Blog: Articles filed under Google

I have to say, I‘m experiencing some strong technology lust for the new wave of Android 3.0 tablets, beginning with the Motorola XOOM, that are hitting the market. Future Shop’s tech blog has posted some video reviews by rgbfilter that show off the XOOM, and there’s a part of me that’s saying, “Want. Want. Want.” It’s exciting to see competitors for the iPad running the first version of Android that’s “optimized for tablets,” and along with the release of the BlackBerry PlayBook, the tablet market is starting to get very interesting.

I have been somewhat sceptical of the niche tablets fill since the release of the original iPad. In retrospect, I think that was as much a reaction against the hype surrounding the iPad itself than any qualified evaluation of tablets in general. The idea that the iPad is a “game-changer” (whatever that means) was silly to me; yes, it’s a significant new product, but tablets are still in their infancy. They haven’t even started teething yet.

I’ve had my Samsung Galaxy S for about six months now, and I love it. This experience with an Android smartphone, and some good observations regarding the utility of tablets, such as this post by Peter Nowak, have caused me to change my mind. That is, I‘m a little more excited by (and about) tablets now than I was last year, and I kind of want one.

But not yet.

My philosophical difficulties with Apple preclude me from ever owning an iPad. Still, I’ll admit to lusting after the physical device itself—I‘ve never had a problem with Apple’s design, and I think the iPad is a beautiful device. So I‘ve been watching with interest the emergence of competitors, and of course my own biases make me partial to the Android crowd. Nevertheless, I still can’t justify buying a XOOM or similar device, because I‘m just not willing to pay $600 for tablets as they are now.

I know some people are, obviously, and all the more power to them. I guess I just have to face that I am not an early adopter (except, apparently, when it comes to HTML5!). Perhaps if I had a legitimate need for a tablet, rather than the mere desire for one, then I would be more amenable to the price tag. When it comes to that sort of money, however, I force myself to be honest: I don’t need a tablet right now. Between them, my venerable 4-year-old laptop and my shiny smartphone serve my needs. Sure, I can think of plenty of uses where a tablet would be more ideal—lately I’ve been bringing my phone into the living room when my dad and I watch TV, so I can sign into my IM client through it. I can see myself doing much more involved work on a tablet in that living room—coding, or writing blog articles—that just isn’t practical on my smartphone’s small screen and isn’t comfortable with a laptop in the living room chair. Likewise, a tablet is a great portable compromise in those cases where I don’t really need to bring my laptop to school but want more than just my phone.

(This last attitude, if anything, demonstrates the effect tablets are beginning to have. I suppose it’s part of the “game changer” paradigm shift iPad enthusiasts want to see. Laptops used to be the pinnacle of portability; now they are big and clunky. Tablets are sleek and shiny and sexy. How the times change.)

So a tablet would be wonderful, but I don’t need it; I just want it. And for me, $600 is too much to spend satisfying a want. Even $450 (the no-contract price AT&T is offering for the comparable Acer Iconia Tab A500) is rather much. If I had the extra money, perhaps I‘d buy one anyway, but I would still hesitate and think long and hard. Tablets are just very young.

It’s similar to my reaction to trying the first generation Kobo eReader last year. I love the idea of an eReader, but the technology isn’t mature enough for me yet. Likewise, I love what I’ve seen of tablets so far, but I can envision them getting much better in a relatively short period of time. I imagine it’s similar to how laptops began to proliferate throughout the 1990s; I still see people using really old Thinkpads, and all I can think is, “I admire you for using last year’s model … but wow, that’s an old device.” Of course, if I took this argument to its extreme, I’d never buy any technology, because “next year’s model” is always around the corner and always better in some way.

But it all just comes back to a question of needs, wants, and opportunities. Why should I buy this year’s tablet when I don’t need it, especially if I decide next year I need a tablet and there are much better models available by then? This is not intended to be an anti-tablet polemic. I‘m sure other people have plenty of legitimate reasons to buy existing tablets at their current prices, and I don’t begrudge them that. I‘m just expressing my own mixed feelings about my lust for a technology that’s still very young and still improving in leaps and bounds. I want a tablet, but I also want a better tablet than what we have now. And since I don’t need one right now, I’m willing to wait a little longer.

