The most popular Google services by usage by Alexa

According to Alexa Google is the most popular site in the world while number 2 is Facebook.

And the most popular Google services aka sub sites by usage (hours spent on the site) are:

 

Percent of all Google site visitors

1. Search google.com  71.36%
2. Gmail mail.google.com 44.93%
3. Profile accounts.google.com 36.34%
4. Google Drive (Google Docs) docs.google.com 9.12%
5. Google Plus plus.google.com 7.72%
6. Google Translate translate.google.com 6.07%
7. Help support.google.com 5.00%
8. Maps maps.google.com 4.91%
9. Google Drive drive.google.com 4.10%
10. Play play.google.com 2.59%
11. Adwords adwords.google.com 2.18%
12. News news.google.com 1.75%
13. Sites sites.google.com 1.01%
14. Code code.google.com 0.91%
15. Feedburner feedburner.google.com 0.78%
16. Product forum productforums.google.com 0.74%
17. Groups groups.google.com 0.67%
18. Url url.google.com 0.56%
19. Developers developers.google.com 0.56%
20. Picasa picasaweb.google.com 0.55%
21. Image search images.google.com 0.53%
22. Ejabat ejabat.google.com 0.46%
23. Google Scholar scholar.google.com 0.14%

Interesting isn't it? So Google documents are used more than Google Plus while Picasa for storing and viewing photos is not used that much. By the way, for a researcher the Google Scholar is quite useful service. :)

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011 by Jane Hart

SlideShare has a stream where you can follow your contacts. Anne Rongas had found this one and I went through it too. The top 3 tools for learning were Twitter, YouTube & Googlen Docs. Check the others by yourself:

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011

View more presentations from Jane Hart

Introduction to Google+

Maybe it is the summer time, maybe it is Google Wave and Google Buzz but I did not get so excited about this new service. Looks nice but still: how to get people hooked from the services they are already using? I am kind of tired of Facebook already and would like to get a new service where to discuss with different groups of my life. Diaspora seemed promising but it did not get the users.

So good luck Google+, I wont be one of your first users but if you get even 30% of my contacts in, I'll be there too. :)

Google reader by @CommonCraft

I thought I had had this video here before but could not find it. So find out how to use Google Reader.

Scared by Google Maps

Google is our big brother, isn't it?

Google Chrome comes with translation

OMG - this might be the reason for me to switch from Firefox to Chrome...

Google Docs in Plain English

How to use Google Docs?

Google Buzz

Explaining cloud computing

What is Google Wave?

Now that I am on Google Wave people asks invites from me but unfortunately I don´t have any.

This guy had a very creative way to ask for an invite, hopefully he has got it since the video is quite nice :).

Riding on a Wave

I was happy enough to get an invitation to Google Wave yesterday. To really test the Wave usage I need more contacts (I had one, the person who invited me and I don´t have any invites to send) but I could not find a way to find who in Finland are using it already. Perfect place for collecting this kind of list is of course Wave itself so I started to collect all Finnish Waver into one Wave. Interesting experiment. :)

Otherwise Wave looks really promising and I am really eager to use it, just need more contacts for that. :)

More Waves to Google

If the earlier video was too long for you, check these

Cut & simplified version:


Translator Rosy:


Google Wave team interviewed by Techcrunch:


Review report by ApFaqTech/Cnet:

Google Wave shakes us

More about Google Wave.
I want it - do you? :)

360 is ending - where to go?

Yahoo has finally closing its blogging service 360 after 2 years of the first warning. It is suggesting to use the blog in Yahoo's Profile service instead. Oh my. I haven't seen anyone using that blog publicly but my friend moved her posts there and the user experience was very poor (e.g. no tags, no monthly archives, no themes, hard to navigate, hard to follow). The profile page seemed to me like a Facebook undressed. All in all this makes my really sad - I have been a Yahoo fan for a long time and now they keep pushing me away. First they closed the photo service, then Geocities and now 360.

Another option Yahoo is offering is taking your content and moving it to a new service. That's what I have been trying to do today but it seems that Blogger is not capable of importing the stuff (a txt file and a lot of pictures were what was exported from 360). Would WordPress work better as that is what is recommended there?

