Google – 2012 and Beyond

If you’re here via our recent Engage/Theory eTouch, welcome.

(If you’re coming in fresh, hit the link in the left sidebar there to suubscribe to our newsletter, where I go much more in depth on some of the topics covered here. Also lots of freebies.)

In any case, in today’s eTouch the topic was Google and their roll-out of real-time search, and how the moves they’re making right now in all areas are changing quite literally everything.

The question becomes then, how to start participating in that change? I’d say hop on board with these tools first. (And don’t be intimidated – keep reading to the end of this post and your fears will be soothed, I assure you.)

1) Gmail – This is Google’s free email service, and to say it revolutionized email a few years back is a vast understatement.

2) Google Reader – This is a utility inside your gmail account that will allow you to aggregate all the RSS feeds of all the various sites you visit. All the information comes to you, in one handy place.

3) Google Documents – Google’s versions of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Again, it lives inside your gmail account, which means you can access and update your documents from everywhere.

4) Google Wave – Quite simply, one might call this “next generation email”. It’s a way to share and collaborate in ways that would have seemed space-age even last year. This one is true innovation.

This doesn’t even touch on Google Maps, Google Voice, and the many other applications and utilities the company seems to roll out on a monthly – if not weekly – basis.

It’s all about making your life organized and easier, and if you’ve noted, all these various things are tied to one another. This is a key point – Google never wants you to leave Google. And hey, if they make it such a great place to be, why would you?

The key is going through the learning process to be able to use these tools. Believe me, once you’ve done it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Scared yet? Don’t be – we’ve got not one, but two separate Google-based courses we’ll be introducing next week, and we’re giving special pricing for all 2009 sign-ups.

Stay tuned to that next eTouch, which is coming Tuesday, December 15.

Oh, and for that exclusive (and free) Google Wave invite, make sure and email fred@engagetheory.com, and put “WAVE ME” in the subject line. They’re hard to get ahold of and going fast, so get in now.