A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

Moving to the Web: Part 2

// July 30th, 2007 // fun

If you are reading this first, before you’ve read the other two parts to this long tutorial, please visit:

My Conversion to Web 2.0
Moving to the Web: Part 1

And now on to the good stuff…

Part 2: Online chatting and email

Instant Messaging is beyond popular. It’s really a staple of most peoples’ online lives. Not my wife’s, but that’s the fault of her employer for blocking those programs. The problem with instant messaging comes when you leave your computer and want to access your buddy list from work, or a library or wherever. Not all companies let you install IM programs, and your local library certainly wont allow it. The other issue is having multiple IM clients that you use and want to consolidate into one program for easy access.

Obviously the main point of this series I’m doing is to move you to the web for everything. So this first step is to switch to an all-inclusive, web-version of an IM client. This allows you to chat anywhere you find a computer (granting they aren’t blocking things).

The recommended site to sign up for this is Meebo.com. It’s such an impressive and easy site to join. You sign up, put in your information for each chat service you use and you are done! It works with AOL, MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo and maybe a few others. The webpage after you login acts like a virtual desktop, where you can move buddy windows around like a normal window. Not only that, it holds a bit of history on your chat sessions, so you can see what you said before logging off last time. Pretty handy. You leave it open in one of your browser tabs from my first tutorial and it’s perfect!

The next step in your conversion is email. Some of you may use online email already, and if so, that’s great. That’s pretty much the point of this step. My main goal will be to pimp Google Mail since it’s an all-in-one solution.

Let’s say you use Outlook, or Outlook Express or some kind of desktop client for checking and storing mail. The immediate downside is, of course, you can’t see it when you are on another computer in another state while on vacation. Maybe you don’t want to drag that laptop along with you but want to check mail, organize it, etc.

Google Mail allows you to have a @Gmail account (Google’s own email address for you – sort of like Hotmail, or Yahoo). But the biggest plus is that it gives you the ability to add your personal, POP3 accounts to it’s service. This means you can check all your mail accounts right here in Google. I believe it will even check your Hotmail and Yahoo accounts as well. It also gives you THREE GIGABYTES of disk space to store your mail, which is incredible. You can have mail on there forever.

It was a huge step for me to go from relying on Outlook to using Google Mail. But the switch has been so great. I was able to check mail from a training class last week and I’m now able to see it from work much easier than before.

A nice feature is being able to tag incoming mails. This is basically like creating “subfolders” in an email client. You can tag something “Family”, or “Finances” and when you click on that tag on the menu bar, you’ll see all mails in that tag. It’s a sweet way to organize everything. You can create filters that tags mails upon their arrival. Another thing it does is to organize email threads into one email group that you can view by using tabs.

The final plus is speed. I was using Outlook 2007 which is a resource hogging nightmare. Even Outlook 2003 was brutal, and slow at times. Google Mail is a simple, quick and easy tool. I’ve never had an email client so quick. And it’s free, so why haven’t you switched yet?

So that’s it for Part 2. A lot to take in, but two simple, easy solutions. Give it a try and let me know how it goes. You can always go back to using your other clients.

Sign up for: Google or Meebo