BigShinyThing

So. Google (arguably) has access to the most complete and up-to-date dataset of fact, opinion, intent and interconnection on the planet. What’s it doing with it, apart from shifting ads and servicing up web search?

Let’s start with a provocation. Why didn’t Google management either:

1. Profit from,
2. Alert us to, or
Intervene to stop

…the ongoing collapse of contemporary capitalism? Was that an active decision on their part, or do they simply not have the predictive capability? That’s an either-or question. We’re guessing the answer is that they don’t, but that they’re working on it. Wouldn’t you be?

Google’s long-standing interest in zeitgeist and trending suggests a deep interest in the descriptive uses of their wealth of data. Once you have description nailed, then prediction is a logical next target — and prediction at the scale Google might attempt would lead to a historical discontinuity of the kind only tackled head-on by Golden Age science-fiction hacks. Check out, for example, Isaac Asimov’s 1955 short story Franchise set in a [fictional] Election Year 2008 in which

… the United States has converted to an “electronic democracy” where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac [...] then uses the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.

The story centers around Norman Muller, the man chosen as “Voter of the Year” in 2008. At first he is not sure he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed. However, after voting he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, “exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise” — a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens didn’t actually get to vote.

Indeed.

There has been much speculation that Google is working to develop some general high level artificial intelligence. AI is tricky and doesn’t, we think, fit Google’s proven modus operandi. Google people like to solve pragmatic tasks in clever ways, not mess with fiddly intractables.

Consider Google’s recently announced flu prediction system — which analyses clustering in search query data to infer epidemiology two weeks earlier than traditional methods. We’re guessing the development of this tool offers clues to what Google is really expending the bulk of its computing resource and intellectual activity towards — not on AI research, but on data-driven predictive models for all sorts of real-world happenings — not only those related to public health, but the financial markets, weather systems, sports results.

We’re betting Google doesn’t know which real-world phenomena it will be able to model predictively. It doesn’t matter. As long as it can model some of the systems which drive our lives, Google is placed to dominate the global economy through the next economic cycle. Revisiting our original question — does Google’s non-intervention in the Crash of ’09 mean that they haven’t got the modelling down yet, or that they simply don’t want to Get Involved? Either way, it’s a Google future, people. Enjoy your franchise.

Google has announced its launch of a ‘cloud computing’-focussed web browser, Chrome. Is this just what the world needs, or a sign that the Big G has jumped the shark? Hard to tell at this point, but they’re certainly pressing a lot of the right buttons with both product and announcement. Chrome is based on the WebKit open source renderer (same as Apple’s Safari), and the whole project is also Open, natch. The system’s architecture is, according to Google, designed with security and performance in mind.

And — most excellently exciting for alphanerds everywhere — Google has commissioned an explanatory online comic from the Tufte of comic design himself, Scott McCloud, which explains exactly What Chrome is All About. Perfect material for writers (such as yours truly) having their first latte of the day and in need of primo fresh bloggables. Now that’s how to market yourself online in 2008…

People get ready. Both Google and FaceBook have this week announced APIs (Google Friend Connect and FaceBook Connect, respectively) which enable ‘any site’ to be aware of identities and social networks — turning the web inside out and focussing (finally!) on people and their interactions rather than content and its location. We’ve been banging on about this since 1994, and think it’s about bloody time, frankly.

Big news (and probably a harbinger of the demise of bespoke social media aggregators like our recent fave FriendFeed). Read the press releases and phone your favourite VC. Now.

Footage of Britney Spears being hospitalised for the second time in a month hits YouTube and Google‘s search advertising hits postmodern paydirt. Running next to the clip is an ad for a ringtone of Britney’s current single, ‘Piece of Me’, in which she sings about her life of overexposure and exploitation:

I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17
Don’t matter if I step on the scene
Or sneak away to the Philippines
They still gon put pictures of my derrière in the magazine
You want a piece of me?
You want a piece of me…

TechCrunch notes that Al Jazeera has signed a commercial agreement with Google last week to share advertising revenue on their YouTube channel:

This comes even as U.S. cable operators continue to shun the 24 hour news service — only Toledo, Ohio based Buckeye CableSystem and the municipal cable suppler in Burlington, Vermont offer the channel to viewers.

Al Jazeera uploads all original programming and unique news to the channel. Interesting to be reminded that the US still has to go to YouTube to see Al Jazeera (whose worldwide audience rivals that of the BBC) while here in the UK the channel is even available via Murdoch’s network.

