Work in progress (TODO: put animated image of construction guy here)

Since early days I have said that the Internet will only be useful if it can provide me with these three things. It must allow me to:

1. easily share my emails between computers,
2. easily share my bookmarks between computers, and
3. store events, dates and notes straight from my email client

The Internet's greatest potential for me is in the ability to de-personalise a personal computer so you don't have to carry your data around. If I can log into an Internet cafe in Germany and chat to my friends, read my emails and check my calendar exactly the same as if I were at home, then the Internet has done its job for me.

I look at the points I outline above as watermarks; not so much a complete list of functionality as an indication of how useful it is for my needs.

Share emails
Web based email has been around for a while, but it wasn't till Gmail came along that it became useful. Gmail doesn't attach ads to all your emails, the interface is sweet, and of course it offers a good sized mailbox.

Plus, it integrates with Google calendar.

Share bookmarks
There's always del.icio.us, but it seems directed more towards the whole 'social networking' angle. I'm sure that it probably does what I want, plus a whole bunch more that I haven't bothered finding out, but I just haven't taken the time to look into it.

As of yesterday however, I have started using the Google Browser Sync firefox extension. This approach actually modifies your browser's bookmarks, history, passwords and all that stuff directly, instead of providing you with a web-page. No matter how simple and awesome a web page is, it can't be as useful as updating your web-browser directly.

Events, dates and notes
Google calendar is currently the best solution I've found for tracking events. It still lacks a few things - allowing you to simply click on any date in the body or subject of a Gmail email to create an event from it would be sweet - but it makes up for it in the group organisation features (shared events allow users to see each other's comments, for example.)

Kiko seems pretty feature-complete, but its a big chunk of Flash that goes slowly and is buggy. If Google calendar took a few of its contacts and mail client integration features onboard though, it would be an unstoppable force.

There is still no decent note-taking device, but I believe Google has one of these in the works as well.

I feel really uncomfortable in shilling for a company like this, by the way. It just so happens that Google provide all the pieces of the puzzle I'm after. I'll be the first to jump off the wagon when something better comes along.