Another interesting article about Google:
http://www.slate.com/id/2130795/nav/tap1/

I think the scariest thing about google is that despite not knowing what they are really up to and where they are going.

I still find myself trusting them.

Must be some sort of mind control.

Sounds like the kind of equipment you might start setting up if you were looking to launching your own net based operating system.

Thus turning all home computers into thin clients and taking Microsoft out of the O/S picture for the end user.

From what google has done in the past the service would have to be free to make computer users drop Windows. But would serve ads in someway. Such as on your desktop or hyperlinks embeded into your documents.

I'd rather pay Microsoft $200 for my OS than have ads pumped at me while I'm working day in and day out.

I think people play into Google's own brand image of omnipresence. When it comes down to it, the only amazing thing Google has done is the Google search and indexing system, which is still only good at indexing web sites. Google scholar doesn't work very well, at least not as good as my college library database. Froogle sucks ass as it doesn't find all the products available. Groups is an idea that was already implemented before Google. The best thing after Google was Google Images, and it sucks because images aren't tagged or indexed like webpages. People like to talk about how they are "digitizing" all the worlds information, or creating the new version of the internet or something. Everyone talks about how Google is "working on the next big thing". The truth is, Google hasn't done anything that amazing since it created an awesome system to index the web. People boast about their network capabilities, budget, and research team, but Google sure hasn't demonstrated it in the least and sure aren't convincing me. Maybe if they perfected their Images, Froogle, and Scholar systems I would put more faith in them, but ever since Google came out nothing has really changed.

So why such hype?

I mean, all google has shown us they can do is index webpages well, and everyone is running around saying they're going to replace Microsoft's OS and become the next internet paradigm at the same time!?

I'm waiting for Google to demonstrate real abilities and in the meantime I try to ignore the hype.

Sounds like Google is getting good at pitching to investors to pump their stock.

Grid processing, server-side apps with thin client access. This is likely the direction that computing is headed. A $100 pc with a simple open-source shell that allows you to interface with the web and access server-side applications. The software lives on the server and the processing is distributed across the networked grid. The client is really just a portal. This was tried during the net boom but bandwidth was too narrow and there wasn't enough power in the existing clusters. Right now the web is basically a hyperlinked database. Google has the money to massively upgrade the backbone and make it a real computational network. And yes, imagine the type of bots/AI that could be run across such a system. A Google web crawler running on fiber-linked clusters, designed to learn from the content it encounters and to make connections between data points, could become near sentient in a relatively short amount of time, given how much human consciousness is now present on the www. Monkey see, monkey do.

Truth Tech, Google has done more than just create a good search engine. Aside from indexing the entire collective information repository of the species, they are also mapping the entire planet (Google Maps), rendering it in real-time 3D (Google Earth), providing secure communications (G-Mail), and turning the web into the most powerful computational device ever known. They are also wiring SF with wi-fi for free. The entire city. What Google is really trying to do, and which may not be apparent just yet but will surely be an emergent outcome of the foundation they're building, is to create universal access to the global data repository that is the web and universal access to extraordinary computational power. Imagine a web that knows itself and can execute programs and algorithms against it's data set.

As further food for thought, how do you compete with an OS that totally dominates the market? You make OS's obsolete.

Huh. You never know, the first AI may awake from its slumber in all that mass of fiber .... a Gaian Mind composed of bits and bytes of all of us ....

Either that or what LVX23 said ... ;)

See also Google Analytics.

Thin Clients? VERY BAD IDEA. We do that and we have turned the clock back 30 years to mainframes and dumb terminals. This is precisely the tyranny that the PC revolutionaries overthrew. It is precisely the tyranny that Larry Ellison tried to re-establish a few years back with his thin client push.

The network should be dumb, as every net celebrity I know has advocated - i.e. John Perry Barlow, David Weinberger, Doc Searles, John Gilmore, David Isenberg... hell everyone. The reason?

