Google, MSN and Yahoo: which way to turn?

Modern consumerism is embodied by the notion of choice. If a consumer is willing to pay, there is always a choice of products. Communism is dead and choice is here.

Even Supermarkets in erstwhile Soviet Moscow which only carried a choice of vodka during the Brezhnev era now cater to the growing Russian nouveau riche. Perhaps the biggest problem for the Russian super rich is not what to buy but how to remain safe from kidnapping and crime.

Computers and internet connections also cost money – public Wi-Fi notwithstanding. However, armed with a laptop and the internet a lot of other stuff is 'free.' Free is in quotation marks because time spent surfing is not actually free – the old adage time is money.

Like many consumers, I have multiple email addresses and too many passwords. Over time, consumers create some order out of the chaos caused by abundance. Emails are narrowed to one, possibly two; a system for remembering passwords is implemented.

However, there is no getting away from multiple. The internet is no exception.

Like a natural evolutionary process, my service providers reflect internet market share among the three biggies: Google, Yahoo and MSN. I use hotmail as my primary personal email, Yahoo is my home page and I rely upon Google for my blogging and secondary email activities.

I was not always a Google user. In fact, I almost felt obligated to use Yahoo for internet searches given Google's overwhelmingly dominant market share. My conversion occurred after I established a Google 'blogspot' blog.

Despite problems with my 'gmail' (it tends to hang and is slow) I clearly understand why Google is google. I have even come to accept google as a verb in the English language!

Google has pulled together many disparate elements of the web into one seamless service. I don't know of any other internet service provider that contains a bank of photographs, blogging, analytics and of course the search facility, all under one umbrella. Google is user friendly and easy to learn.

If I can learn the intricacies of Google's blogging service then anyone can! There is only one way to learn and that's by doing. For avid readers of content on the blogosphere, I highly recommend joining the 'underworld' to share your ideas. In the blogosphere nothing is sacred, not even the PAP.

And someone somewhere on this beautiful planet of ours will certainly find your thoughts interesting. It's called the Fat Tail.