Internet Marketing Blog

Meta Me: My Lifestream Through Google Analytics

Now that Google is increasingly owning everything online, they ought to start thinking about integrating their Google Analytics service into everything else they own not called AdWords.

In addition to analytics, the Google accounts and services I use include Webmaster Tools, Local Business Center, iGoogle, Alerts, Gmail, Talk, Docs, Notebook, Calendar, Maps, Maps for Mobile, Earth, Picasa, Groups, Page Creator, Reader, Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Blogger, FeedBurner, AdWords, AdSense, Checkout, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Video, YouTube, Desktop, Mobile Search, GOOG-411, Google SMS, Web History, Trends, Suggest, Sets, and Toolbar.

I'd like to get statistics for all of these products and services to analyze how and how often I use them. I admit, it would be a huge step for a lot of people to surrender and personally identify all that data about themselves and entrust it to a megacorporation.

Services such as Tumblr and the most recent Google acquisition, Jaiku, allow account holders to plug in the RSS feeds from all of their various online accounts, from your blog to YouTube to digg to Flickr and Twitter and display the content you create in one "lifestream" to which friends (or strangers) can subscribe. The emergence of the notion of, and services catering to, lifestreaming suggest that the idea of sharing your entire electronic life is gaining a foothold in the popular consciousness.

Certainly, user statistics for all these services are being collected by the service itself, though that data is not necessarily personally identifiable. Why not allow people or organizations access to their own data?

The payoff could be huge for both the user and the organization. Say Google runs with my request and integrates Analytics into all of their products and opens up the user data to their users. The analytics of how you behave online could prove invaluable to those users in terms of finding ways to use their time or services more efficiently or in hundreds of other ways we have yet to fathom.

The payoff for Google is massive and obvious in that they would accrue a gold mine of user behavior data, the knowledge from which they could then apply to their existing and future products.

Further, with Google's foray into the productivity software business, the resultant integrated system could form the foundation for a largely automated time recording system to calculate time sheets in the background, saving businesses a lot of lost time and productivity.

And that could the mother of all cash cows.

Replacing Outlook For A Failsafe Email Backup

Do as I say, not as I do.

Despite consistent warnings to friends, family, and clients alike, I failed to follow my own advice to regularly back up your data and paid the price when my hard drive failed recently. Recovering from a hard drive failure and data loss is a lengthy and painful process, but the good news is that I managed to recover with most of my data apparently in tact.

I now have two external hard drives to which I will regularly back up my data.

Replacing Microsoft Outlook

Disasters often present new opportunities. I have been thinking for some time that I'd like to find an alternative to Microsoft Outlook for my email and calendar software. I've always got my email program running and Outlook just seems to be slower and takes up too much of my computer's resources.

Perhaps more importantly, though, is that I want synchronized mobile access to my email and my calendar. This hard drive crash gave me the perfect opportunity to investigate my options.

Thunderbird Email Software

I seriously considered just configuring Gmail with my domain name because I figured it would be much less likely that Google would lose my data than another of my hard drives failing. The only problems with that is that, because I have multiple email addresses and Gmail accounts, I'd have to constantly remember to log in and check each account.

And I wasn't comfortable even with a one percent chance that Google would lose my emails. I wanted a failsafe solution where I could backup my Gmail.

A search provided me with blog post explaining how I could configure Gmail for my POP mail accounts and use Thunderbird to download from those Gmail accounts. The configuration would leave a copy of the emails in my Gmail accounts yet I could still use Thunderbird as my single email client. My emails could be downloaded to my computer but if my hard drive failed, I would have backups automatically in my Gmail accounts.

I've become a much bigger fan of open source software recently so I looked into the Mozilla Thunderbird email companion to the Firefox open source browser. Thunderbird looked as if had everything I needed in an email client but there was still one sticking point: A Calendar.

Lightning Calendar Plugin With Google Calendar

I thought about using Google Calendar or another online service but that, too, would require logging in every time I wanted to use it.

A little research unearthed a blog post explaining how to configure the Lightning calendar plugin for Thunderbird with Google Calendar to provide real-time syncing. The plugin is supposed to work with Microsoft Exchange calendar events, as well.
 

It looks beautifully and seamlessly all through the magic of XML. Create an event in Thunderbird, and it appears in your online Google Calendar and vice versa. Best of all, Google recently launched a mobile version of Calendar that works perfectly on tiny telephone screens.

Multiple Email Accounts & Mobile Access

A very nice aspect of Thunderbird is that you can configure it for use with multiple email accounts and each account can have it's own inbox.

Finally, everything is mobile. If I'm away from my desk and need to send an email, I can do it with someone else's computer or even my phone. If I need to look up an email I've already received, I can access it through Gmail's interface. And I've got access to my calendar wherever I go.

I've completely switched over now, so if there are any problems or glitches, I'll be sure to let you know.