This is a critical response to David Lyon’s “The World Wide Web of Surveillance: The Internet and off-world power-flows,” published in the Spring 1998 issue of Information, Communication & Society. Those of you lucky enough to have a university account that has access to such things can find it there; those of you following along at home can read the earlier version presented at a Canadian Association for Information Science meeting in 1997.

That was the single most difficult aspect when considering my response to this reading: it was written in 1997. True, that’s only 13 years ago—but the World Wide Web itself is only 20 years old. That is pre-Google, the entity that has, perhaps more than any other Internet-based company, single-handedly changed the way we use the Web—not to mention introduced a suite of privacy and surveillance concerns that weren’t around in 1997. So as a technophile upstart who came to the Web in 2004 and writes in HTML5, I had to keep my reservations regarding the article’s age in check. After all, despite the changes since Lyon wrote this, most of the article is still valid. There are parts that read as outdated, and I’ll point those out when we get there. For now, let’s talk about surveillance.

Like everything else online, online surveillance emerges from a tradition of offline surveillance going back to ancient times. Not all surveillance is necessarily sinister or malign: Lyon uses censuses and population statistics (like birth rate) as examples of surveillance we generally consider acceptable (though if the recent debate around the long-form census shows anything, it’s that “acceptable” is always a matter of subjective degree). In more recent times, against the backdrop of democracy, surveillance is the turf of an eternal tug-of-war between politicians and law enforcement officers and the freedoms of the citizens of the democracy. Too much surveillance infringes on those freedoms, whereas too little surveillance hinders law enforcement and aids criminals. As always, it is a matter of balance.

Lyon looks at some of the initial fears regarding surveillance back when the Internet really was young, citing concerns that we would have an “Orwellian police states and Kafkaesque faceless bureaucratic machines” (93). He notes that time has not borne those fears out exactly (though sometimes I look askance at the photos of signs I see on UK metro stops). Instead, he says that there are “two major debates … concerning surveillance,” the first being the extent to which online surveillance differs qualitatively from offline (paper and bureaucracy) surveillance, the second being the extent to which Foucauldian theories are applicable to online surveillance (94).

If the differences were not as obvious in 1997, I think they are fairly obvious today: the network provides speed and data collation abilities far beyond what analog surveillance could ever achieve. However, it is also decentralized. So instead of having a single entity, like the government or a corporation, spying on the users of the Net, anyone with a computer might be able to spy on anyone else. So do we really have a “panopticon” in Foucault’s sense? For a really detailled look at that question, you might be interested in Mark Winokur’s article, which we read previously this week. In Lyon’s case, the answer is that the panopticon might be part of it, but there is more to the Internet and surveillance as well. Moving beyond the realm of surveillance as a form of discipline, he raises another Foucaldian idea, that of biopower, and proposes that it might fill some of the gaps left by the panoptic consideration of online surveillance.

Citing William Bogard, Lyon delineates a difference between the classical panopticon and what he terms “hyperpanoptics.” The former is “an architecture” that deals “with real time and physical space,” whereas in the digital world, “time is asynchronous and speed of flows is crucial, and … distance and proximity are blurred….” In the classical panopticon, prisoners couldn’t know if they were being watched at all times, but the model was such that they weren’t—that is, there would be one guard in the tower watching some prisoner. Online, however, this model strictly ported would break, because it is possible to watch everyone at once, provided your guard is a sophisticated signals intelligence network like Echelon (not to be confused with the fictional artificial intelligence, the Eschaton). Lyon calls this electronic solution to the limitations of surveillance the “mythical goal” of surveillance (101).

He doesn’t explicitly go on to connect biopower to this, but it seems like Lyon means for biopower to elevate the theories of online surveillance beyond the notion of surveillance-as-discipline. That is, we aren’t just being actively watched or monitored; long-term surveillance collects our data, our patterns and behaviours and habits, and uses that data to build profiles of people and populations. The purpose of such data mining can range from law enforcement to marketing, but it all relates back to biopower, to the focus on human particulars. Facebook, which I’m sure Lyon would have mentioned were it around in 1997, is probably the paradigm case here. We share so much personal information with Facebook, and so it has this massive database of human relationships at its fingertips. It knows who talks to whom, who went to school with whom, who works with whom, etc. Caladan was ruled with sea power, and on Arrakis it was desert power; with the Internet, he or she who has biopower wins the day.