People laughed when we reported on that anecdote a while back that Google was developing an artificial intelligence. Well — it doesn’t seem so ludicrous now does it? This nice post points out exactly what Google knows about us at any one time. And it’s A LOT.

Bits that we’ve hacked out of the post:

With its acquisition of Feedburner, Google now controls the leading company for managing RSS feeds. Thus, Google knows everything about my readers – how many of them there are, where they come from, and how they access my content. How might Google use this information? Targeting ads in my feeds based on context or geography sounds like a start, but using cookies the company could also theoretically collect data on my readers and better tailor ads to them throughout Google’s product line.

[...]

With an estimated 30% market share (based on bloggers, many of whom use Google-owned Blogger, reporting statistics from the now Google-owned Feedburner!), Google Reader is one of the most popular tools for aggregating RSS feeds. By knowing the blogs and news sites I read, Google can tailor ads to my preferences. Additionally, Google could use this data to customize my search results by favoring sites similar to those to which I subscribe.

[...]

Through Gmail and Gchat, Google knows everyone I contact. While you can turn a chat session “off the record,” Gmail’s 2.859GB (and counting!) of storage provides enough space so most people never need to delete a message. Thus, Google has both a history of all of my emails and chats, and can also make inferences about my strongest connections are based on how frequently I correspond with them

[...]

While Google’s photo sharing application Picasa is far from a market leader, with its purchase of YouTube and its homegrown Google Video product, Google is the undisputed dominant player in online video. Thus, Google knows not only what I search for, but what I produce.

(Around here is where it gets scary … )

Hopefully you’re not so unlucky to be one of the guys photographed leaving the strip club or adult book store in the new Google Street View feature, but there is a good chance your house or workplace can be seen via satellite in Google Maps. Additionally, Google Maps competes with MapQuest, Yahoo, and a host of others for providing driving directions, so they have a good idea of the places you frequent.

[...]

While Google is still in the early stages of building out its suite of Office-like applications, their ambitions have become fairly clear. With Docs & Spreadsheets, an upcoming PowerPoint competitor, and partnerships with the likes of Intuit and Salesforce.com, Google is spreading its tentacles far and wide in the business applications space, gaining knowledge into what you do, your finances, and who your contacts are.

With thanks to Adam Ostrow, whose post “MySoul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns” this is based on.

Google Maps’ new Street View feature provides a street-level view of buildings, composited from images filmed by camera trucks which have explored and photographed every alley and byway of — for the moment at least — a few major American cities. Street View is an early outrider of a new wave of digital services which take ‘pervasive’ to a new level. Pervasive, or invasive? To Oakland, California resident Mary Kalin-Casey, the sight of her cat Monty peering out her second-story window in the Street View panorama of her apartment block meant that Google had peered a few pixels too far into her private world. According to a New York Times report:

“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”

Her husband quickly added, “It’s like peeping.”

“Quickly”, one assumes, as the stopwatch is obviously running out on their 15 minutes of zeitgeisty fame.

Concerns about privacy are understandable — but the real issue here is what happens when this information gets mashed up with the rest of the digitally-tagged world-of-tomorrow-afternoon. Close your curtains, hunker down behind the sofa with your cat and laptop, and stay tuned.

Want to find some famous female inventors?

Try the query “she invented” in Google, and it will come back to you with a helpful

Did you mean: “he invented”

Sigh. This isn’t Google’s ‘fault’ — but it does sadly reflect that there are a lot more references and queries online to inventions by males than females.

[via Digg]

In the article, BusinessWeek writes about the GoogleZon film (old news) and asks, “Is Google Getting Too Powerful?”

Sound familiar?

Google has announced a souped-up version of online application suite Google Apps. The (un)creatively named ‘Premier’ edition offers enhanced functionality, more online storage, phone support and a bunch of other corporate-friendly features. All with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, for a flat USD50/person/year. Not just a tempting offer for small businesses who want to avoid spend on IT infrastructure — Google has already signed up Procter and Gamble and General Electric as flagship clients.

Sounds like value to us — importantly Google have also published programming interfaces for their office suite, so that third-party developers (or switched-on corporate IT departments who see which way the wind is turning and want to continue to justify their salaries) can enhance and tweak functionality. All that virtual team collaboration stuff? Already in place. Blackberry integration? Soon, probably. Yawn, then take a deep breath: next comes the modern bit.

