Jennifer made a post on Lifemuncher the other day about how much she depends on Google for her everyday life. Which got me wondering how much I depend on certain web properties for the various things I do on the web. So I decided to take inventory:

Email: GMail
GMail is the backbone of my livelihood. Being a freelance web worker, everything I do is run through email, from my To-Do lists to my contact management to my social correspondence. GMail’s conversation threading is what makes it invaluable. If any other desktop application had a similar feature, I’d switch right away.

Blogging: Wordpress / Tumblr
Wordpress is the ultimate blogging application: trust me, I’ve tried almost every single one. Recently, I’ve been playing around with Tumblr, which has a lot of functionality I’m hoping can be built into my next Wordpress install.

Photos: Flickr
There’s not much more I can say here: Flickr is large part of the reason why I love the internet. And that’s even after Yahoo! acquired them.

Video: Vimeo / YouTube
I don’t create many videos, but when I do, I always upload them to Vimeo: the Flickr-like interface really makes me feel comfortable there. Of course, when I’m looking for video, Google-owned YouTube is always my first stop.

Bookmarks: del.icio.us
Yahoo!’s acquisition of del.icio.us was a smart move, because it sure has some geek cred. Sure, it may not be pretty and it may not have the best social functionality, but if you’re looking for bookmarking, it doesn’t get much better than del.icio.us. In fact, it also powers my short ends on my website.

Comment Tracking: Co.mments
I wasn’t too picky about where I track my comments, I just needed a place to do it, especially since I leave five to six comments on various weblogs every day. Co.mments has a clean and easy to use interface, which is what sold me.

Documents: Google Docs
For presentations and projects needing layout flexibility, there are no better applications than the ones in iWork. But when someone sends me a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet, Google Docs (I used to use Writely before it was acquired by Google) does the job. I’ve recently started using the collaborative functions on Google Docs as well, and there really is no better substitute for the clunky Microsoft Office.

Events: Upcoming
Easy integration with iCal is one of the main reasons I use Upcoming as my primary event manager. While Google Calendar and 30 Boxes are both brilliant calendar apps, everything that Upcoming doesn’t do is perfectly taken care of by iCal.

Invoicing: Blinksale
I don’t even think there is any competition in this market. Blinksale is the best way to invoice your clients. Period.

Site Statistics: Google Analytics
I’ve been thinking of using Mint for a while (and I think I will when I launch my new web strategy) but for now, Google Analytics is free and gives you much more information than you could ever need. And it’s remarkably easy to set up.

Maps: Google Maps
"Google Maps is the best. True dat. Double true!" If you don’t get the reference, go back to a Lazy Sunday last year and you might get it.

News: Yahoo! News
Yahoo! News feels much more intuitive for me, and has a distinctive human touch. Google News feels too automated. Are there any other good current news aggregators out there?

Feed Reading: NetNewsWire
This doesn’t even count because it’s not on the web, but it’s just to say Bloglines and Google Reader aren’t really of use to me because I have my Macbook with NetNewsWire on it everywhere I go.

Music: Last.fm
iTunes manages my music library perfectly, letting me add tons of metadata to every track I own. On the days where my 17gb of music feels inadequate, Last.fm’s tag radio has enough goodies to keep me occupied for hours.

So as we can tell from the above list, I’m not as dependent on Google as I would have otherwise thought. In fact, I probably use Yahoo! properties just as much as Google properties. That being said, if I did lose GMail, the world as I know it would collapse, so maybe I’m more vested than I thought in making sure Google survives and thrives.