For me, however, the most interesting part of Lyon’s article is how he carefully differentiates between surveillance and privacy. The two terms are not synonymous, and privacy is but one concern related to surveillance. Lyon is careful to point out that surveillance can also cause social division and inequality on a scale beyond individual invasions of privacy. He obviously considers these coextensive, for he laments, “some theorists seem so concerned with the one that they ignore or minimize the significance of the other” (99). I myself must confess that often I focus on invasions of privacy to the exclusion of social inequality, probably because as a white middle-class male, I tend not to experience that inequality directly; I mistakenly view my privileged status as the normative experience across society. So it is good to be reminded of such things.

And once reminded, how can you really forget? Look no farther than the Great Firewall of China. This is a country with more people online than the United States (let alone Canada) has in its entirety. Yet owing to the regime’s control of access to the larger Web, the population receives an experience online that is fundamentally different from what we see in our countries. It is a little mind-boggling.

When it comes to privacy, Facebook offers us plenty of examples, notably Facebook Beacon. Our own privacy commissioner of Canada has reviewed Facebook’s policies and found it wanting. It is important to note that this is not necessarily a sign that Facebook is “being evil,” as privacy issues are complex, and Facebook is as much a newcomer to these waters as we are. Nevertheless, it is clear that corporations stand to gain enormous benefits from the data to which they have access.

I should hope that we all have at least a basic understanding of the privacy implications of surfing the Web, more so than the average user might have had in 1997. Lyon’s article is understandably a product of its time; the Clipper Chip project he mentions was dead on arrival. Historically, the governments‘ attempts to mix secrecy with control over encryption have failed miserably (keeping your cryptography standard classified so it can’t be peer reviewed is just asking for trouble). Keep in mind that this article also predates the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. While the US has not established a One World Encryption, those attacks led to the passing of the USA PATRIOT Act, and our own Anti-terrorism Act here in Canada. In fact, Lakehead University’s Faculty Association actually objected to the university’s use of Gmail as the basis for our new email system, on the grounds that Google would be subject to US privacy laws. So online surveillance has only become more complicated since 1998, not less.

So here are some links, because links are cool (on the scale of coolness, links are slightly cooler than fezzes but nowhere near as cool as bow ties):

• Of course, I’m going to link you to Spark, because it is seriously one of my favourite programs.
  • Interview with Evgeny Morozov on Internet and repression
  • Google Street View has been a fairly non-controversial subject here (aside from some naughty WiFi data sniffing), so it might interest you to learn about how Google did Street View in Germany.
  • Though not necessarily surveillance per se, Episode 101 talks about workplace Internet filtering, which is related to Lyon’s brief discussion of how workplaces will monitor one’s Internet usage.
• For more on Facebook privacy concerns, I refer you to Rocketboom for May 17, 2010.
• The above video mentions Diaspora, a self-labelled “open alternative to Facebook” that is currently in alpha stage. Is it truly going to resolve the issues around Facebook and online surveillance? (Something about Diaspora that has nothing to do with online surveillance but is really cool is that its “gender” field is a text input. This is slightly controversial owing to issues of data integrity, and I’ll be interested in exploring this when we get to the part of the course that deals with gender and sex online.)

In his conclusion, Lyon says that

until the inequality-reinforcing and personhood-threatening aspects of contemporary surveillance are seen together, and until these dimensions are understood in relation to the virtualizing of surveillance, the real issues of contemporary surveillance will continue to elude us. (103)

This seems like a great starting point for discussion. I happen to agree with Lyon that these two issues (social inequality and invasion of privacy) are related, not disjoint, aspects of online surveillance (feel free to let me know if you think otherwise). If this is the case, how can we see these as a unified issue, and do existing theories (e.g., Foucauldian) allow for this, or do we need something else? Have we made much progress in this since 1997?

I intended to post this two days ago, but somehow never got around to it. You know you need to blog more when your grandparents remark on your inactivity. So let’s do this!

