Go go gadget fingers!

Earlier this evening Jimmy listed a bunch of non-search Google-icious things that he uses. For various reasons (including temperament) I don’t use most of them:

• Analytics. Tried it, didn’t like it. Because this site is hosted on DreamHost (sign up with that link and get 25% off; I also get a kickback), I get full logs that I can parse with whatever tool I like (currently Analog and Webalizer) so it’s no big loss.
• Blogger. As it says down at the bottom of the page, Petroglyphs is powered by WordPress. I do have an account, but it’s only so I can comment on blogs that require it.
• Gmail. All my mail goes through DreamHost, on my own domain, so I can do with it as I wish. As with Blogger, I do have an account; in this case it’s a side effect of using Talk to communicate with my sister and brother. (An interesting fact is that despite having never used Gmail for any mail of any sort—no personal mail, no website signups, no mailing lists—and never allowing it to be advertised or added to things like user directories, it’s full of spam! The account name isn’t something easily brute-forced, so somehow it’s been shared. Sounds vaguely evil to me….)
• Desktop. Not available for my platform of choice, and I don’t use any other platform to an extent that it would be at all useful. I’ve played a bit with Beagle but found I used it so little that it was hard to justify the resource hit it took to run.
• Google Alerts, Google Blog Search Atom feeds, and Google News Search Atom feeds. (Jimmy mentioned Gmail Alerts; these are similar features.) These I do use for a few terms of interest, although I’ve generally found (or created) most of the links that appear on it before it notifies me of them. All three have a frustrating habit of alerting me multiple times of pages that have existed for years. All in all I prefer Technorati.
• Calendar. My calendar is private; when there are public events I’m planning to attend I add them to my upcoming.org account. Everything work-related is in my PDA, and I wouldn’t publish it to a third party server in the first place.
• Page Creator. Shudder. Nothing but raw XHTML, CSS and ECMAScript for this boy, all written by hand in Vim or WordPress’s markup view.
• Personalized Home. My 100+ browser tabs and aggregator are the closest things I have to a home page, and they have most everything I’m interested in.
• Talk. As noted above, I’ve got an account that I use to chat with my siblings. For most internal discussion at work I use our IRC server, and I use an MSN account (ptui!) for my other personal contacts.
• Google Maps. I do use this one, although I primarily get to it with a smart keyword in Firefox.
• Google Video/YouTube. I’m a consumer of both—aren’t we all?—but have no need or desire to create or upload anything.
• Froogle. Nope.
• Docs and Spreadsheets. Nope. It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever start creating and editing work files on a third-party server, and I use OpenOffice.org for anything personal (which I wouldn’t be posting to a third-party service anyway).
• AdSense. This site is an ad-free zone, with the exception of a very few personal endorsements like the DreamHost links above. I did have AdSense on What’s That Song for a while, since it was advertising-based, but I think I only ever made a grand total of about fifty cents from it (which I never cashed out) before I killed off updates to the page a few years ago.
• Google Earth. Used it a couple of times, and it’s sort of cool, but ultimately not of interest.
• Picasa. I’ve got The GIMP, which does a whole lot more than Picasa, and Gallery, which does everything I need for publishing and sharing my pictures.