The magic of Google

If we try to find out internet users who would manage to do their job without using a service from Google, it would be a tough search. Today, several product names from Google are vividly used as an adjective amongst the internet users, esp. the kids and teens.

Years ago, Sabeer Bhatia came up with world’s first webmail which Microsoft owns today - Hotmail. It had all goodies one would want to see. Yahoo mail, Rediffmail and others came alongside but Hotmail and Yahoo continued to battle for the number one in this segment. All this continued to happen while Google was known to be a search engine, of course the best in what it does.

Blogger was with Google but it had yet to see its best days ahead. Then came Gmail – fast, intuitive and brand Google! Students, freelancers, internet savvy men and women wanted to have one with their name. (and possibly a “.” to distinguish the first name from the last!) Ever since, we’ve seen masses moving to Gmail. The rest is history. Google Apps was another feather in it’s cap. Today, many of us proudly use Google Apps for email, calender and more!The story with Blogger was no different. Not all of us know that what is today known as blogger or blogspot was once developed in August 1999 by Pyra Labs.

Today, twitter has hit the mainstream social media. Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders for this amazing service were the two people behind blogger as well. But Blogger could see its success only after Google acquired it. That may be one of the reasons why Twitter isn’t yet ready for a sale! YouTube was a yet another profitable buy by Google.

Even today, Blogger is the leading hosted blogging platform. Wordpress.com follows next, despite a sharp growth in Wordpress users over the past 2 years. Blogger will be 10 years old this August and is still growing.

On this note, Google has come up with a story writing initiative by blogger users. Google asks, – What’s your story? Did your blog help you find a job? Learn a language? Interact with your fans? Master a new skill? Battle an illness? Turn a hobby into a career? We read as many blog posts as we can, and what we do read is often brilliant. But we want to know more - we want to hear from you about what Blogger has meant to you over the past decade.

Do what you do best: tell your story. Write a post, and then let us know about it by filling out this form. Keep an eye on Blogger Buzz, where we’ll be sharing some of our favorites over the coming weeks.

The dent which is to be noted here is the reason behind the success of a product or service which comes with the Google brand. Having said that, it’s not every product that comes up from Google’s pouch is a success. You would want to check out a list of products that emerged out of Google’s inventory and eventually failed.

However, products like Adsense, Orkut, Adwords have seen some immense success without a second thought.

The magic of google is prevalent while Gmail and Orkut are still in beta. There is a lot more which is yet to be unrolled in the times to come. A company founded in 1998 with just over 20,000 employees worldwide today has given a lot to the world. All this when computing is more about connectivity and portability today!