Today, at least. Email was really stressing me out. I have a home account, a home/junk/online purchases account, a library listservs account, and a work account. I was using Bloglines and realized that what I really needed was an aggregator, but for my email.
So, though I have some privacy reservations, I opted for Gmail. All my accounts point to a Gmail account, and Gmail lets me send email that looks like it’s from the addresses everyone already has for me in their address book. Filtering allows email to go to certain folders (or “labels”), so that I don’t access personal email at work, and I can respond to important work email even when not at work. It makes my life much easier, and for now, I’m willing to sacrifice a little bit of privacy for a reduction in stress.
While exploring the different Google services, I decided it was time to use Google Reader. I’ve only begun to play with the statistics (or “trends”) section, but I can see that it’d be very useful.
One of the things I’ve found really interesting about Google’s services is that they require a different vocabulary. Email folders are “labels.” Emails and threads are “conversations.” Favorites are “starred.” Listserves are “groups.” Aggregators are “readers.” Statistics are “trends.” I think one of the true measures of Google’s success as a service provider is the impact they may or may not have on the general vocabulary of electronic communication.
Anyway, I’ll probably report in after a while with an update about how this is going, but it’s an interesting experiment for now.
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