Feel free to comment!

AdSense -easy money?

I just need to try this - can I make easy money with AdSense. Here are instructions how you add it to your blog. For my Finnish readers I recommend Mikko's Rahasta blog, he tells there e.g. useful stuff about AdSense. Check also AdSense policies in English or in Finnish

People normally hate ads but since they should be optimized for my blog you might see some links that are really interesting. If e.g. ten of you click an ad, they will pay me something like a buck. Yey - I'll be rich ;). Or maybe not but at least there's no harm done if I try out.

The problem with money making is that the regular readers won't come to my page, they follow the feeds with a feed reader. I noticed that you can add ads to feeds too, here are the instructions for that.

Yahoo vs Google

Yesterday I told you about the bookmarking by Yahoo. After that a friend mentioned that Google is also offering bookmark support and that made me to think about Yahoo and Google and their services.

I started to Yahoo very long time ago. My first email address was in the university, second one in Nokia and the third one in Yahoo. During that time it was not possible to read my university emails from Nokia office or from home and vice versa - I could not read my Nokia emails where ever. So I needed an email address that I could reach everywhere and Yahoo was the answer (the other option was Hotmail). Ever since that I've been using Yahoo for my private emails.

Then I found Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Photos (that was terminated when Yahoo bought Flickr), Yahoo's website builder Geocities and Yahoo's blogging service 360. I'm also using Yahoo's bookmarks and My Yahoo which is a portal where I can manage several Yahoo services (e.g. email, address book, calendar, weather, Flickr, news, notes, maps - even Facebook).

But Google was chasing after me. First my friends sent me invitations to Gmail and I created an account. Searching the emails works really well but still I was not tempted to start actually using the email - all my friends were using the Yahoo address and I was too lazy to inform them.

When the Yahoo Photos ended I moved part of my photos to Flickr but as you can show there only 200 pictures for free I took also Google's Picasa into use. It works like a dream too. (I'm going to talk you about the different photo services later.)

Then there started to be problems with 360 and most of my friends changed to Google's Blogger. I was loyal to Yahoo and kept waiting the blog change they have promised for 2 years now... I still have 2 blogs there but I have also 2 Blogger blogs and they work like a dream.

Google has a home page too, it's called IGoogle and I took mine into use today. The variety of themes was amazing (compared to Yahoo) and there was a lot of services too: bookmarks, maps, weather, Google Reader, Gmail, YouTube and Facebook.

So why do I still hang around with Yahoo? The main reason: because my emails are there. Maybe I should move to the next level and really compare these portals and choose the one that does the tricks for me...

There's also one interesting portal by Nokia: Ovi. There you have your contacts (easy to move them from your mobile phone), your calendar, maps, music, games, files, Flickr and my favorite: Share. I use Ovi for sharing my pictures and videos but have only tried the other features.

But hey, can I finally get the first real comment to this blog if I ask How do you choose which portal you are using and what are the killer applications for you?

Blogs @ Common Craft

Yet another Common Craft video, this time about blogs:



I've watched that several times every now and then and still find very useful ideas from it. Until now I have used Blogilista to find the new blogs to follow since I've been interested about Finnish blogs and bloggers. Now that I'd like to start building a global blogosphere for me with blogs and followers from all over the world I need new tricks. The video recommended to search blogs from Google's blog search or Technorati. I added my blog to Google's blog search and also to Technorati by claiming it (sounds like a gold rush, does it? Well, I have a hidden treasure here ;). For that purpose I needed to add this code here:

Technorati Profile .

I hope I can get new readers from those search, so welcome :).

PS. I also started to follow Common Craft at Twitter.

Google knows

Yeah, you know how to use Google, but here is a handy tip:

A picture is worth thousand words, right? Next time you are talking with a foreigner and you looking for the correct translation, use Google's picture search. The tip was originally about "spargel", but do you know what are "kirjolohi", "raphia", "Spatenmeissel" or "trankokeri". Now you do :).