that information out of the email's text and present it to me as a calendar entry. I added my wife to the event and it sent her an invite.

I believe that this may have been the most awesome benefit yet of allowing Google to read every email that I send and receive. I don't even feel violated. I still trust Sergei & Larry when they say their philosophy is, "Don't be evil." And in this case, Google's constant monitoring of my activity lead to a sort of magical internet moment. Orwell can kiss it.

I just wish that Google would decide to take on our cable company. Then I could switch to GoogleTV and be an even bigger GoogleBitch.