Alert!

In addition to having admittedly brilliant products, part of what's led to Google's ubiquitousness is it's openness. What I mean by that is it's willingness to interface with other products in the same field.

For example, Google Calendar acts as the intermediary between all my other calendars, allowing all of them to peacefully coexist. At work we use Thunderbird as our email and calendar client (with the Lightning add-on). I feed my Google Calendar into the Thunderbird on my work computer and also onto my laptop Thunderbird, so I can have my calendar when I'm not at work. I have Google Sync on my phone, so my Google Calendar is on my device calender. When I'm on the go, I can add to or look at my work schedule.

This redundancy does have drawbacks, however. When I'm at work I use my laptop and my desktop and my phone. When a calendar alarm goes off, this is where I get notifications: 1) my phone, 2) my desktop Thunderbird, 3) my laptop Thunderbird, 4) my Google Calendar on my laptop, and last but not least, 5) I get a pop-up notification on Gmail if it's open. That's right - I get five cascading notifications of an event. (My phone is the first.)

It's a wonder I can get anything done on time!

A Slight Margin of Error

After once being wooed by both Microsoft and News Corp, it looked like Yahoo was going to be the big winner in a tale of two futures. But their algorithm for playing one bid off the other was apparently a bit flawed (they thought they could get $37 per share out of Microsoft's initial $33 offer).

Today, Yahoo faced a 13 percent drop in share price over the news that Microsoft "unequivocally" wants nothing to do with the company. Ironically, Yahoo now finds itself paired up with an unlikely partner for ad revenue sharing--Google.

It may not be the dream deal they were hoping for, but at least it should help improve their algorithm.