Monday, September 26, 2011

Life Will Never Be The Same, But That's A Good Thing!

"My life has changed
Where do I start
Since Aladdin came in
And conquered my heart."
--the Chinese princess in Chichester Theological College's panto Aladdin, 1985

In 1985, I played the part of the Chinese princess, and the lines above were the beginning of my first speech. I delivered them in a Southern (U.S.) accent. Don't ask.

But I was thinking today that my life, particularly since last December, has been changed incredibly because of Google. And where do I start?

Of course, before last December, like so many people, I Googled daily. I can't even remember the last time I used a different search engine. Google was it for me pretty much from the time it launched.

I loved stuff like http://lmgtfy.com/ -- I really annoyed people with that, actually, but we won't go into that here.

I downloaded and used the Chrome browser pretty much from the first day it was available. I used Rockmelt for a while, too, as it incorporated lots of great Chrome features along with other sites.

I worked in Google Docs -- several clients were happy to work that way, and I found that it made things easier most of the time. I was still tied to hard drives and Windows, but I was committed to investigating what working in the cloud could mean for me.

Then, one day last December, I was tootling around on Facebook and saw a post from . . . well, I can't remember exactly what it was. But I took a survey and was promised some Chrome stickers. So what the hey, I thought, I can do this.

I was shocked, and I mean shocked, to find a Cr-48 on my doorstep a few days later. This was before people had started posting about this, so I had no idea what was going on. And the minute I started up the Cr-48, I was in love.

And then Google launched Google+. And I have finally found people on the Internet who are asking questions, involved in meaningful discussions, interesting to interact with, and I am loving it!

And now Google+ has enabled Circle sharing. The possibilities are infinite. I've already seen people from my Circles connect with each other, and they might not have found each other if I hadn't been able to share.

I can hardly wait to see what's next.

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