I am sure I am not the only one who emails herself documents, pictures, and spreadsheets as an extra back-up precaution. Basically, using my Gmail account as an additional data storage device. Numerous people upload their pictures onto Picasa, documents to Google Docs, and save every single message they receive in Gmail. Some of us upload full resolution pictures to Picasa, not only to share them with friends and family, but to store a backup copy away from our own computers, or even away from our own home. In case of a fire, natural disaster, or computer breakdown this is a really good precaution to take with the images or documents that are important to us.

However, as we produce more data, and more images, our storage needs increase. When Gmail was launched, it offered a (no longer) astonishing amount of space: 1 GB. Nowadays the storage capacity of Gmail has increased sevenfold, and that translates to a lot of mail! I personally like to keep my inbox relatively small, compared to some others. Right now, I am packing away about 8000 emails, which I would love to bring down by about half once I have the time to go through them all and delete the ones that are no longer relevant or important. Ultimately, I feel my ability to find important data diminishes exponentially as a function of the increasing number of messages in my inbox. However, if you do want to keep all your messages, or have to, and are running out of space, Google also offers additional storage space for a relatively modest cost.

The storage you can buy from Google comes in different sizes. The storage space is also shared between Gmail and Picasa, and is in addition to your current free quota. Google has been dropping the prices of storage, as the cost of hardware and infrastructure required for the same amount of storage reduces as well. All in all, this is quite nice, but the question is whether the price paid is truly worth it.

First, let’s take a look at Google’s storage plans

You can buy extra storage here, and depending on your needs it comes in different sizes and there are different price tags associated with them:

• 20 GB costs $5 per year.
• 80 GB  costs $20.00 per year.
• 200 GB costs $50.00 per year.
• 400 GB costs $100.00 per year.
• 1 TB costs $256.00 per year.

Each plan comes to $0.25 per GB of storage, so there is no savings involved with purchasing a larger plan. As a result, it is smart to start with the smallest plan and work your way up if needed.

It is doubtful that Google is offering this service at cost though, so I was a bit dissappointed that each of the plans comes down to the same per GB cost. I would have expected that someone purchasing a TB of storage would deserve a little bit of a discount, based on just sheer volume. In fact, the 1TB plan seems marginally more expensive than any of the other ones, at an average cost of $0.256 per GB of storage.

The Benefits of Buying Google Storage

Why would you pay year in year out for storage, when you can just purchase an external hard drive once? This was my first instinct when I started thinking about this concept, but although buying storage real estate with Google seems more expensive than just buying a hard drive, there are some serious benefits involved in doing so:

• The virtual aspect: If your computer breaks down, is stolen, or your house burns down, Google will still have a copy of your documents and pictures stored safely on their servers.
• The portability aspect: wherever you go, your data travels with you. You can access and share pictures and documents from any other computer, anywhere in the world. You can download them directly to another machine, instead of having to send them. This can save time, and money. When you are traveling it can be particularly handy if you do not want to carry around an additional hard drive with data (few people can fit 1TB on their laptops), or you don’t want to bring your own computer altogether.
• Wear and tear on hardware: Although you pay a yearly fee, we can assume that the cost of storage will continue to decrease and become more affordable as time goes on. The same happens with hard drive prices. However, your external hard drive might break. It might do so at the worst possible time (all data is lost!), and the replacement cost of your hard drive also needs to be factored in. I have spend a few hundred dollars over the past few years in data storage costs, and 100% of that involved purchasing new hard drives. I did have a few hard drives break down on me (without doing anything to cause this, there was no dropping of the equipment and I also did not throw it against a wall…). If you take all these factors into account, virtual storage does not come at a much higher premium. I am also assuming (anyone can correct me if I am wrong) that Google backs up the data entrusted to them, meaning it is relatively safe to assume you will not suddenly lose everything. However, you still need to do your own due diligence and make some extra copies of the really important stuff if you want to be sure.

