The World of Google

Some of the google gadgets are fun, and a few are useful, though I wonder if actually having them on your page would embarrass you with the seriously techy crowd in much the same way as it embarrasses my daughter that I still have Tom as my friend on my myspace page. (What she doesn't know: Tom is really, really my friend! He may be faking it with y'all, but with me I can tell it's the real deal.)

We are doing lots of new stuff at a fast pace, and I think we need to pay more attention to privacy and security issues. Working at different reference desks, several times I've accidentally opened people's google stuff they forgot to log out of. It is easy to go from gmail to google docs to igoogle and then forget to log out of gmail, I guess. Or maybe the problem is that you have to opt out of "remember me on this computer." As for Facebook, what is that guy in our department learning from those girls' pages? What's he doing with his notebook with all the checkmarks in all the columns next to all the girls' names? Maybe we can have him do a workshop for us.