The past few weeks have been, for the most part, uneventful (and that’s good). I worked a bit more than I would like, but there’s not much to be done. I’ve tried to use all the free time I have as wisely as possible, mostly reading. Now that the snow is gone—even though the frost warnings are not—I like to sit outside the front of the house on the nice days.

Having finished playing Mass Effect a second time, I tried playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary again. Unfortunately, the controls continued to frustrate me as I fell back into the rythym of “No, Lara, jump that way—oh, and you died.” So I tried Tomb Raider: Legend instead. While it’s the same engine, the levels are shorter and more varied, so I’m less frustrated with it.

I’m greatly anticipating Mass Effect 2, and a few days ago I saw the trailer for Assassin’s Creed 2. I enjoyed the first Assassin’s Creed, although the story was somewhat weak, and the second one looks like it will be worth picking up eventually. Video games remain a side hobby, however.

Not too much happening in June, but it is a month of firsts for me. This Friday, I’ll be getting my wisdom teeth out (for the first and, logically, only time). Then a couple of weeks after that, I’ll be attending a wedding—my second wedding ever and my first wedding as an adult. So we’ll see how that goes.

Rogers released the HTC Dream and HTC Magic on June 2, the two headsets currently using Google Android. Those of you who aren’t into technology can safely skip this next paragraph; suffice it to say, I find Google Android sexy.

The Apple iPhone indubitably revolutionized the way we see smartphones. Where the BlackBerry and Palm were function, the iPhone was all about design—after all, it’s Apple. Unfortunately, Apple is starting to use its reputation for innovative design (i.e., its coolness) to sell uncool products. Because the iPhone is sort of like the North Korea of smartphones, in that Apple has control of what’s sold through its apps store and ultimately what’s on your phone. That’s why I find Google Android so appealing. Anyone with the coding skills can write Android apps and distribute them to anyone with an Android-powered phone. Thus, you can have all the functionality of an iPhone without any of its draconian drawbacks. The major disadvantage, of course, is that you risk the scorn of all your friends who are slaves to the Big Mac—er, Apple.

So the prospect of getting a Google-powered smartphone is extremely tempting. Yet I‘m not willing to become a slave to Rogers. I don’t need a smartphone. It would be nice to be able to check my email or update my calendar from anywhere, but honestly, I don’t get that much email, and my calendar seldom changes. If the plans were less expensive and Rogers were less evil, I’d jump at this opportunity in a second. Fortunately, I just have to wait until tomorrow, and mobile phone prices will be the least of my concerns.

Yes, tomorrow I get my wisdom teeth out. I’m nervous; I’ve never had any procedure like this done before—and would like to avoid them in the future, naturally. My wisdom teeth are fully grown in, and they don’t cause me any pain, so I’m hoping that means the surgery will go as smoothly as such things can go and my convalescence will be short. We shall see.

An interesting week lies ahead of me.

According to Robert Thomson, Google is an “internet parasite”. In Thomson’s view, Google’s aggregation of content promotes a “‘mistaken perception’ that content should be free” and decreases traditional brand loyalty.

The nature of content, content creation, and how much this information is worth are at the heart of every major debate regarding the economics of the Internet. These issues are responsible for our DRM woes with regards to software and digital music, and they drive the collapse of so-called “traditional media”, such as newspapers, which aren’t adapting quickly enough to the new playing field.

This is the most amusing quotation:

Google encourages promiscuity — and shamelessly so — and therefore a significant proportion of their users don’t necessarily associate that content with the creator.

Oh no! Google’s promoting competition among content providers! How dare they?! I mean, it’s not as if the so-called “free market” is based on competition. Shame on Google for corrupting those free market values!

I would go so far as to argue that the whole point of the Internet is aggregation of content. This is why the Internet revolution is so profoundly different from any previous information revolution, including that of the printing press. The Internet removes any cost associated with distributing content—there’s only the initial cost of production, then it can be distributed an infinite number of times. And this is scary for businesses that rely on the scarcity of their commodity relative to its demand. Now that content can be ubiquitous and easily accessible, these businesses are struggling to adapt their revenue model.

