– Lifehacker is currently running a poll to see if folks would switch to Google Music (presumably from iTunes). Although the options are a bit biased, right now it is still leaning WAY toward folks switching to Google Music.

77.6% – I’d have to be sure, but if it does for my music what Gmail did for my email, count me in!

7.3% – I doubt it; I’m pretty picky about how I manage my music.

5.3% – Google already has enough of my data; I’d rather not give them more.

7.3% – No thanks; I’m perfectly happy with my current media.

2.4% – Other

What stands out to me here is the small percentage of folks that are worried about Google owning a lot of their data… and Lifehackers readers are typically techie type folks. This is one of the arguments that come up time and again with Google products, but it doesn’t seem to have as big of an impact on people when the product is good enough. Not sure if that is good or bad.

– “YouTube has a new video editor that lets you create videos using excerpts from the videos you’ve already uploaded. You can also add a music file from the AudioSwap library.”

This is a great development as we look forward to ChromeOS and web based applications. We are getting closer and closer to not needing a local computer where everything is stored in the cloud.

– Google published a GREAT video today that really explains and shows off what Google TV is going to be. Really it is going to be a fantastic multimedia device where you can access so much information. The ability to install any android app is also going to be incredible. Check out the video.

– “If you’re a fan of Google Tasks and you’d like to put quick access to your task lists right on your Android home screen, gTasx is a simple wrapper for Google Tasks.”

– Google posted an article today that pointed out 16 new applications that are available in the Google Apps domain. One of them that looks really promising is Harvest! It is a time tracking application. It costs per user, but this app and apps like this could really increase the functionality of your google apps domain… and no need to maintain the infrastructure of this great service. It’s all inclusive.

BENEFITS
* Fast to setup and deploy to your team
* Access your data from anywhere
* Easy-to-use time tracker, no training necessary
* Track time/expenses on the go from a free iPhone application
* Stay on budget with project tracking features
* Desktop widgets, Twitter, and many 3rd-party add-ons
* Fill out timesheets quickly within Gmail

ADDITIONAL FEATURES
* Login with your Google Apps or Gmail account
* Export data to QuickBooks, Excel or Google Docs
* Generate and send invoices based on tracked time
* Create and send job estimates
* Use Harvest with other leading small business web applications

– “Another big positive in Buzz’ favor is that it rarely goes down, thanks to Google’s infrastructure. Have you seen all the Twitter outages in the last few days? The last one was a doozy, lasting at least six hours.

Twitter noted on its status blog: “We’re currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching.”

That is so 2000! It’s like the dot-com boom days when engineers didn’t compensate for traffic spikes. Why does this keep happening?

I don’t know, but that alone could be reason to drive Twitter users to use Buzz.

Buzz can’t replace Facebook, whose network is too large, its functionality too rich and its applications too popular.

But there’s no reason to believe Buzz can’t become the new go-to Web service for messages and conversations.”

– Google launched a new piece in their Google Docs a couple of months ago called Drawings. I have been using it plan out my business, as well and create some really awesome drawings. They make it really easy to just post drawings directly into docs.

Today they posted a great article about gettings started and some possibilities on their docs blog. You can read more below.

– Garret Rogers has an interesting post this morning on Googling Google where he points out that Google’s Chrome OS will be able to remote desktop to regular computer to run the applications that will never be able to run in a browser. That is a good move on their part.

I hope that one day we will be able to have all of our applications in the cloud, and we are really getting there for about 80% of the people, but for folks like me that use programs like dreamweaver and photoshop we will probably need a computer to remote to for a while.

That being said, it would be great if we had a virtual remote desktop we could remote too… maybe Google will create one of those for us to run on their massive server farms.

– If you are looking for an easy way to create your own template Google’s Blogger has a nice template designer that will do the trick! Check it out!

– This title is from an article published on CNN this morning? It is really a great article that points out the flaws of the iPhone 4. They also point out that the HTC Evo (Android Powered) also has a front facing camera for video chats.

My personal opinion is that this is starting us down the right path. The big problem right now is that you can only call to other iPhones… and only in wifi.

I think that for now most folks are going to use secondary apps like Fring, or Skype for video chats because they work across all platforms.. but I hope to see the day when we can make video calls to all network, and to landlines, etc. That would be great.

– As many of you know, speed reading using technology (or flash players) is one of the things I recommend for saving time in the gProductivity system. Here is an article that talks about some of the best tips and tricks for speed reading.

