Our hosting service switch, which was supposed to take up to two days, took about four hours, which means I frontloaded this week's clips for nothing. So, rather than just let the site sit idle until Monday I figured I'd cover some well-worn ground and talk about my concurrent switch to Gmail.

I haven't switched completely over -- I'm still using my same etchouse.com address -- but I am using the interface to coordinate all my accounts. Our new domain host has a nice e-mail administration interface, which makes it very easy to forward from one account to another, and I discovered that my wisc.edu account has the same thing if you look hard enough. I made the move primarily because it allows me to not have my old mail client, Entourage, running all the time on my underpowered laptop, and I'm already noticing the difference in performance in other applications. I also like having everything in one place and universally accessible. When I put the video clips together, for instance, I'm working on a desktop machine where I didn't previously have access to my mail, calendar or address book. Now I can get all that stuff from here, there or anywhere else. It's also amazing on blocking spam. I've had two slip through so far, whereas on a normal day it would've been about 50 or so before.

There are some downsides, though. One is Google Calendar, which just kind of smells. It works much better under Firefox XP than it does under Safari (where it really doesn't work at all) but it's still pretty featureless compared to Entourage. The address book is similar -- other than name and e-mail address, all the rest of a person's contact info just goes into a plain textbox, rather than into individual database entries. This is the big UI problem with Google's "keep everything" philosophy. While the Google search engine is certainly fine-grained and powerful enough to easily find the things I'm looking for at any given time, that's no reason to supercede my existing skill in putting things where I know I'm going to want them to be later. For example, mail can be "archived" but there's no apparent way to create folders to store things in, or to sort by category. What you get is a big mess of mail with a few simple ways to separate it (inbox vs. archived, "starred" vs. "unstarred") and a big Google search box on top. I have no plans to switch back at this point, and I have the rest of the summer to get used to it before I have to deal with a lot of e-mail again, but I do hope they start to crank up the features a little bit and start thinking about getting it out of beta.