So every internet user in the world knows about google, hell I couldn't do my job without google and even go as far as to put a line item on my resume saying “proficient with google search to accomplish tasks”. Its the best home page as its simple, (unless your dave who uses yahoo). Its white like macintosh hardware so people think its cool. They have sharable calendars, documents, pictures, You Tube, etc etc etc etc etc.
But is google really all that the ibook users crack it up to be? I don't think so, I have long been afraid of google and the masses that flock to it like crows to a bigmac in the street.
lets start off with The Good, google is an amazing search engine, its clean and they have the best user interface of any search bar none. (considering the top 4 not the little fish rip off’s of google UI) google has a search bar that is handy and youtube is social marketing for the future. see any fanboy for further good, as this post isn't really about the good.
RSS reader, this is one of the tools that I think google has that is actually very handy, as my RSS isn't private information and I dont care what marketing information can be gathered from it its the best reader I have used, and its free! a cool trick I just found was to look at your stats, see here is the day of week I read blogs as well as the number of subscribers to feeds in google. Notice that Katie has 5 readers in google… cool.
The Bad gmail, seriously. why do people think its the wave of the future, I think because one reason, it was invite only at the start. exclusive club email only, awesome way to make people want it. but in the end, you have all your email up on a search engine. in subject view only. what if you want to sort or folder your email, oh you cant, you can search or tag. but the idea of the subject view has been around since outlook 97.
The ability to share information, we all know of google hacking, put this into your search… filetype:txt "enable password" but the information isnt stopping at what you have on your webserver any more, your employees synch your office applications with google to make the iPhone blah blah, and release your corporate information.
need I say More? (i just found this while looking for fun info)
I was looking at google documents, it appears that there is no easy way to search however I will research more and post up, however this is not cool. yes store your personal info on google, sounds like a great idea.
The Ugly google is comming out with new applications every day to take personal information from users, I wont even get started on the google browser, or cell phone. I will focus more on some fun things that caused me to write this blog post. might be FUD but all the same it has merit.
I dont know if you have seen googles new enhancements to picasa, just like myspace etc you can now tag people in pictures just to help out the search engines find you by text, but google didn't stop there. You can put the tag to the award winning google earth to locate where they are at. Nice. (more on that award winning app later) we also know from prior that you can search for only faces in image search by adding the &imgtyp=face to your URL
Sure thats a nice example but really, how good is it… here is a nice video on how you can play with it and whats so scarry about all this? well if you dont care to mess around with the account to test the facial software, check out the new line of Sony Cameras with “smile shutter” Im not sure if sony released v2 of this, a lot of reviews online are bad, however I just got back from best buy, where I played with a camera for about 30 min in the store it works perfect. I was scared that its so good in consumer 170$ camera.
So whats to worry? well lets just consider this math equation.
+ 
= the largest database of oh shit.
and one last ugly I will leave on, if you didn't think I had a point with the rest…
thats great google, keep a large database with info that I would like to have in a search engine company.