Googling spacetime

Dave Birch writes: "[T]he 'tagging' of real world items so that we can google spacetime (as the phrase goes) is a significant and inevitable trend."

Sounds plausible. And the prospect of "googling spacetime" makes me feel like a citizen of the universe. Rock on!

Googlephobia growing

Ivan Pope reports on growing Googlephobia (and that in advance of their launch of a mobile phone network that will know where you are and what your voice sounds like):

You know something is hitting the popular imagination when it makes front page news. Today the Independent, with a hint of sensationalism, has put Google on the front page. So what’s brought it to this? The Independent story starts with Eric Schmidt’s somewhat daft comment that “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’.” However, there is a lot more to it than that, as anyone who follows online news will be realising. The Techmeme news service is flooded day after day with Google stories as they make the tech weather. Here are seven recent Google stories that go into the Googleophobia mix:

1. Google want’s to tell you what to do tomorrow (see above)


2. Google buys Feedburner and knows what RSS feeds we are reading


3. Google invests in human genetics firm


4. Google buys Doubleclick to control the human sum of banner advertising


5. Google wants us to report ‘paid links‘ so they can police them


6. Google launch their ‘Web History‘ product and reveal just how much they know about you


7. Google installs ‘virtual spyware‘ on Dell computers

That personal and personalised information Google is tracking is all adding up...

NEWSFLASH: O2 to deliver Google's mobile network

A fairly senior source at O2 confirmed to me this morning that O2 is indeed working with Google to deliver a Google-branded mobile network in the UK, as speculated by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch yesterday. I can't vouch for the reliability of that information, but it sounded pretty definite the way my source told it.

Google to launch mobile service in UK?

From TechCrunch:

We’ve heard from a good source in the mobile industry that Google may be preparing to launch its own branded mobile network in the UK in the next few weeks. If our source is accurate, Google will become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) via a deal with UK mobile phone company O2.

So we Brits could be the guinea pigs for a seamlessly Google-mediated virtual life? Well, I guess we are the global leaders in the evolution of the Surveillance Society...

Yahoo and Google try to out-Green one another

This kind of tussle for the technology behemoth Green brand identity high ground can only be a Good Thing. : )

Google as "the Internet"

Seamus McCauley muses on "Google" as synonym for "the Internet" (click the link for a nice bonus photo illustration!):

I've been wondering for a while how it came to pass that "Google" became visual shorthand for "the Internet" amongst advertisers.

The current campaign for Thomson holidays exhorts holidaymakers to use "our Google Maps" (which turns out to be a slightly customised version of what is very clearly Google's Google Maps). Mobile phone companies in particular, when they started wanting us to know that we could access the web on our phones, showed us phones with Google on them. Here's another one.

So I'm intrigued by the sudden cultural shift implied by Nokia's latest online ad for the N800 (left), a phone with Internet access, majoring on the BBC website and Flickr and MySpace and Wikipedia without a mention of Google. "Take the Internet to new places", it says. Or, in other words - not just Google search.

Google has an incredibly powerful brand (BBC) that for the last couple of years has been semiotically synonymous with the Internet. Assuming, not unreasonably, that advertisers are on the cutting edge of understanding cultural significance, that psychological dominance of what people mean by the Internet may be coming to an end as consumers are considered able to accept more nuanced symbols of the web.

When millions of people identify your brand with the Internet itself, you know you have a decent business. Whether or not Google can continue to convince the masses that they are "the Internet" will play a huge part in determining their future fortunes.

However, it's also intriguing to note that the growing privacy concerns around Google provide them with the inverse challenge of convincing people that they are not too omniscient for their users' comfort—when striving for omniscience kind of goes with the territory of trying to be "the Internet". This would seem to pose Google with something of a strategic and branding conundrum.

There's money in that there identity—we just don't quite know where yet.

[also left as a comment on Seamus's post]

Naming baby for Google

Nick Carr writes:

Here's a sign of the times. Expectant parents are beginning to google prospective baby names to ensure that their kids won't face too much competition in securing a high search rank.

In Britain and elsewhere, surnames traditionally served to denote the shared identity of a family trade, as in "Smith", and first names were drawn mostly from a relatively small and familiar stock. These days, names are having to carry the weight of our desire to stand out from billions of others—we want them to function as our unique identifiers.

Well, while I have now met another L. Razzell, Google has yet to inform me of another Luke Razzell...

Google wants your voice print

Now Google wants our voice prints!? That Google identity walled garden is getting more verdant by the day, and the little doorway ever more overgrown...

Google's defacto "identity system"

Scott Lemon discovers that "Google wants MORE of your identity!":

Well FINALLY, Google adds the ability to annotate and more [on Google Maps] through their new My Maps features ... BUT ... I MUST create an account and be tracked by Google in order to use the features!! What the heck? I can't just hack out a quick annotated map for a friend or family without providing information to Google about who I am and having them permanently note my interest in some specific point on earth?

Once again ... the average person has NO idea they are now going to have even more records kept of every place they have marked or annotated, and when they did it. Google continues to gather even more information about you ... who you are ... what you do ... where you do. Amazing.

I know a number of people who are pretty annoyed that they have to use a gmail email account (which they may not even use regularly for email) to access services such as Blogger and Google Groups. I am one of those people!

With the rapid rise of OpenID as a means of individuals integrating their personae across web service providers, I suspect Google's attempt to lock users into Google's own defacto "identity system" could become a real competitive weakness for them at some point.

Subtle walls

Responding to a post by Google's Matt Cutts on the open aspects of Google's strategy regarding personal information, Nic Carr ponders the subtler aspects of information "lockin":

"As we consolidate more of our personal data into a single company's databases - whether it's Google or another firm - how 'easy' is it, really, to withdraw our information? The answer is: It's not easy at all.

"In a comment on Cutts's post, Philipp Lenssen gets at this issue:

I agree that Google is rather open in these regards and allows you to export a lot. One thing to remember though is that as soon as Google products cross-integrate — e.g. a link from Gmail to add an event to Google Calendar — the costs for users of switching away are increased for any single product. As a practical example, let’s say I love Gmail and I hate Google Calendar, so I want to move to competitor Acme Calendar. Great, you guys offer exporting functionality for my events, so I’ll quickly move them from Acme. But you guys don’t allow me to set my preferred Gmail calendar integration software… so now I end up with a somewhat broken Gmail feature. This is not at all alarming on this scale, but it can be a problem for users down the road when Google heavily increases cross-integration (Google Checkout is being pushed in search result today, for example, cross-integrating another two theoretically 'loosely coupled' services)."

In terms of identity, Google is effectively encouraging me to put together as many fragments as possible of my online personae within the Google walled garden, reassuring me all the while: "look, you're free to take any or all of your personae fragments and skiddaddle any time!" However, what Google are not enabling me to do is to embody my online identity in "small pieces loosely joined", where some of those pieces may be entrusted to Google but others to other service providers. They could, easily, but that would hit profits.

Identity lock-in. MySpace, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google are all at it. The telcos are at it and the retailers are at it. The government are at it. The marketing messages may be changing, but the commercial (and political) realities are still very much entrenched in this Bad Business.

Googlegate

Talking of corruption...

Naughty Google?

Sounds like Google may have been naughty boys and girls...

I guess that Lord Acton's saying that "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" has been proven to apply fairly universally—even to the "don't be evil" ones? : (

Image courtesy of Murdoc (who created it for another reason altogether)