The one aspect that does concern me a little is privacy. Who can guarantee how private our data is when it is in the hands of a third party? I trust Google, but things could still go wrong. I think I would be very selective with what I store with Google, and might not entrust my most sensitive documents to them. Having said this, I haven’t heard of any privacy issues concerning Google, and it probably will not be an issue in the future. However, just the thought that someone could break into a server and steal my private data scares me enough to restrict myself from storing anything online that should not fall into the wrong hands. Aside from financial information and data concerning my personal identity, there are still many GB of documents and pictures that can find a safe haven in Google storage.

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Here’s a collection of the entire world-wide Sesame Street tribute:

An illustration of the cast of Sesame Street (USA) This is probably the picture you get when you think about Sesame Street (minus the Google logo in the middle, haha).

Abelardo Montoya – Mexico’s very own Big Bird. He appeared in Plaza Se’samo.

Kami – South Africa had its own HIV positive character on the show Takalni Sesame (Be Happy Sesame). Announced in 2002, Kami is an orphaned muppet girl with HIV and the sniffles. The character’s name derives from the word Kamogelo, which means acceptance.

Leniemienie – Netherlands and Belgium had a cute little six-year-old mouse on Sesamstraatwho started out as a simple mouse looking for cheese. When female emancipation fires died down, she became more child like.

Boombah and Chamki – India’s stars on Gali Gali Sim Sim, Boombah is a vegetarian lion who loves to dance and Chamki is an inquisitive schoolgirl who loves to learn. Chamki knows karate.

Abigail – Israel’s own Elmo, Abigail stars on Rechov Sumsum where she interacts with Israeli celebrities and speaks about herself in the third person.

I didn’t even know these characters existed until I saw the logos up on Google! It just goes to show how far spread this amazing show really is. For more information on Sesame Street, international or not, check out Muppet Wiki!

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Have you Googled anything today? If you have, and you used the regular Google homepage, you might have noticed some familiar looking big feet. Google is celebrating with Sesame Street, which is turning 40. The first Sesame Street episode was on November 10th, 1969, and it is the longest running kids program on national television.

Google, being a company that would not exist without the Internet, has a more direct connection than Sesame Street than you might suspect: the Internet is roughly as old as Sesame Street, and the two ‘matured’ together over the years.

Today’s Google Doodle, Big Bird’s legs, might very well be one of the most recognizable Google Doodles yet. Love the Google Doodles as much as we do? Here is an archive of the latest creative efforts from Google.

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For those lucky iPhone users out there, here are a few easy steps to access Gmail through a shortcut. No need to use your browser, if you follow these steps:

1. Open your Safari browser and surf to www.Gmail.com
2. Sign into your Gmail account.
3. At the bottom of the screen, you should see a “+” symbol.
4. Tap the +.
5. Now, select “add to Home Screen”.
6. Tap “Add” to confirm your choice.
7. Now, you will see a Gmail icon on your home screen, and you’re done!

Google made a video about Gmail for mobile, which includes adding the Gmail direct shortcut to your iPhone’s home screen. It is a nice visual guide through the Gmail for mobile application.

Got a question about Google? Ask me in the forums: http://www.googletutor.com/forums/

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The Data Liberation Front is a new project by Google to further strengthen its commitment to let users easily export their data from Google products.

The site has been developed by Google engineers from its Chicago office with a simple goal – teach end users how to move their data out of Google products in the easiest possible manner and also, how they can easily transfer stuff online to their Google accounts.

The website already lists a huge number of Google services like Adwords, Analytics, Calendar, Blogger, Docs, Gmail, Maps, Picasa and many more. As new Google products are introduced and export options are made available, the site is updated with the same.

There’s also a Google Moderator page for the site where users can add tips and suggestions on what more products should be added.

Overall it’s a simple but a very useful initiative which would bolster confidence of Google’s customers in the company. I’d also call it a useful site to bookmark. In case you are wondering how you would export your Analytics data or Docs presentations, this site could always come handy.

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Using Google Docs is getting easier and easier as more features are added. At this point, I could completely imagine using Google Docs pretty much exclusively, and having it replace my regular word processing software. The benefits are simple: Google docs lives online, so  hard drive space is saved, features are constantly added, it is more than adequate for standard document creating and editing, you can translate documents into other languages, and documents can be shared very easily with anyone who has an email address.

