Posts Tagged Google
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Posted by Jason Birch in Google, Rant on October 21, 2009
Ever have something you can’t get out of your head? How about two things?
The first thing stuck in my head is the idea that Google is moving wholesale into the content business. They aren’t creating their own content, but they aggregate external content into a “walled garden” and encourage users to host content on Google properties, both actions ensuring that value remains solely exploitable by Google. For product and service folks this won’t matter much, but for people reliant on web content for their income the contraction of the web into mega-portals is definitely a business threat to be aware of. I personally worry that this business tactic may affect the vitality of the web in the long run. Case-in-point, with the recent launch of the real estate layer in Google Maps, realtors are incented to funnel their listings through Google Base rather than posting them openly on the web as GeoRSS or KML. This echoes the aggregation that is occurring in Google’s “Place Pages“, and is a worrisome trend.
The other thing stuck in my head is that stupid Sesame Street pinball counting song… actually I kinda dig it, which is probably why it’s staying stuck.
What I really want to do is to stop thinking about these things. I figured that maybe if I combine the two it will help me exorcise both demons, so:
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-J
No, I don’t know Bill from Canada…
Posted by Jason Birch in Google on September 22, 2008
and, amazingly enough, the weather for the second largest country in the world isn’t homogeneous either.
I’m so used to Google knowing what I want that this was a bit of a surprise:
Google geo-meteorological search intelligence: fail!
-J
All your Base are BBOX
Posted by Jason Birch in Google on January 10, 2008
You can now do some slightly fancier things with location queries in Google Base, including the good old bounding box.
I am actually a bit surprised to see this. Base has not had the kind of recognition/adoption that I figured would be required for it to get the development resources it needs (an anonymous Googler once said that the problem with Base was that I was the only one who had heard of it). They still have quite a way to go though… For instance, I need a way of uploading KML representations into a column, and of course Base needs to be swapped in as an open back end to MyMaps. :)
-J
OpenSocial: scope of disruption
Posted by Jason Birch in Google, Loose Integration on November 2, 2007
If you’re only looking at adoption by the players like MySpace, I think you’re missing the big picture.
Sure, buy-in by these sites is going to push adoption of the APIs, but for me the real value is that this extends social capabilities beyond the sphere of these "container" sites to the entire web. If you read the Google OpenSocial FAQs, nowhere do they say that its goal is to enhance sharing between portals. In fact, they explicitly say:
This is an effort which we hope will benefit the entire web community. [...] In the future, we are planning to open-source the components that are required to run OpenSocial on your own website.
The code hasn’t been released yet, but the docs make it clear that this vision has merit. OpenSocial uses gData, AtomPub, and a whole lot of REST goodness to allow any website to implement interactive social capabilities.
I see this taking off quickly in blogging (FriendBlogRoll,etc), but I also see huge potential for things like distributed social mapping. Take a look at what Google has done with its Put Yourself on the Map capabilities. That’s pretty cool on an individual mapping level, but imagine extending that out to community maps, implemented similar to the concept of “Groups” on Facebook. Encapsulate some GeoRSS in gData (via Sean) and how hard would it be to build an OpenSocial system where "friends" can all interact with the same map through their interface of choice? OpenSocial is already geo-aware to some extent; the People data includes a GeoRSS GML Point element to locate individuals!
OpenSocial has incredible value for traditional web sites as well. I’ve been considering several different applications for my hobby website (I built this Drink Recipes website in college, and it’s stuck with me since) such as "tell a friend", "friends favourite drinks", etc, etc. All of these could be built as plug-ins for OpenSocial-enabled sites (and of course as an additional plug-in for Facebook), but they can also be exposed on the main website, turning the whole web into one big social network.
One area that I don’t really understand is how OpenSocial deals with distributed authentication. It looks like you can either authenticate locally (through user/pass) or through Google Accounts using AuthSub. I don’t know a lot about this area, but I really think that this may need to be extended to authentication methods like OpenID.
-J
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