Many people have told me that I should be getting paid to do this.

But I don’t really care.

I just wanna spread the love.

Yes, siree, I’m a Google enthusiast. Addict. Fan. Whatever you want to call me. Google rocks, no matter what other people say. And here’s why:

GMail
This is how I first got into the G. Of course, a lot of people have been using Google as a search engine, but when I tried Gmail, I fell in love with it. I love it because it loads so friggin’ fast, and organizing mail is so friggin’ easy because of them labels, and my inbox keeps clean because of conversations (emails in one thread are kept as one entry in your inbox) and archiving (you can store your emails into the archive and just search for them later when you need ‘em).

And and and — here’s one of the best parts — I get to use Google to send my work mail, yahoo mail, and whatever else mail server there is out there! Yep. If you’ve got Gmail and you don’t know about this yet, go and check it out. Click Settings -> Accounts and you’ll see something like this:

Except it’ll be your email address there. Ahahaha. Of course. Just click Add another email address. Type in your address in the pop-up, and you’re all set! You don’t have to log into your other email accounts to send one little email. Of course this is super handy when coupled with email forwarding. Set up your other email addresses so that all your emails get forwarded to your gmail. And then set up Gmail (click Settings -> Filters) to put
labels on them.

For example, I’ve got my work mail to forward stuff to Gmail, and when Gmail gets it, it puts a “work” label on it. And then I can reply to the email using my work address while still in Gmail. Ain’t it ever so cool?!

GTalk
Google’s chat thingy. It’s lightweight and it’s super handy. You know what’s the best part about GTalk? You don’t have to download it. Seriously. Just log in to your Gmail account, and you see Quick Contacts on the left side of the screen. Pick the contact you want to talk to (granted, of course, that their green light is on, meaning they’re online), click Chat, and voila! Instant Messenger in an instant!

You can, of course, download GTalk so you can close your Gmail window and still receive IMs and mail notifications.

Whether or not you download GTalk, all your chat sessions are saved in your GMail for future reference. ^_________^

Blogger
OK. Now I know a lot of people are loyal to LiveJournal and/or moving over to WordPress. To tell you the truth, I’ve got an LJ/Vox blog, and I’ve got one in WordPress, too. But my fave still remains to be Blogger. First of all, I still think that posting is easiest in Blogger. Sure, sure, other people might try to protest about that. But, hey. To each his own.

Also, with Blogger, I get to fully customize the look and feel of my blog. For free! I was a bit disappointed– oh, wait, scratch that. I was TOTALLY disappointed when I learned that to modify CSS in WordPress, I had to pay up. Argh. (If I’m wrong, send me an email and help me fix my WP blog.) Here at Blogger, you can do whatever you want with your HTML, and Blogger would have no complaints. Unless, of course, if your HTML isn’t structured properly. Hehe.

Another thing is that Blogger helps you choose colors. In Templates -> Fonts and Colors, Blogger generates the colors from your blog, colors that match your blog, and other colors that’ll look good, AND you can shuffle the colors within page elements. All you gotta do is click and experiment. And if you do something wrong, you can always revert back to the original settings.

Sometimes, I reshuffle the colors in this tool just to watch ‘em move. Just for fun. And then I revert back to the saved settings. Hehe. It really looks so cool, watching them move!

And you get to insert widgets from third parties, too. In some blogsites, you can’t modify the HTML, and you can’t put foreign widgets and scripts in. Too bad.

Ah, yes. I love Blogger. Ain’t it obvious?

Google Reader
I believe I’ve already blogged about this. But I shall say something again.

Reader is, like, an answer to my prayers because with it, I don’t have to regularly check my friends’ blogs for updates. Sometimes I spend time checking up on their blogs only to discover that they haven’t updated at all. Bummer. Also, sometimes, I check up on their blogs only to discover that I’ve missed so many entries! That’s a bummer, too.

With Reader, I get updated whenever a friend updates his blog (or site) whether or not they’re on Google. I put WP, LJ, Multiply and other wites on my reader, actually. Also, Reader isn’t limited to blogs. From what I understand, it started out as a feed tracker. If you want, you can get news and stuff in there.

You can label, favorite and share your feeds, too. Aaaaaaand you can post ‘em on your Blogger as a widget! Yey! That’s what I love about Google. Everything works together so friggin’ well.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets
Oh, joy! I SO wish this existed when I was still a student. It would’ve made my life SO much easier.

With GDocs, you can upload documents and web pages, as well as spreadsheets, so you can access and modify them anywhere, without needing to download them. This is very convenient because with this, you save your flash drive from getting (or spreading) viruses. Each revision is logged, and you can revert back to any version of your document at any time. You can also collaborate with friends, work colleagues and groupmates. And you can also choose to just share the documents, and let other people view it without changing the content. And then, later, you can save them, or publish them online as web pages, or as blog entries!

Google Personalized Homepage
This is the turnpike. This is where everything comes together. If you’re going to get ANYTHING from Google, get the personalized homepage.

It has the classic Google search bar, of course. Like Yahoo! Homepage, you get to choose what to put on your Home. You can put your calendar, news, and whatever else. But what’s so cool about this is: you get to put non-Google stuff on there, too. Holy crap. Nothing beats that, I tells ya.

For my Home, I put in Gmail (like, duh), Yaho
o Mail, Google Reader, my links (which I can also organize using labels), date and time (the clock looks so nice and sleek!), quote for the day (they’re either hilarious or inspiring. Luv it!), time converter (a must for someone whose clients and bosses are out of the country), and my Docs. I can collapse my widgets, and I even get to use tabs and rename them! Aside from my Home, I get the “tips, for the days” tab, and my “converters, translators” tab.

One thing I love about the Homepage is that I don’t have to log in to Yahoo! (or anything else Google, for that matter) to see my stuff. Gmail is there, so I see new mail. Reader is there, so I don’t have to log into Reader to see new stuff in feeds. If you click on the link, the contents “pop up” and you get to read the entry right there in Homepage. (see the lower left quarter of my screenshot below) And, if I click on other Google services, I don’t have to log into them again because one Google log in logs you into everything else Google!

One new and very fun thing about the Google Homepage is the themes. For the meantime there are only a few themes available. They’re all very amusing, but even if you don’t want a cutsie look, there’s a theme for that, too. Personally, I was choosing between the beach theme and the tea house theme. I chose the latter. A fun thing about the themes is that it changes dynamically depending on the time in your area. On my screenie above, you can see the nighttime, early morning, afternoon and early evening versions. The dawn version’s cute, too. It’s just the nighttime one, except the colors are slightly changed, and the snail’s replaced with another animal. The “wee hours” version has ghoul kitsunes in them. It’s hilarious! The evening version is nice, with fireflies and stuff around the kitsune. The designers’ attention to details is so cool!

So…yeah. That’s it so far. I’m sure I missed some awesome thing about Google services. When I do remember what those are, be sure I’ll blog about it later.