Ever since I started using it, and to this day, I've felt like Gmail is wonderful, magical, useful, intuitive ... In short, it's basically the best email service I've ever used. Most people who have made the switch from AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. would agree. Not to mention how, for most people, AIM is a thing of the past, because we all use Gchat for our "off-record," real time correspondence these days. The best part of it all is that you can rely on Gmail. It really never glitches out. Oh, wait. That's not true.

Yesterday, a Gmail outage lasted for over an hour and affected "less than 10 percent" of Gmail's user base, or approximately 33.2 million people! That's the official word from Google, but I wouldn't be surprised if the actual number of people affected was higher. I experienced the outage for at least 45 minutes. Definitely a pain, especially when you're trying to use all the other integrated services -- like Google Calendar, Docs, etc.

It's one of those incredible stories that could only happen today: Google Earth helped a lost boy find his mother. Twenty five years ago, Saroo Brierly was just a 5-year-old boy working with his brother cleaning trains in India. He got separated from his brother, and then he ended up on a train bound for Calcutta -- a 14-hour journey away from the village whose name Saroo didn't even know. It was impossible for him to find his family. He took to begging on the streets of Calcutta until he was finally taken into an orphanage and then adopted by a couple in Australia.

Fast-forward to 2011: Saroo never forgot his birth family. So he figured out how far outside from Calcutta he must have started. And then he used Google Earth to scour the region for familiar landmarks.

If my due date is right, I'm 11 days away from giving birth, so you best believe there's a whole lotta Googling going on up in my house as of late. Just last night, my husband and I parked ourselves in front of the ol' laptop for about an hour to watch video after video on things we should, you know, know about having a child. It was highly informative and managed to quell my anxiety slightly. It also made me think: How the hell would I get through the first few months of motherhood -- or pregnancy for that matter -- without the Internet? I mean, I guess I'd manage, people did it for years, but it must have been a lot harder. How-to videos are everything to me right now.

So, in the spirit of sharing, here are six things I've (embarrassingly) Googled/YouTubed recently. They may seem silly, but they've really helped this mama-to-be out.

See a movie, walk down the street, sit on a train, or hang out in an elevator for two seconds. More often than not, at least half of the people you see have their heads down, glued to their smartphone. Disturbing to say the least. But I guess that's why Google has come up with a "solution": Google Project Glass, futuristic glasses that turn your entire field of vision into a smartphone screen where you can get and interact with alerts, texts, directions, check-ins, etc. The glasses are currently in "crowd-sourcing phase," meaning they're checking the market out right now to see how a product like this would fare.

Eerily, it could do really well. (Some YouTube commenters are already plotting out how they'll use them. For instance, in the kitchen to follow recipes.) But whether or not that's a good thing is definitely up for debate!

Here's a video of how the freaky things might work ...

Leave it to Google to have fun with April Fool's Day pranks. The company comes up with such creative ways to amuse us with their doodles, but this weekend they took to Google Maps instead for their prank to give us a look at the world through 8-bit map technology.

To be honest, I can't really explain what an 8-bit map exactly means, but basically it's old school technology, and they've created a program dubbed Quest based on it through the old-school gaming system Nintendo. Not Nintendo's Wii, but the old cartridge version many of us had as kids.

Coming soon to a Google near you: a new unified privacy policy designed to "create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience." At least, that's how Google describes it. According to some privacy advocates, it's a troubling change that will result in the invasion of users' personal information.

Starting March 1, Google's new privacy policy brings together 60 separate privacy documents into one. The idea is for Google to be able to deliver all kinds of personalization (like improved search results and, ahem, better targeted ads), but it also means your private search history will be now be shared across Google's services.

There are some benefits to sharing this information: for instance, Google could decide you're a snowboarding fan based on your searches, then recommend snowboarding videos when you visit YouTube. However, if this new policy ooks you out, there's an easy way to disable your search history.

Saying that Kim Kardashian is vain ... well, it's the understatement of the century. Of course she's vain. Her wildly lucrative livelihood is hugely dependent on her standing around and looking pretty. She has to be vain. It's cool, though -- all celebrities are, not just her. And you know what every single one of them -- whether they admit it or not -- does? They Google themselves. They Google themselves like the dickens. All day, every day. Of course, typically this is done when they're in the privacy of their own homes.

Not Kim, though. She thought she'd be slick and try to sneak in a quick Googling sesh while out and about recently. And thanks to the paparazzi's crazy high-def, super zoom, intergalactic cameras, poor girl was busted.

Pope Benedict XVI is no stranger to the ways of the web. He's actually proven himself to be quite a fan of technology, having tweeted using an iPad to announce the inauguration of a Vatican news service and giving his thumbs-up to an iPhone app that lets believers keep track of their sins. There's even an official Vatican Twitter feed. Pretty cool to see the Pope keeping up with the times!

But the leader of more than a billion Catholics worldwide also recently shared some words of caution about sites like Google, Twitter, and Facebook that apply to all of us, no matter our faith and background.