Because the intelligence is (and should remain so) all at the ends. Weinberger wrote an amazing book called, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web ". The best introduction to the correct thinking on this matter (I know, correct, but I'll be blunt, correct) is found here.

http://www.worldofends.com/.

This website was created and has become THE manifesto for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It underlies the basis of digital rights, maintaining a free internet against the co-opting by corporations and governments to turn it into another form of mindless mass consumption.

By maximing the intelligence at the ends, and making the network itself as open, dumb and transparent to ALL as possible, maximizes freedom, decentralization, network power over hierarchical power, and ultimately creates a much smarter peer-to-peer global neural network than any centralized scheme could ever be.

If we somehow are convinced by Google or anyone else to throw away all of our brains at the end and replace them with empty stupid brains (thin clients) we will have lost everything.

I like having the most general purpose code executing device possible, in which I decide which code it executes and how. That means I can run bittorent, cryptography, whatever, and I can download it from anywhere. This power is the revolution that will change everything, unless of course the network itself gets taken over. Google may have noble intentions now, but if it somehow becomes the internet - we are all in trouble.

I dunno Paul... thin clients may very well be the future.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5879292.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed

After all, more and more services are migrating to the net.

Example: since GMail arrived... do you still see the necessity to use a mailclient?

I certainly don't.

One day, the Google boys'll put an entire office suite online, and that will be the last of local MS Office. ;)

Very importnat points, Paul. I suspect the power users will continue to create a market for powerful desktops while the average shlub who just wants web access and basic functionality will be sold thin clients. Also, if net processing remains truly open source, then it will be difficult for control systems to regulate it.

I think that thin clients will happen specifically because the paradigm is already in operation -- with cell phones. Cell phones have shown us that:

* Over time, the hardware can be offered at a much lower price point so that everybody can afford them. (Which arguably equals true democritization of computer use, though I agree to an extent with what the EFF says about digital rights and mass consumption.)
* A subscription/use fee is mandatory, and can also pay for free upgrades (software AND hardware), content, and web access all rolled into one, meaning that users will be hooked for the life of the device and beyond -- the corporate wet dream.
* Built-in wireless will mean that you can use your device anywhere within your zone of coverage without additional fees.

Hardcore users who still want high-functioning machines for uses such as programming and design will still be able to get them -- but might find that with more new computer users in the marketplace, that price points for smarter machines may also drop.

Ha...

I posted and THEN read Jay's zdnet link above -- which is a more expansive version of my comments.

I guess I just vibed the zeitgeist on this one.

Ridiculously overhyped. I'm not sure what's more overrated: google's stock price or the notion that google is going to create a revolution. What's keeping half the IT companies afloat is the public's naive notion that the stock market cannot crash. I agree the internet/ edge computing/ or whatever else comes down the pipe has and will change the world.

But don't worry folks the likelyhood that the internet will become skynet and humanity will have to fight the terminator robots is unlikely. ^_^-

Google is an OK search engine. Links don't make your content worth anything, in my opinion. And their image search sucks. Gmail is great. I read that article about Google's fictional "crash." I think they've proven that they aren't the best at seeing the market and they have made lot's of enemies who will work together to fight them.

Hello Dears,

I am still amazed about FutureHi, speccially because of the you, members. The power of internet allow us to find people that have the same oppinions, points of view, concerns etc.
Before the internet, I would supress many of my opinions, affraid to be classified as crazy.
This power to group "similar people" is being experienced by us, brazilian, in a way that seems to me as a Google experiment: Orkut.
Orkut is already a reality in Brazil. I could stay days and days writing to you how it is like for us.
Orkut is only for invited members, so if you want to know more, contact me though MSN: marinapurri@hotmail.com , so I can send you an invitation to join the comunity and explore it for yourself.