The one thing that used to keep me from using Google Docs for all my files is just that getting them on there required either creating them straight in Google Docs, or copying and pasting the documents into a new file unless I wanted to upload files one by one. I’d only do it with documents I would really need to use on the road.

This week, Google Docs introduced a cool new way to download a large number of documents out of Google Docs, onto your hard drive. Whether you just want to back them up, or use them offline as well, you can get up to about 20,000 files in one go. That’s right, 500MB of content can be downloaded in one single .zip file, which according to Google is about 20,000 typical files.

Three other cool new features in Google Docs

Google Docs has a few more new improvements in store, which are especially handy when you have a large number of files in your Google Docs, and are sharing files with other users:

1. Viewed items: Google Docs will indicate whether or not your have viewed a document. Items you have not opened yet are bolded, while viewed files are not. Files you are sharing with others will also be bolded again once someone else has made changes to it.
2. New! files are will be marked with a bright red “New!” label right next to them, and of course bolded because they will also be ‘unviewed’.
3. Easy uploading: Before Google made it easy to download your files from Google Docs, they made it very easy to upload them with a multi-file uploader.

Will these features make you use Google Docs even more often now? I think it definitely will help me when managing my documents!

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It doesn’t end there, and face tagging isn’t the focus on this article. There is another feature that is the photo importing tool. Previous versions of Picasa, and any other photo management tools I have used previously, wouldn’t let you select exactly which pictures you want to upload to your computer, and which you do not.

Trivial feature? Not at all,.. for example, on my recent trip I borrowed someone’s camera for a week. The camera still had pictures on it that didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t want to download them to my computer and then have to delete them again.

Another couple of reasons this feature rocks!

1. Aside from letting you choose which pictures to upload to your computer, it will also recognize the duplicate pictures already on your hard drive, but which you have not deleted from the camera yet. No matter which folder you put them into!
2. Sometimes you crop or change a picture, but leave the original on the memory card in your camera, Picasa will not automatically filter these out as duplicates, but you can easily do it manually.
3. You can also indicate which pictures shouldn’t hit your hard drive, but should instead go straight onto Picasa Web Albums.

How to upload your pictures, step by step

As we’re talking pictures here, the best step by step guide you can get to uploading your pictures is a visual one. Here is a detailed video showing you all the steps to importing your photos from your camera, excluding pictures, and uploading them to Picasa Web Albums.

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Here is a cool video Google put together showing you how to create task lists and manage different to-do lists. There are a couple of tips in this short video that I wasn’t aware of yet either, so if you think you know what your task list can do for you, look at this 1 minute video and you might be surprised!

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Tasks in Google Calendar

The same tasks you have in your Gmail account can be accessed in your Calendar. There isn’t really anything special you have to do to pull up your to-do list. It is easily accessible through a link on the top left side of Calendar:

When you’re tired of being reminded of all the things you have to take care of, you can make the list disappear again by clicking on the same “Tasks” link.

Tasks on your Mobile

Accessing Tasks on your mobile is as easy as surfing to www.gmail.com/tasks from your mobile browser.

Tasks on iGoogle

iGoogle has a special gadget for Tasks. The easiest way to find the gadget, and add Tasks to your iGoogle home page, is through the link on the Tasks page.

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With layers being the new dynamic feature of this version of Google Maps, there is no better way to show it than with a video. Google thought the same thing, and produced this video below:

So basically, the difference between this and previous versions is that the new maps have ‘layers’. This means that you can get additional information, aside from just the map, about the location you are. Google Maps can pull information from Wikipedia about places in the area, it can superimpose transit maps, and give traffic information.

The following video shows how to use the transit layer in Google Maps:

For now, transit maps are only available for about 50 big cities in the world, but hopefully they will keep adding more. In any event, when traveling there is a fairly large chance you’ll pass through a big city, where knowing how to get around will come in handy!

You can also use my maps to plan out a trip, and access the info directly from your phone while you are traveling. Latitude also works with the new version of Google Maps, so you can keep track of where your friends are, if you have the function turned on.

Where can you get Google Maps 3.2?

The latest version can be downloaded directly from your Blackberry. Simply open up your Blackberry browser, and type in: m.google.com/maps.

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