As part of getting organized, I need to find tools which will help me get the job done.

Open letter to Google:

While I’m a big Google fan, unfortunately, Google apps fall short in many areas. Without better integration of the Google apps, Google will end up falling behind the likes of Facebook, iPhone, and potentially even Microsoft.
Overall
Google has some exceptional apps, like Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Picasa and others. On their own, most Google apps including Calendar, Reader, and others can stand on their own. However, from an integration point of view, Google generally falls flat. While there have been across the board changes to the apps, simply making the user interface more consistent is way short of the needed integration.
Below, I’ll get into details how specific Google apps can improve:
Google+
Google’s answer to Facebook. It started out with a great start, but statistics showed that the number of public postings decreased during beta. While taking Google+ out of private beta has brought on a huge number of people signing up, Google shouldn’t pause to congratulate itself because otherwise it will find similar to private beta, the general public will find Google+ less appealing to continue to use.
Some of the changes which Google needs to make to Google+ are:

• The most important change is to allow pseudonyms. If you really want people to grow their social network on the Internet, you have to give them to safety of a pseudonym. It’s a safety risk to expose so much traceable personal information on the Internet. At a minimum, it may be ok for the Google account to be tied to a real name, but it should not be required to expose one’s real name as part of Google+.
• The second most important change is to remove the requirement that a Google account is tied to an individual. Sometimes it makes sense to have family accounts to make it easy to also post information at a family level separate from an individual level.
• Google never has seemed to be good at developing an attractive user interface. While there’s something to be said about a simple interface, there’s also something to be said about aesthetically pleasing eye candy. If someone can have a beautifully architected plain house or a aesthetically pleasing, beautifully designed house, I think most people would pick the latter. This also applies to Android apps. Who wants to see 6 simple icons on a screen for a menu?

Update: My original post was from Sept 27, soon after the Google+ public launch. Google+ experienced peaked traffic, but it soon went down to pre-public launch levels as shown by [Chitika] in their post from October 7.

Can I call it or what? (OK, didn’t take a rocket scientist.)
Google has pointed out 3.4B pictures uploaded to Google+ in their first 100 days. That’s A LOT of photos. Hopefully they aren’t drinking their own kool-aid though. One of the functions of the Google+ Android app is to automatically upload photos taken from your Android device. I’ve had hundreds uploaded, but none shared on Google+.
Since then, Google has announced they will start allowing anonymous accounts. It’s a beginning, but they still have a ways to go to make Google+ the place to go for social networking.
Gmail
Gmail is generally known as the best mail service on the Internet. Lots of good capabilities exist, but if Google sits on its hands, Gmail will be passed.
Some of the improvements should include:

• Gmail should be one’s inbox for everything, not just mail. As an example, in addition to mail, it could post all updates from Facebook, Twitter, even 43T. Everything would be chronologically ordered like mail, but could filtered out whether user is only interested in mail or any one of the other sources. To me, it makes no sense to subscribe to updates, so that they can in turn send a mail to your Inbox which results in cluttering up one’s real Inbox. Why not just show the notifications as part of the Inbox without having to have actual mails be sent to you.
• If my inbox can now be filled with many more notifications from a wider range of sources, I need a better interface to be able to get through all of it. I can whiz through 100s of new articles using Google Reader. I would love a similar type of interface which would allow me to go through the entire inbox just as quickly.
• For people who have multiple Google accounts, there needs to be a way to share contact information. It makes no sense to maintain multiple duplicate copies of contact information. I know there is an export/import capability, but it should be automatic. In fact, while sharing contacts, it should also be possible to specify which contacts to share. As an example, for example, one would not necessarily want to share all of one’s individual contacts with contacts associated to a family account.

Android
I can’t believe I’m putting Android here. Andy Rubin, “father” of Android, is a brilliant guy… but sometimes, it looks like he doesn’t get it.
He criticized iPhone 4S personal assistant function Siri saying that people should use their phone to communicate to other people, not to their phone. He seems to be ignoring the fact that our phone is not just a phone anymore. It’s the reason personal digital assistants (PDA) are basically obsolete. People are now using their phones also as their PDAs… So of course, then an assistant is a perfectly logical use of their phone.
And hopefully Google realizes that their strategy for continued dominance of the phone market is to make Android ubiquitous as I mentioned in January. The new GoogleTV will have Android support. Archos is making landline phone systems and alarm clock type devices running on Android. It’s a start.
More to come including:

• Google Calendar
• Google Tasks
• Picasa
• Blogger
• Google Sites
• Google Docs
• Google Health
• Maps
• Google Bookmarks
• Google TV

See more progress on: create a way to evaluate and compare different things