Google Apps is the first mainstream system to give business users tools which really begin to acknowledge the cloud, tools which aspire to the benefits of those long-used by Linux hackers and wikipedians; tools with which to engage and work with strangers or competitors for mutual advantage. They aren’t there yet — Google’s initial focus is to get some traction in the mundane worlds of word-processing and data-crunching — but the trajectory is easy to plot: on- and up-wards into business-focussed social media. The challenge is to reshape — or re-create — traditional business processes into a form where they can really profit from such tools.

Companies find it difficult enough to move from Flash-heavy websites crammed with stale corporate nonsense, to actual conversation with their audience. It will be much harder for most to find a path on which they can make their borders more porous, their processes more diffuse, their knowledge more open, and yet still have an edge. But adoption of tools like Google Apps — even in their current early form — might serve to redirect people’s attention up from their desks, out through their screens, and into the cloud where the world is. It’s a start. Wait and see.

As soon as the Google/YouTube deal was confirmed, YouTubers were busy yakking about it into their webcams. Fears over increased advertising and the sheer size and influence of Google seem to be the main themes. This of course gives Google a live and evolving focus group of users to help them decide if not what to do (we strongly suspect they already have a Big Plan — if not several) then how to do it. On the corporate side, Google are also having to assuage client News Corps’ fears about their burgeoning media empire… suddenly that scary little film about Googlezon doesn’t look so fanciful…

Source: Lostremote.

The results are readable via Cory‘s site.

Why is this interesting? Well, for a start it has significant implications for advertisers — after all, you can’t advertise in Windows, can you (although we suspect that Microsoft’s ‘Live’ offerings in the next version of Windows will be edging closer to that)? As ZDNet points out:

What better application could you think of to embed ads into than one that people use for budgeting and price comparisons?

Google will be watching carefully who uses Spreadsheet and what they use it for. Once the company has proved the application and gathered enough usage data, then it’ll launch an AdWords option for Spreadsheet and start to test its viability as a vehicle for contextual ads.

Then there was the rather prescient letter in The Economist a while back by a Mr Alan Tobey:

Google seems to be following the same line Ronald Reagan took with the Russians in the 1980s (“Is Google the new Microsoft?”, May 13th). Reagan speeded up the break-up of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend beyond its means on weaponry to defend against perceived, but actually unreal, threats such as the Star Wars programme.

In much the same way, Google is throwing up many cheap-but-flashy initiatives that force Microsoft to spend huge sums in order to contain perceived, but probably illusory, market threats. Can we not anticipate the same outcome: the break-up of software’s acknowledged evil empire and the emergence of its captive technologies into the world of fair competition?

Let’s see.

Google trends is the latest demonstration from Google that it understands us more than we understand ourselves. It’s also part of Google’s reaffirmed emphasis on search since diversifications such as Google Video and Google print.

Our initial searches would indicate that porn is rapidly encroaching on news in terms of volume… especially in Manchester…

However. Note to Google: if you want this blogged, make it easy a la Technorati.

Via Gawker.

The FT reports today that Google and Earthlink have beaten five other bidders for a contract to blanket San Francisco with WiFi coverage. The ‘catch’ is that users will be tracked to within 100 or 200 feet and beamed ads from local businesses in exchange for wireless internet access.

The service is likely to take six to eight months before it’s up and running and expect lots of debate re the privacy implications of proximity advertising before then. As the FT points out, this kind of marketing has been possible since the proliferation of bluetooth on mobile phones but — with the exception of kids bluejacking each other — very little has been done to exploit it commercially. Google is already teaching people about the possibilities of location-based tech with Google Earth and the already notorious Gawker Stalker Maps (which uses Google Maps to flag celebrity sitings in New York) — and what better way for local businesses to find customers? Beats the ‘Golf Sale Here’ sign anyday.

As John Battelle puts it in his book The Search:

As far as the internet ecosystem is concerned, Google is the weather.

Nice quote, but this week Wall Street was disappointed by Google’s only-just-under-90% growth, and their share price dipped accordingly. Glitch, or is the magic starting to fade? We tend to believe that Google will be around a while longer, and that they’ve got a few more profound changes to bring to our lives before BST calls GOOG a SELL. Over at CNN, they’ve polished up their crystal ball and written up a nice summary of the Googly futures predicted by some of the world’s most influential futurists (hate that word!), including George Dyson and Ray Kurzweill. Their scenarios? Take your pick between:

1. Google is the Media
2. Google is the Internet
3. Google is Dead
4. Google is God

We’ve been pushing the Google Is the Media angle in some recent posts here, and we’ve covered the God theory before as well…

How long ago it seems, the dotcom bubble and bust. To our eyes, there are two real differences-which-make-a-difference between the first dotcoms and what’s going on at the moment:

• There’s a touch of the vaudeville magician about the current crop of dotcoms: while distracting their consumers (and the markets) with simplicity and openness, they make their money (and are betting their futures) on plans for media empires to rival anything we’ve seen before.

