Google has Assimilated Me - How’d this happen?

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I just moved all of my Writley documents to my Google Account. Now all my business and personal side projects, notes, resume, and otherwise Life Plan are on some server humming along at a Googleplex at unknown location.

Let’s see how this happened:

• My e-mails. (Gmail) - I’m not an email account whore and I rarely get a new email address. To date, I have had my college email account (which I never used/wasn’t web accessible at the time), my first web account - Yahoo! (has become my spam account now), Hotmail - well before Microsoft bought it (I let it expire), and then there was my email account for my business - dax@dnainvestments.com. Lastly, 1 email to conquer them all - my gmail account. After using the gmail account cautiously - afterall I don’t want to get used to using yet another email account unless its worthy. Google’s search gave me reason to try out their email. So I got hooked and my main account -Yahoo! became my spam account. Once I got the searchcain in my veins I craved Google to takeover my business email- but alas a @gmail.com account just does not look very professional. Then came the hosted gmail account using my own domain name so I am on it now. That in a large nutshell is the evolution of my email accounts.
• Photos - not yet, but that’s because I don’t place much value on organizing my photos.
• My spreadsheets (Google Spreadsheets) - It became quite convenient to work on spreadsheets on any computer without worrying about if the machine had Excel - a public computer at the library, my laptop, a hotel computer, basically anywhere with a browser. All this without worrying about backup. I’m putting some serious trust that it will be there. I usually have some older copy on a machine somewhere . You can export to excel for non-network working.
• My notes (Google Notebook) - I have a bad habit of having 10 million notepad files on my machines - new_document(1–10000000).txt. Google Notebook has put that in check now.
• My Wordprocessing (Writley) - I’ve started utilizing this for my documents as well now. Similar benefits to Google Spreadsheets and it can be saved in the open-source ODF format. I like openness.
• My Calendar (Google calendar) - My wife sends me stuff in Google Calendar now so I can’t say “You never told me that” . I like that I can configure it to automatically send me SMS reminders.
• My Blog (Blogger) - What I’m using right now to post this.
• User Groups (Groups) - I use it from time to time to post/answer and otherwise browse other people’s problems…high-tech voyeurism. Interesting how other people’s problems can be so entertaining.
• Maps (Maps) - I use this to find my way around practically everywhere. Thanks to Nirav for reminding me about this tool I use all the time. I must admit however, that Yahoo has started stealing me away with their Yahoo Maps Beta. Yahoo has multi-leg directions that Google and Mapquest are missing. Handy when you need to go to point C, but have to stop somewhere on the way. For example if you are going to look at 4 houses, it would be handy to enter them point-to-point-to-point-to-point as opposed to getting 4 different sets of directions.

They have alot of my information. For my part I do not care that they analyze my stuff and post ads on my screen. I sometimes wonder how much I’m worth to Google. How much do they make? I’m not going to ask them to share it with me. I’m not going to backlash. Maybe I can give them a Christmas present and click on just a few more of those Google ads.

I use their services by choice. Choice is always good. I choose to let Google host certain portions of my life. There are some thing better left outsourced.

They provide me secured infrastructure and services that I use improving my productivity, expanding my communication and collaboration, and otherwise helps me organize my life. When it all craps out, I’ll probably say “S#$@#$)!” followed by “Well it was damn good up until now.” I’ll then be lost for I would have become unasimilated.