Top Ten Reasons To Get A Google Account

There are several reason why one should get a Google account. Google offers tons of services to it’s users; email, word processor, RSS reader, search, address book, calendar and many more. Of course other websites offer the same services, and some are even better than Google’s. They only offer a single service, and thus have time to fully concentrate on it. But this also means that you will only be able to do what the service was made to do. Google also exceeds them in multiple other ways.

10. Free as in Beer
Google is free to join, there are no sign-up or other fees. Hopefully this advantage does not need any explanation.

9. Google is Big
Google is one of the largest internet companies out there, so you can be sure that your data won’t disappear the next day. They do regular backups, and have a lot of cash to keep chugging for years to come.

8. Constant Expansion
Google is on a buying rampage, they acquire several web star-ups every week. Because of this users see many new features, and are bound to see them for a long time to come. What makes this better is Google’s dedication of showcasing them to their visitors. Every time you login, just take a quick look in the top right corner of your screen, and you might be a bold red link telling you that new features have been added. Click it and you will see a detailed (but not too detailed) explanation of new things you can find.

Not all features come from buy outs, many are developed in-house. The Google employs something called the “20% rule” which allows their employees to spend 20% of their time to work on personal projects. This creates an environment that is beaming with innovation since the developers are not inhibited by criticism from the marketing and design departments.

7. AJAX Interface
Google is an industry leader in AJAX and dynamic web pages. They were the first one to introduce it on a large scale when they released GMail to the public, and they continue to innovate with it. This adds an off-line feel to the applications and improves their speed because you no longer have to load an entire page when you save a document or send an email.

6. Lots of Space
Google has large servers with a lot of space to store your data. For example, you get 10GB to store pictures with their Picasa service and almost 3GB (still increasing) of email storage. This means that you will not have to delete any of your documents and always on file.

5. Searching
Let’s not forget that Google is primarily a search company, so this does spill over to any other services that they offer. You can search your emails and documents with the same intelligent algorithm that you can search the web with. This means that you will no longer have any “lost” documents as long as you have an idea what they are about.

4. Web Based
All the features are web based and the data is stored on Google’s servers. This means that you will be access it from any computer that has a recent web browser and an internet connection, like the ones at the library. No longer you have to bother to carry a laptop everywhere you go, just so you can use a good Word Processor.

3. Smart Calendar
GTalk is also integrated with the calendar service, but in a much mundane way. As reported by several other bloggers, Google’s smart robots detect any special messages like meeting planning, and offers to add them to your calendar.

2. Contacts Everywhere
I was setting up a meeting with my friends today, and I wanted to add a reminder to my Google calendar. While looking over options, I noticed that I could add my friends to the event. As I started typing their emails, Google decided to auto-complete the email with what it found in my GMail address book! Now that was very convenient because I didn’t have to write the longer emails nor did I have to remember the more complex addresses, as typing the name triggered the address book auto-completion.

The same mechanism works with the Word Processor. You can invite your contacts to view or collaborate on documents with you.

1. Instant Messaging
With the introduction of the GTalk service and it’s online client, Google decided to dump it everywhere, so users can talk to each other from anywhere. This become very useful when you are collaborating on a document. I was working on a French school project with a friend of mine where we had to translate a big document, and since it was quite late we wanted to didn’t want to meet up. So I remembered the collaboration features of Google’s Docs and suggested that we try it. In a few minutes we were both working on the same document at the same time, and if we ever had any problems we just discussed it via a GTalk balloon that popped up on the side of my window.

All these nifty features are what make Google the leader in online desktops, and that’s why you should get a free account with them.