Har's Site

I just saw the Google DNS announcement. I learned that Google wants to speed up my surfing. Those guys…always looking out for me.

To be fair, I like Google’s candy. Scanning my Firefox tabs I saw Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Calendar, Google Wave, Google Contacts, and (oh, yeah) Gmail. I suppose I could point out that all of these free services constitute a lot of good will from a company that makes it’s money selling advertising, but hey, it clearly hasn’t stopped me so far.

Look, I don’t think Google is *evil*. They are actively participating in the development of the web and bringing some interesting innovation. If they play by the rules and benefit financially from their labor, good for them. My dependence on Google’s hosted services, however, has been needling me for some time. In spite of my brightly-colored Kool-Aid mustache, I can’t shake the discomfort I feel when I consider what I’m freely entrusting to another company. When you give a company valuable data, they don’t have to be nefarious to cause you harm.

Here’s some of what Google keeps safe for me:

• everything I search for (google.com)
• what I read (Reader)
• what I write (Docs)
• who I call and when I call them (Voice)–BTW, they also transcribe and store my voicemail
• what I do and when (Calendar)
• what I’m collaborating on (Wave)
• who I know (Contacts)
• what I chat about (GTalk)
• and–wait for it–every email I’ve ever written or received (Gmail)

Who else would I trust with all that personal information? Apparently, Google and I are *very* close.

I can’t prevent a company from collecting bits of information I strew around the internet–especially when I’m using their free services to do so I can, however, choose what services I use and the information I give them. I can also own at least a copy of the public content I generate and not rely on a company (whom I’m not paying) to both keep my stuff safe and give it back to me whenever I want. And maybe–just maybe–some of that information should *only* be stored on my own box.

Google DNS? Sure|why not|maybe. For now, I think Google and me need some space to think things out.

UPDATE 12/08/09:From The Register:

“If you’re concerned about Google retaining your personal data, then you must be doing something you shouldn’t be doing. At least that’s the word from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt tells CNBC…

Took a couple minutes to test posting from my phone. Attached a picture of my workspace to test photo upload.

Three years ago, I first mentioned my “dream app” concept: a tool that would bring all my communication streams together. While those streams have changed over the years, the idea has persisted.

It’s a common problem, and one that Motorola has taken a swipe at with their CLIQ phone. This phone does most of what I’ve been looking for:

1. Consolidates all my social media streams
2. Consolidates contacts from those platforms
3. Abstracts access to my social media outlets
4. Allows me to slice-and-dice my data from those outlets

This could be done an any platform, but it’s interesting that it forms the core of a phone offering. I’d like to take a closer look at the CLIQ.

The phone: Motorola CLIQ

The UI: MOTOBLUR

A nice Hands-on Demo

Today, Drudge breathlessly ran the headline, “DOMINATE: GOOG PLOTS DEATH BLOW TO MSFT!” (Bloomberg article). While Google’s move into the OS space does take on Microsoft directly, I doubt Chrome OS will penetrate too far into the OS market in the near term. But then, I don’t see it as a near term play. Google’s Chrome OS is another evolutionary step in the growth of the internet: making hosted services the focus of the user’s computing experience.

Like their competitors, Google contributes to the evolution of the internet by instantiating their ideas as experiments launched into the web at large. Both the DNA that survives these encounters and the knowledge of the product’s failures are incorporated into the next product mutation, and so the internet evolves. We know that Chrome OS will be lauded, criticized, hacked, improved, and fed into the next round of ideas. We’ll just have to see what sticks.

So, I’m less interested in whether Chrome OS will be a “Windows-killer” and more interested in what innovation Chrome OS will bring to the web app space. We know Google is designing it “to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds” and then “stay out of your way.” We also know they are addressing the underlying OS security. Those are good things.

But does Google plan to augment the linkage between hosted apps and hardware? How will local resources mix with remote services? Is there some client-side security savvy built in? Will Chrome OS optimize the performance of hosted apps in some way? None of that is clear in the initial announcement. So while I do think Chrome OS is an experiment worth watching, I’ll leave the hyperbole to others…for now.

Wanted to try this… Below is a FF discussion on a Time article: “How Twitter Will Change The Way We Live.”