– Lifehacker has a great article on how to mount USB drives and keyboards from your computer on your Nexus One. While it is really techie right now and you probably wouldn’t want to try it on your own, it does open the door for a possible future end user application that would do the same.

Being able to connect all sorts of devices to our super phones is always a nice thing.

– Google collaborated with Pixar to create one of those funny “Search Stories.” Check out the link below to see a nice Toy Story search story.

– Google announced today a new way they are searching the internet. For most of us that really just means that their content will be faster and more fresh. In layman’s terms.

It looks like instead of indexing entire pages only periodically they will take dynamic information (the power of the internet now a days) and be able to add that to the index they maintain without having to rescan the entire website. That is pretty amazing.

There will certainly be some implications for SEO and webmasters.

You can read more about it at the link below.

– Google updated their chat client to include nice little icons at the top of the chat window for enabling video chat and group chats. I guess I won’t be the cool guy any more that knows how to do all this “cool stuff” with Google… dang…

It’s alright though…

You can read more about it with the link below.

– “Share, annotate and review your documents online.” That is LetsAnnotate.com’s tagline. TechCruch pointed them out today and I think they have potential!

They are really a nice Googellize technology in that they have not only an online interface, but the ability to collaboratively annotate PDF’s on an iPad as well. That is pretty neat.

There is a FREE forever plan for up to 2MB and 2 collaborators. They also have some paid plans for more collaborators and more space.

– There is a great extension for you Google freaks out there that easily allows you to open all links to PDF’s and PowerPoint presentations in the Google Docs viewer without having to download them locally. With the recent addition that allows you to easily save things to google docs there is no need to save locally!

Nice! This will be very helpful in the Chrome OS!

– Lifehacker’s Gina posted an article today about digitizing your life. She did a fantastic job of breaking it down by the following categories.

1. Paper
2. Images
3. Audio
4. Video
5. Storage and Organization

This deserves a good read for any modern knowledge worker!

– There was a great article published today with this same title … perhaps my favorite line is “Apple has taken the lead once again, but I don’t think Android will be playing catchup for long.”

This is written by Jason Kincaid, who like me was an iPhone fanboy til 2009 (like me) when he changed over to the Droid. I would have to say he is spot on here. The new iPhone looks great, but I’m not going to get rid of my Droid for this… Android will catch up and soon.

Besides… I can always play with my iPad…

– You know I am very interested to watch how Microsoft finally develops into this online collaboration space. Google has years ahead of them in development, but I am hopeful Google will continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve.

25 GB of free storage… not too shabby… And it syncs up with Skydrive… where is that Google Platypus drive we heard about so many years ago already?

– So Lifehacker is currently doing a little very informal poll to see which people prefer more… iPhone or Android. Right now it is an overwhelming 67% for the Android and 29% for the iPhone. That is no big surprise considering the techie slanted audience that reads lifehacker (like yours truly). We like freedom… we like the ability to do what ever we want with our device.

That being said, I do have a little iPhone envy today after giving up my iPhone about 6 months ago for the Droid (which I love). I take solace in the hope that there will be updates coming that enable video conferencing on the droid devices…

– Oh this is great! Now any address or google map URL in an email will automatically contain a google map! So enabled that one just now! Looking forward to having that functionality!

– If you want to know about the new iPhone this is the video to watch. 6 minutes and you know what everyone is talking about.

Things I love – Multitasking on iPhone – Faster – Video Chat

Of these, video chat is certainly the one that has the most potential for changing and pushing the limits of mobile devices. Love advances like this… because eventually it trickles down.

– “Schoology’s mission is to leverage the familiarity of popular social media tools to improve communication and collaboration inside and outside of the classroom. Schoology provides a full suite of learning management tools, including an online gradebook, attendance, test/quizzes, discussion boards, blogs, homework dropboxes, and collaborative course and group pages.”

This could be huge for schools… finally someone that gets how important social media is in schools… harness it, don’t act like it isn’t there!

– Google Sites is one of those tools that is really not used enough for collaborative groups. It really is a pretty powerful tool. This article goes over how to embed a doc into a site… really neat!

– Hmmm… maybe I’m a little sad today that I got rid of my iPhone and went to Verizon.. here’s to hoping they get a Verizon version someday….

– This is great… and long overdue. iBooks could never be a real serious device for academics and business people till we have some sort of annotation functionality.

I am still hoping they will eventually get a pen I can just write on my books with… that would be awesome!