Trying to go online…

organization / productivity July 22nd, 2006

With all of my apps.

I’ve got my own web site (you’re on it right now!) with blogging tools, a photo gallery, and mail services. I have an IMAP server for kataan.org, and can hit it with their webmail tools or Outlook from work or home.

I’ve done most of my planning, email, blogging and photo sharing the same way since 2000. Online services have tempted me, but after watching most of the “We’re going to change the world” B2C consumer services crash and burn, go to paid models, or just disappear, I was a little leery of relying on them.

Enter Google. They released GMail with 1 gigabyte of storage and their search facilities, and set the bar for storage that put the rest of the mail providers on the defensive. Google appears to be around for the long run, and offer POP3 access (so if they ever did go away, I could get my mail off their servers)

Google Calendar looks interesting. I uploaded my appointments from Outlook and configured alerts to my cell phone.

I’ve used a couple of IM services; I lean a little more towards Yahoo!’s network. I’m considering moving my work contacts over to Yahoo! talk – the ability to use any Jabber client and to have an open protocol is intriguing.

These are all little steps, but they add up to a big bonus for me – being able to isolate my PIM information from my PIM. In an ideal world, I’d have a phone that sync’ed PIM info with Outlook, but I’m using a cheap cell phone by design — I don’t want to be tied to a Blackberry and be online 24/7. I send outage alerts to my phone, and don’t respond to any non-urgent emails sent after hours. Work can wait.

With this in mind, being able to keep all my contacts synced in my phone and to have calendar information mailed to my phone or available on anyone’s computer saves me from carrying a laptop or my Palm PDA (mostly relegated to syncing my work and home Outlooks). I can operate quite well with my phone and a hipster PDA. The hipster PDA saves me from carrying business cards around, is an almost ideal non-modal information input tool, and it’s dirt cheap. Battery life is not an issue, and it doesn’t need a special stylus, text area protectors, or special carry cases.

[tags]productivity, google, hipster pda, gmail[/tags]

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