Predictions for Google's 2008

From http://googlesystem.blogspot.com

Some of these items are obvious, others are mostly wishful thinking.

1. Google will try to unify its application and transform them into a big social network. The Maka-Maka project (or Google's activity stream) will enhance the already existing profiles. If Google doesn't understand that your Gmail contacts aren't necessarily your friends, we'll see a huge privacy backslash.

2. Google should finally go beyond indexing text and start to use image analysis and speech recognition in Google Image Search and Google Video. The NevenVision acquisition should produce visible results in the image search engine and we could see better results for famous people or the option to find similar images.

3. Google won't give up on universal search, but we'll see a different interface that separates standard search results from OneBoxes and other additions. Google's snippets will become smarter and they could include information about authors, locations, concepts.

4. Gmail will add another batch of new features, one of the most important being task management, and will finally go out of beta. Gmail will launch a Google Labs-like site with experimental features that could be added by those who are curious to see the next features before they are officially launched.

5. The first Android phones will be a disappointment, but developers will create a lot of interesting applications that could compensate for the poor designs.

6. Most Google applications will work offline using Google Gears, even if the functionality will be limited. Google Gears will also work on mobile phones and could become a part of Firefox.

7. Google Maps will be redesigned and could include more space for user-generated content. We'll start to see user's locations, important events from our area, recommendations from friends. Google Maps will become more personal.

8. OpenSocial won't work as well as expected and Google will focus on its own social network(s). iGoogle gadgets are about to become social and aggregate data from your contacts.

9. Google will launch a people search engine that gathers data from the web, especially from social networks.

10. Google Books will be more present in search results and Google will start to sell access to the full content of some of the books.

11. One word: sync. At the end of the year, Outlook and most mobile phones will be able to synchronize with Google Calendar and Gmail's contacts. Google Docs will have plug-ins that let you edit documents in Microsoft Office or OpenOffice and save the changes online. Google Toolbar will integrate Browser Sync and start to synchronize your bookmarks, cookies, passwords and your browser's history.

12. Multi-faceted search, searching from different points of view (objective information vs positive/negative opinions, official information vs comments from blogs, forums).

13. Google will differentiate commercial search results by integrating data from Google Base. Google will continue to try to promote Checkout, this time by showing small badges next to the search results from sites that accept Google Checkout.

14. Google Talk will move completely online: the embeddable gadget will let you create custom chat rooms, talk with other people and maybe even see them if they have webcams.

15. Picasa Web Albums will add some of the photo editing features from Picasa and will increase the free storage.

16. GDrive will finally launch, but it won't offer infinite storage or advanced features. It will let you access the files stored in different Google applications and upload new files from a single interface. Storage: 20 GB.

Big Brother Better Watch His P's and Q's

By Captain Capitalist

George Orwell's gloomy predictions in the book "1984" have turned out to be exactly backward. In Orwell's view, the advance of technology empowered authoritarian government (Big Brother) to keep tabs on individuals and control every aspect of their lives. The reality has been just the opposite.

First of all, for an economy to develop advanced technology, one must have free enterprise. That's where the money comes from. The Soviet Union lost the cold war because they couldn't afford to keep up. China is gradually moving toward free market capitalism because it pays well. They will never reach their full potential until their society is also free. If and when that happens, more power to them. The reason for that is simple: Resource allocation as determined by billions of individual decisions made every minute is a much more efficient system than resource allocation by a handful of self-anointed elites.

The advance of technology in the west has actually lead to scenario's like the recent rebirth of Radio Caracas Television. Venezuelan strongman and international idiot, Hugo Chavez (until recently lauded as a visionary by many dolts, I mean pundits), shut down the station because it did not promote views consistent with his agenda. The station is now broadcasting daily via YouTube. The authoritarian government shut them down and the private sector put them back up.

Many people are now up in arms about Google's new Street View technology. Google's satellites provide a panoramic view of streets and intersections. When you look up an address you can actually see exactly where the building is, and what it looks like. People fear this may lead to a "Big Brother" scenario where the government can keep tabs on you 24/7. A real "Big Brother" scenario would be if the government took control of Google's cameras and pulled them from the web so that you and I couldn't access them. What we speculate was a massacre (we have to speculate because there were no camera's) at Tienemin Square in 1989 didn't take place until after the government kicked out the media and shut down all the cameras.

Bad guys and bad governments are like cockroaches. They don't like the light. The technologies being deployed today are not part of a monolithic enterprise, working together to keep you down. They are individual pieces of technology being made available to the public by a wide variety of organizations with differing and sometimes conflicting agendas. They are competing for your business and when one steps out of line, the others are more than happy to point that out to you.

Information technology is an extension of memory, but it's much more reliable and accurate. The current boom in sharing, transferring and storing information is akin to the invention of the written word. Billions of individuals can now share and build on each others ideas, and carry the effort forward to future generations. It's much harder now for governments and con men to hide the truth from the masses, and good ideas have a better chance of being brought to fruition than ever before.

If you're concerned about individuals being able to see what you're doing in public, here's an idea: Stop cheating on your wife, lying to your business partner, running red lights, stealing from you boss or trying to dupe the public. Then go home and get a good night's sleep.

Big Brother, we're watching you.