I propose that a collection of Googles be called a "desktop"
Recently, I’ve started to require a more distributed way to store my “live” data. By “live” I generally mean “the shit I use day-to-day” — emails, calendar items, general notes, music, pictures, daily reading, and bookmarks. Most of this live data lives on the internet now, seeing as I have multiple computers to ship it between. Other than flickr, delicious, and upcoming (all owned by Yahoo) as well as last.fm, the rest of these services are fulfilled by Google: Calendars, email, notes, and the “homepage”. The only other thing is IM, and I have to live with a plethora of online identities to cope with all the retards not using Google Talk.
Email is not surprising, since Google’s mail is the best around, and Calendaring is OK, despite it’s flaws (no DAV). Google Notes is my most recent thingy that I’m trying out, and it’s pretty great. They’re not “tasks” or “todos”, they’re just thingies that stick in your mind. They kind of act like sticky notes or notes for your palm. The only downside is that there’s no convenient way to transfer this information to your palm (for notes anyway, there is for calendars, but it’s still hairy due to lack of DAV / no synchronization).
However, the point is that most of the “live” shit I do is now on Google or Yahoo. What a world. I’m vaguely considering getting an rss reader thingy account so I can read newsfeeds from someplace other than my main machine.