I’ve recently become aware of an addiction. Well, it’s really more of a dependence; something I rely on, and can’t get through my day without. I’m using it constantly, in one form or another…

Yeah, I’m a Google addict.

My homepage is Google.com. My main e-mail account is a Gmail one, my website is hosted on Blogger, and I recently discovered the time-saving joys of Google Reader (with the accompanying Firefox extension, naturally). My Google homepage is customised to the hilt, with handy access to Wikipedia, a to-do list, weather forecast, and, um, Bejeweled and a Magic 8 ball, just because they were available.

I’ve tried telling myself it’s not that bad really; I only occasionally use Google Maps to find out where I’m going, and I haven’t succumbed to Google Earth. I don’t use Google Calendar, Google Documents or Froogle, but I do use various bits of Google’s search engine on a 100-times-daily basis, even when I should be using, say, Wikipedia, or a dictionary. (Other people use Google as a spellchecker sometimes too, right?)

I even use my Gmail account as a quick and dirty way of storing files online for later access via another computer — if I’m entirely honest, I’m typing this, right now, into an e-mail that I’ll save in my Drafts folder.

It’s probably a bit dangerous to be this reliant on any one company — but it’s Google, so it’s not a problem, right? This is, after all, the company whose motto is ‘don’t be evil.’ Okay, so there was quite a fuss when Gmail came out and people got scared of their targeted ’sponsored links’, which picked up on keywords in your e-mails to figure out what to try to sell you (right now, it’s offering me free satellite, 1GB free storage space, and a strategy for using Google adwords) but we all got used to that and stopped being freaked out. Targeted ads are just good sense, surely? And surely all that stuff about how Google censors the Internet in accordance with various countries’ policies, well, that must be okay, probably. As for the numerous lawsuits (over YouTube, particularly, or over Google’s plans to make thousands of books and newspapers freely available and searchable over the Internet), well, people sue over anything these days, don’t they?

I’m not convinced that using Google so extensively is a problem (I can quit whenever I want! I just… don’t want to) or at least not inherently, though maybe I should branch out a bit. Just in case, like.

I don’t know. Is anyone else as much of a Google addict as me? Or are your online activities sensibly spread out over various different companies? Everything seems to be becoming more and more integrated these days (see: Flickr forcing even its early adopters to get Yahoo accounts to sign in with) and there’s always something just a tiny bit scary about monopolies.