Nowadays, most people will have heard the term ‘cloud computing‘ being bandied around like some generic technological buzzword, and won’t give it a second thought. What they don’t realise, is the potential that the concept of ‘cloud computing’ actually has. Today, I’ll be talking about one relatively simple (but important) extrusion of this concept  into our everyday lives, and how we organise them. It’s called Google Sync.

So Google Sync is a very handy service, provided for free by everyone’s favourite world-dominating company, Google. It basically involves a simple, singular, online place to store and interact with your contacts, calendars and email – and then have any combination of these sync with whatever devices you see fit. If you have a Google Account already, great – you can go start using these services right now! If not, you can sign up for one here.

In case you don’t already know, a Google Account allows you to have a number of features all in one place, such as unified Web Search history, Mail, Calendar,  linking to your YouTube account and more. It’s generally a very handy collection of services for anyone that spends time on the net. Google Sync itself, just utilises 3 of these – Google Mail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts (available through the Google Mail service).

The general idea is that, as a Google Mail user, you will have already compiled a pretty comprehensive list of your email contacts, possibly even being vigilant enough to add useful bits of info to each contact such at telephone numbers and addresses. You may also, as a Google Calendar user, have a full online representation of your appointments/calendars. Google Sync allows you to ‘push‘ this info to or from your device, every time you, for example; add/edit a contact, add an event to your calendar, etc. It also enables ‘push’ email on any device you choose.  The best part is, the service utilises Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync – meaning that it is compatible with a whole list of devices, including all major Operating Systems (Windows, Mac & Linux), iPhone, Symbian Devices, Android Devices and Windows Mobile devices. A full list can be found at the link in the introduction. All of this allows you not only to back up some of the most important information on your mobile device and have it all unified in one place, but also allows you to edit that information on a PC (or anything with a web interface) and have it sync in real-time back and forth with said mobile device. Personally, I use the service on my iPhone – and it works beautifully. But then I am a little biased – I am a big fan of unification and simplification!

If you, too, are a fan of such online organisation, or generally just like to experiment with these kinds of services, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this one. It really is a handy facility – and I only wish I could let more people know about these kinds of services so they could simplify their systems of data storage in this way! Do you use Google Sync? Any thoughts, positive, negative or otherwise? Let us know in the comments below.