The Web fought Nature and ...Nature won

Most people find it scary but I find it oddly comforting: Nature ran into the Web twice in two days and won convincingly each time. 


First there was this devastating weather in the US. They didn't call them wild storms for nothing: they left sweltering heat and massive power outages in their wake. Not only were millions of people affected, one of the casualties has been the Internet. Power interruptions at the big data center operated by Amazon.com in Virginia crashed other popular websites that rent out Amazon's computers. No Instagram, no Pinterest, no ..
how many lawyers would be pouring over SLA's and contracts right now? The Cloud being blown away by clouds: there is justice in that.


And then Nature pulled another one.

On July 1st a leap second was added to adjust global world time as close as possible to the solar time or the Coordinated Universal Time. Sensitive computer systems that run on milliseconds don't like leap seconds at all. Google was prepared but others weren't: they're not as technology geek as Google I suppose. LinkedIn, Foursquare, Stumble Upon, Gawker, ... they all went down. Mozilla 'choked on the leap second': not tech-savvy enough? 


Or, to paraphrase Forbes Business: locusts are next :-)

I don't want pizza

When reading about the way Google looks at the world and how it will look in 20 years (as if you could possibly predict that) I get this creepy feeling (again ...). 

Marissa Mayer explains in a recent interview: " It may not be that you search for pizza, but we know you tend to like pizza places, or you tend to like more casual, loungey bars, so we can suggest things." Now why would I be hàppy with that? If I tend to like pizza places and feel like going to a Spanish restaurant for a change, why would I appreciate this meddling in my life and the choices I want to make?


Mayer takes it one step further: "On the social front, can we suggest someone that we think that you should know because you have so much in common that we think you'd like each other?" Nightmare!


I know, I'm being naive: I never liked the 'others who bought this also bought' advice from Amazon. It's not because I like reading J. Eugenides that I absolutely want to read more of the same. I never click on 'most read' or 'most liked' articles on website. If everybody keeps clicking on most read links they remain most read. 


What I do like is to surf the Web. Isn't that what it was designed for? To explore? To be surprised? To learn new stuff? To travel in cyberspace? To be informed, annoyed, shocked, saddened, happy, ... or amused instead of being told what to do, where to go and what to see? 


Former CEO Schmidt once told the Wall Street Journal "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next," and got a lot of flak for that. He also told CNBC in december 2009: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place". 


Wake up, Europe, but don't over-act(a).


(And by the way: they are looking into self-driving cars. I wouldn't want to be in one when it starts driving to a destination I didn't pick :-) )

Weird Google Stuff

Interesting article on Huffington yesterday: Google Earth's 'Atlantis' has disappeared after an upgrade. Google has been quality checking their 3D Ocean tool and now claims to have 15% of the ocean floor visible at a resolution of 1 km. Before the upgrade, images existed that were rumored to be images of the long lost city of Atlantis. 


Fake Atlantis isn't the only strange image recorded on Google earth; in the same article Huffington refers to 36 different weird ones. Google Maps finds some pretty weird things too. 


More importantly Google Earth itself is up for an extensive upgrade later this year which is said to result in twice the accuracy it has today.


Still, removing these images: they do have a censorship reflex, don't they?

A very cool infographic on Google Search

Infographic by PPC Blog

Google going social?

Posted in the Wall Street Journal today: Google to announce some social feature linked to Gmail allowing users to share media and even update statuses? The least you can say they don't create this irritating hype announcing something ages beforehand.

On the other hand: I don't mind creating status updates for my Facebook account on a (nearly) daily basis but do I want to see status updates on everything I do? Absolutely not.

The reason FB has remained this much fun is because most of the status updates I see in my friends' circle are witty, funny, serious, provocative ... no day-to-day 'i'm having coffee now and after that I will start doing the dishes' kinda stuff. But on my Google mail? And what is Google going to do with that? Run text analysis, sentiment analysis, semantic analysis and get me analyzed to bits?

I don't think so.

En waarom zou het nu wél lukken?

De Tech blog van de FT meldt dat Facebook een top Google madam heeft binnengehaald om nu eindelijk ook een keer te proberen geld te verdienen met dat ding. Facebook heeft een paar maanden terug ook al een keer geprobeerd om een systeem van social ads op te zetten en kreeg prompt een user-revolt over zich heen. Of deze Sheryl Sandberg meer kans op slagen heeft, zal nog moeten blijken. Pleit in haar voordeel dat ze veel meer ervaring heeft om te proberen het potentieel dat er ligt, ook echt te valoriseren.

Don't be evil

Of zoals Angela Natividad zegt op adrants: it's a statement, not a lifestyle. Ze verwijst naar het (stilaan onrustwekkende) uitdeinende Google dat nu ook Myspace opgevist heeft als 'partner' in het kader van de komende lancering van OpenSocial. Myspace trekt natuurlijk de meeste aandacht ... maar er is ook Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, ... in het selecte kransje van opstarters. Alleen Facebook is niet gevraagd. Google mag stilaan de Microsoft treatment krijgen, vind ik.