Keeping Google Honest

Google's Public Policy Blog has a new story about how its maps feature Street View helped police locate a kidnapped child.  I don't know if you'll hear them reporting on how it helps criminals scan city apartments for units without windowbars.

FT on Google Grand Strategy

One of my inaugural posts on this blog - Google Docs and the Future of Computing - was about how I ditched Microsoft Office in favor of Google Docs, and how Google is shifting computing from users' PCs to company servers. The Financial Times summarizes exactly how this plays into Google's larger mission:

Gmail, its web-based e-mail product, has become a development focus for the Silicon Valley company, with a stream of innovations leading to its promotion by influential early adopters.

With links to Google Docs, Calendar and other web-based services, Google appears to be making Gmail the centre of an online productivity suite that could eventually challenge the dominance of Microsoft’s Office collection of programs.

Google has two motives for pushing harder into e-mail. First, Google makes money from advertising placed inside e-mails. But the service is also valuable for its “stickiness” in increasing users’ dependency and time spent on other Google products.

Microsoft has its own array of Windows Live and .Net products to rival Google, but the integration of Google's free library of applications to the central Gmail platform is what sets it apart.

New Ideas on the Expansion of Broadband

Two guys from the New America Foundation - the tech public policy think tank run by Eric Schmidt of Google - published an awesome paper suggesting ways to expand broadband using basic intuitions from property rights.

Google Docs and the Future of Computing

I just wrote a term paper on a free web application offered by a search engine.  The last time I wrote a paper in something besides Microsoft Word, I was 7 years old and the year was 1994, when you could buy the internet in a box.

My desktop Packard Bell computer ran a Pentium I with 64MB of RAM.  My 15 inch cathode ray tube monitor looked like a droid from Star Wars, and my computer gaming life was limited to a turn-based, 2-D, tank-shooting death match.  

Then, my mom brought home a copy of Office from work.  I've used versions of that program to write book reports in grade school, research for debate in high school, and write my thesis in college.  My relationship with this productivity suite has taken me through a lot.

So, it was a big development in my life when yesterday, I wrote a paper in Google Documents: 24 pages, 1.5 spaced, 1 inch margins, APA format, headers, footers, and tiered headings for crystal organization.  Google even packaged the document into a PDF.  

And I can't see myself going back to Office again. 

Google Docs, and the associated Google application suite, allows  me to sit down at my "computer" at any computer connected to the internet.  No jump drives, no sync programs or anything.  All I need to get my stuff is a browser and a computer no more powerful than my old Packard Bell.  Pretty cool.