Google is taking over the world, and ruining my life.

As someone who has grown up in the world's largest democracy, I have always been wary of giant conglomerates. The fact that I am the world's biggest cynic doesn't help either. Don't get me wrong, in a recession, sometimes the best place you can be is in a diversified global body that is too big and too deep into things to fail (or be allowed to fail).

Let me start by making a few things clear. I intended to write a post about Obama's inauguration, the significance of yesterday being MLK Jr. day, and how the new president won over most of the IU students. Then something happened that made me completely switch gears, and take the 10 minutes I have between class and work to rant about google. 

Blogger.com is a google owned website. So is Youtube, Orkut and about a million other websites. All of this was fine till Gmail, in its alter ego as Umail,  became the email service provider of choice for IU. I have long had a dual presence in the web world - one email for the university stuff, and one for personal use(only). This is not required, so it IS just me. But one thing that almost all of us do is multitask. I don't have time to check my university mail, my regular mail, Orkut (which is a less glamorous cousin of Facebook and MySpace), and all the other websites I frequent individually. And because of Gmail being my email service, and my unversity email, EVERYTIME I leave one website and go to another, I have to sign out and sign in again. Otherwise it asks me to create a new account(multiple accounts IS the problem, dude). 

So as a consumer who doesn't want to a)remember multiple passwords, b)have to keep signing in and out and c) have to let go of the separation of personal and university email divisions, I have one plea to make to google : Stop taking every successful website over! I would like some diversification in my choice of websites, and who they get their marching orders from!

I'll have the Obama post up soon. I missed the inauguration since I was in class, where the prof reminded us there was bound to be clips of the speech on youtube(google, sigh). 

On a happier note, I found a great way to get indie music from fresh artists for free :iTunes indie sampler. It's free for download, 20 songs (I like about 12 of them, the others are ok, not great). Join their Facebook group (before google takes that over too) and get the code!