Google has rapidly moved to the number one spot on my List of Companies Which Are Awesome. I love Gmail and Google Calendar, I have Google Maps Mobile on my cell phone, and I routinely will spin the globe in Google Earth and poke around looking for neat stuff.

You may have heard Google's recent announcement that they are testing out an online spreadsheet program; even prior to that, Google bought Writely, an online word processing application. Both of these are still in a beta-testing phase, and participation is by invitation only.

Soooo..... if you want an invitation to either or both of these things, I'm told you can go here and ask for one, and you might could maybe get one. Perhaps. Or maybe not. Whatever, I signed up for one of each, and I'll let you know if and when I receive them. If you like, you may wait until I have bestown (bestooned? done bestowed?) the SCSUScholars Sparkly Tiara of Approval upon the site, with all of the benefits and honours that implies.

Or, you could go now and give your secret personal email address to a total stranger, sight unseen without any guarantees of anything whatsoever purely because some other total stranger (me) told you that you could, secure in the knowledge that you're not being any more stupid than I am. Your call.

If you try it and it works, though, you owe me.

UPDATE: I have received my Writely invite, and will be trying it out soon (got some actuall work to do today, so my puttering-around time is limited for the moment). So it's not a scam. Still, no word on GoogleSheets yet though, so maybe it could be a scam after all...

UPDATE II: I have now also received a Google Spreadsheets invite! Hooray! Sparkly Tiaras for everyone!