Regards,
Marina Purri

"Truth Tech, Google has done more than just create a good search engine. Aside from indexing the entire collective information repository of the species, they are also mapping the entire planet (Google Maps), rendering it in real-time 3D (Google Earth), providing secure communications (G-Mail), and turning the web into the most powerful computational device ever known. They are also wiring SF with wi-fi for free. The entire city. What Google is really trying to do, and which may not be apparent just yet but will surely be an emergent outcome of the foundation they're building, is to create universal access to the global data repository that is the web and universal access to extraordinary computational power. Imagine a web that knows itself and can execute programs and algorithms against it's data set."

That would be all well and good, but regardless, what I am saying is that nothing has changed in terms of actual technology at Google since their introduction of their search engine. Google maps is nothing new, nor that impressive, and G-Mail is just an email account with 2 gigs of storage, nothing new at all, nothing groundbreaking. Before G-Mail I used Mozilla Thunderbird with my 200-gig hard-drive and my ISP POP account. I could easily search through my emails using Thunderbird, and I didn’t have to delete them if I had the space. G-Mail just bundles it into a server-side application so you can access it anywhere, but with a loss of functionality and the introduction of advertising. Also, are they really wiring SF with wireless for FREE? I seriously doubt that, if there isn't a direct monetary cost, there must be another cost, such as giving Google total control over the Wi-Fi and possibly advertising?

Nothing has changed (that wasn't already done before) in terms of technology since Google introduced their search, which in itself has become a bastardization of what it was originally. The reason I used Google to begin with was that they provided a search engine similar to Altavista's MetaCrawler but without Ads and bogus hits (pay for clicks). I loved Google because you could search and get what you want. Now anybody can buy their way to the top and Google search is nothing like it was, now full of junk-hits and advertising. The very reason people originally embraced it is gone.

In addition, the fiber optics they are purchasing doesn't mean anything until we have more information. It doesn't change anything. In my area, the fiber is still owned by SBC and Comcast and I connect to the net through a phone line. So just because Google buys up that fiber access point somehow that makes things better for me? How? I already have to deal with the fact that SBC owns my access to the internet, what would be different about Google owning it? I can use their indexing system? I can already access their indexed web/database from Google.com. I don't like thin clients, I like having my own computer that I have total control over, screw giving Google or anyone else more control over my end. Thin clients will destroy what the Internet was good for. Screw giving more control over to the telcos and cable companies and their advertisers. The net doesn't need regulation, it doesn't need Comcast/Verizon/Bell or Google "improving" our service by filtering and controlling it. "Thin clients" is the corporate strategy to gain ownership, centralization, and control over the internet by restricting access and protocol, and trying to define what the internet "should be".

I guess my question is: So what? If Google does do what the article suggests, how does that benefit me? Does that enable me to access my information easier than on Google.com, and how? Does that benefit me because suddenly “the net will become self-aware” when Google centrally indexes it? So just because Google would be able to index the net, that would change my world for the better? I don’t understand?

Peace,
truthtechnician

i can see mysself looking back and being like, 'damn i remember when noone owned the internet'

QUOTE:
"I guess my question is: So what? If Google does do what the article suggests, how does that benefit me? Does that enable me to access my information easier than on Google.com, and how?...

Peace,
truthtechnician"

It will allow you easier access to all the big companies who could afford to pay google so their link shows up at the top a search result. *silly grin* yes it's revolutionary! *sarcasm*

I hope I'm not getting off topic. I think in the near future the internet will be this place where 90% of all traffic goes thru only 10 websites. Actually it's kinda happening right now. For example if you did a search (it doesn't matter what search engine you used or what exactly it was you were searching for) there's a good bet that amazon.com or ebay.com will probably end up in your search results most of the time.

i never thought that ebay and amazon paid them to do this. that is really not cool. ive lost respect for google!

Remember that one of Googles Operating Principles is: "Don't be Evil". That's a lot more reassuring than, say, ENRON (operating principle- "We ARE Evil!")