Google are forever tweaking existing products or bringing out new ones and, to their credit, are not afraid to admit it when they get it wrong, which means we will never see them entering the political arena.
There have been some great successes, such as the Android Operating System, the Chrome browser, Instant search, Google Places and driverless cars (except when they crash) to name but a few.
There have also been some fails, such as Google Buzz and the over-optimistic Google Wave, an epic fail.
Recently, Google has introduced its Apps Store and there is some pretty good stuff in there, primarily, but not exclusively, for users of the Chrome browser.
Firstly, though, despite being described as an Apps Store, not all of the items are actually applications. Some are, but others are extensions for the browser and some are just links to a website.
Nevertheless, well worth checking out as there are some definite goodies in there. For example:
Tweetdeck (application): Multi-account and multi-network social media application to help sift the wheat from the chaff. Uses far less valuable memory resources than the Adobe Air based desktop application and has the vast majority of the facilities of the desktop version. What it doesn’t currently have, I’m sure it soon will have as it is further developed.
Gmail Checker Plus (Extension): Incoming mail notifications for multiple accounts, dropdown summary with the possibility to immediately Read, Delete Mark as Spam or Archive. One click take you to your Gmail account.
New York Times (Application): Excellent, specially written application from the New York Times providing categorised news with an excellent interface.
Huffington Post (Application): Another excellent news application, this time in a NewsGlide format.
Google Shortcuts (Extension): A dropdown, horizontal or vertically oriented, list of sites, a sort of favourites list in many ways. There are over 150 Google links (Mail, Docs, Maps etc) you can add or, especially beneficial, there is the possibility to add your own custom links. Probably of special interest for those with an already overcrowded favourites toolbar.
Springpad (Application and Extension): A note-taking, clipping, filing and general cloud-based storage systems for just about anything.
Weather Window (Application): Interesting little application, highly configurable, to show you weather conditions and forecasts for any number of locations with a window showing simulated conditions at your chosen location.
Hootsuite (Link): Described as an application but currently only a link to the excellent Hootsuite twitter (and other social media sites) client. Sort your incoming chatter to your heart’s content and into manageable categories.
Scratchpad (Extension): A simple text-based note-taking extension, one of many such extensions available for the Chrome browser. Also works on Chromium-based browsers such as Rockmelt.
The possibilities are almost endless, just head over to Google Chrome Extensions to check them all out.