I spent a brief time years ago pumping the mail from my terrible workplace e-mail server to Gmail, which obliterated many sins (low capacity, terrible software and hardware) while giving rise to others (Google is data-mining us like crazy).

Well, after years of IMAP in Thunderbird, I'm changing course. I'm letting Google's Gmail handle my work mail again.

I'm aware that Google is using my e-mail to craft marketing messages it will aim at me. I don't like it, but I don't hate it enough to suffer through my current mail routine, with the inbox maxing out more days than not. That leads to all sorts of lost productivity on my part.

And my coworkers are making increasing use of Google Drive/Docs, Calendar and Google Plus (with plenty of Google Chat/Talk and Hangouts).

My thinking: If I'm doing all of that, Gmail doesn't add much to the spy vector. And this is for work only. I've been trying to do most of my personal e-mail off of Gmail -- and every other ad-supported e-mail service.

But faced with a poor e-mail system that I must use daily, Gmail makes it much more usable. Google has won me over. Again.

I'd hate to be a company looking for growth by selling a packaged office suite. Now Google is acquiring Quickoffice to bolster its mobile offerings. I'm not sure why they need it. Development of Google Docs / Google Drive seems to be moving rather rapidly on Android, though not so rapidly on the iPad, from what I can see. I have no idea about Docs/Drive on the iPhone.

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I already have the Widgets Plus Google-Plus (aka Google+) widget on my official Los Angeles Daily News-sponsored, Movable Type-running blog, and today I added it to this blog, which runs under Ode.

I had to tweak more than a couple of parameters to fit the widget in the 178px space in Click, but for the 235px space at

Posted: Oct 24, 2011 2:51pm UTC

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Category: /google/plus/

I've seen these Google+ widgets popping up all over. Here's where you can get one.

Yes, I'm on Google+. So are many of you. And more every day.

From what I can see, we're all captivated to some extent by its shiny newness. And that it's not Facebook.

We're more comfortable with Larry and Sergey than with Mark Zuckerberg.

There's no 140-character limit.

Hence, a lot of us are, in effect, blogging into Google+. Sure, we can get that content out of there at any time. But currently there's no "native" way to bring feeds from other sites directly into our Google+ streams.

This needs to happen.

And I need to get back to writing into my own sites. Including this one.

I'll try to post this entry in Google+. And Identi.ca (which will, in turn, post to Twitter, which posts to Facebook).

Look here (and not just there), I'm saying.