  While punters are having fun with these new toys — uploading their photos, posting to their blogs, gawping at the bigshinything — those same consumers are themselves building, click by click, from the online terra nulla, new media territories where tomorrow the future of marketing and sales will be decided through products and services sold back to them via the channels they themselves have created. Brilliant!

  As evidence, we offer the following:

  • Google is still viewed as a search engine, but its revenue (and future) depends on its footprint as a media owner: every Google brand extension gives it more media surface on which to plant its ads — and as for targetting, who knows what you want better than Google?
  • The must-have iPod probably only really exists to get iTunes onto people’s desktops, and to thus give Steve Job’s growing media empire an early mover advantage in owning media delivery in the next decade — leveraging both brand loyalty with consumers and his success in getting traditional content owners to actually sign up for online delivery — a major triumph given their conservatism.
  • Skype wants ‘the world to call for free’, but still makes its margin from the extras it offers which allow Skypers to interact with the world of traditional telephony.

  For these magicians, a little prestidigitation to keep the brand simple also makes it easier to expand or change the real business plan without having to worry whether its on-brand or not, and without really letting consumers into the secret that they’ve been charmed into doing all the hard work of building the market for them.

• It’s not just consumers being roped in to create the very markets in which the dotcoms wish to sell. The most savvy of these businesses offer out their services for others to innovate with.

  Got a clever idea for a location-based service? Use Google Maps for the interface, and concentrate on the bit of your business that’s unique. Want to add voice chat to your dating site? You don’t need to spend millions on infrastructure, just build it using Skype. Google, Skype, Flickr and the rest make it easy for other people’s clever ideas to come to market: each business using their services increases their media surface and earns them some incremental revenue. Individual bloggers might add a few new pages for Google ads — a startup using Google Maps might just kick-start a whole new category of media in its own right. Lowering the bar for other clever businesses is a low-risk investment in the 99.9999% of innovation that happens outside the established dotcoms themselves.

  These then are what the volume businesses for the 21st century look like — billion-dollar enterprises with cuddly, fun brands and friend-get-friend appeal, which offer access to their core services ‘for free’ to other innovators in return for new media opportunities in the ecosystems they encourage to flourish around them. And so far, it works: not only are these upstarts making obscene amounts of money, they’ve jump-started a new wave of creative systems and services. Look on their works ye traditional media giants, and despair.

A posting on Slashdot flags a Forbes report in which an analyst predicts that Google may be making a move into online music distribution:

Robert Peck speculated that it makes sense for Google to create a rival for the popular iTunes service by Apple Computer, given the explosive growth of unique visitors to the iTunes’ Web site. Further, ‘Nielsen indicates that iTunes users form a distinct target audience with brand preferences along autos, alcohol beverages, magazines, and television,’ he added.

Things that make you go hmmm.

Brandrepublic US reports that Google is now facing legal action from the US Department of Justice. George Bush’s administration claims that it needs the information in order to defend an internet child pornography law that is unrelated to Google and that has been struck down by the Supreme Court. Google has refused this request on a number of grounds including that the request was vague and unduly burdensome, and that it would reveal trade secrets. Not to mention representing a massive infringement of civil liberties. Nicole Wong, a lawyer for Google, said:

Google is not party to this lawsuit and their demand for information overreaches. We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously.

And then the story gets rather more murky. The Financial Times points out that Google does not actually cite privacy as the primary reason for refusing to comply. Instead, the company’s main objection is to the government’s attempt to use its ‘highly proprietary’ search database to access and use to defend its position in court. Fair enough – Google has a right to protect its brand. But maybe in today’s United States the ‘personal privacy’ card just isn’t worth playing.

A mere few days after this story broke, Google announced that it would backtrack on its previous position and self-censor its service in China. Looks like freedom of expression and information just isn’t part of Google’s empire-building agenda. A BoingBoinger has undertaken a little test:

Phillip sez:

To make for more transparency in the discussion on Google’s censorship in China, I’ve collected a selection of search results which differ in Google.cn and Google.com. For example, for the keyword “Tibet” over 33 million pages seem to be missing on Google.cn.

So much for the company’s much vaunted ‘don’t be evil’ code.