Thomson’s reaction, unfortunately, is indicative of the larger trend among traditional media providers: they don’t get it. They don’t get that it doesn’t matter if content should be free—content is free now. We live in a society of moochers. Pointing at Google, which has recognized the role of the Internet in content creation and is now profiting from it, and claiming that Google’s tactics “aren’t fair” is just an economist form of whining. In order for newspapers to survive, it won’t be about the content they produce but their ability to specialize, embrace new technology—rather than resist it or co-opt it—and their willingness to share content at first in order to build that brand loyalty that Thomson insists Google is ruthlessly eradicating.

Meantime Thomson said it was “amusing” to read media blogs and comment sites, all of which traded on other people’s information.

“They are basically editorial echo chambers rather than centres of creation, and the cynicism they have about so-called traditional media is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting the quality of traditional media,” he said.

It’s true that many sites, especially those that aggregate content, aren’t necessarily original. However, Thomson fails to acknowledge that freely-available content allows for new “centres of creation.” That’s why we have concepts like “public domain” and Creative Commons.

To be fair, Thomson does a good job of summarizing the challenges of traditional media: “Thomson also said it was incumbent on content creators to make their own websites compelling for readers.” The article ends with a somewhat syntactically ambiguous quotation, but I think Thomson was adding a caveat emptor for those who prefer to reinvent the wheel rather than fix the broken one. He raises questions that newspapers must answer before finding their place in the new world order.

I for one welcome newspapers to the Internet, provided the stop whining and adapt (or die). The Internet isn’t killing newspapers; the market that the Internet facilitates is killing newspapers. And so far, newspapers‘ bids to kill off the market haven’t worked, so it’s time to face the music: change or die. Because unless newspapers do start doing something useful with their online presence, aren’t they just parasites preying on those who have been socialized—wrongly I believe—that knowledge must be hoarded?

Yesterday, I explained why I was excited about Google getting into the browser game. Of course, no new Google venture is complete without some people taking issue with Google’s privacy policies. In this case, the controversy was around Google Chrome’s EULA, specifically section 11.1. Now, since everything on the Internet happens at the speed of light, Google has already changed the wording of that clause and applied it retroactively, claiming that it was all a mistake by the lawyers behind the curtain. However, this incident reminds us of just how much data Google collects, not to mention privacy issues online as a whole.

I should begin with the disclaimer that I am not a Google fanboy. I love some of Google’s services—I use Gmail, although I prefer to check my mail through Mozilla Thunderbird’s interface, and Google Calendar is my favourite calendar application. However, I’m perfectly willing to criticize Google. I try not to be a fanboy of anything, but if I were, I‘d be a Joss Whedon fanboy. So I’m going to hijack this post to mention that the Dr. Horrible soundtrack is available for purchase on iTunes. That is all.

The Internet is transforming us into a global village as Marshall McLuhan predicted. More and more information concerning our offline personae is being stored in a digital form and then transferred all around the world, whether we know of it or not. Companies that exist primarily to gather data (like Google, a search engine company) always want more. How much are we willing to give?

When addressing the issue of privacy on the Internet, I’ve decided to tackle four questions. Firstly, what do we want when we yell “privacy!” on forums and blogs? It’s a word, but what does it mean? Next, what criteria should we use to determine which institutions to trust with our private data? And who is to blame when that data gets leaked or shared with third parties? Lastly, let’s put on our pragmatist caps and consider the reality of the Internet today: what’s feasible, and what will require major paradigm shifts to accomplish?

I Have Everything to Hide

A typical retort to those who lament the loss of privacy in everyday life is, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you should have nothing to hide.” No one’s perfect though, and we all have things we want to hide. That’s why most browsers, including Google Chrome, have some sort of stealth mode (or “porn mode”) that doesn’t record what you’re doing. Everyone can have legitimate reasons for keeping secrets. The point of privacy is to present people with choice: an individual should have the choice of whether or not to reveal his or her private information, right?

But what’s private to us? Well, if anonymity is your goal, then probably everything except a pseudonym, maybe your gender. The Internet is increasingly critical to offline applications, however, and anonymity is no longer always an option. Sure, it’s possible to establish an ephemeral blog with no personally-identifiable information available to the public. However, the site will record your computer’s IP address, which in turn can be traced back (in most cases) to you. Even if you use a public computer, you’ll probably have to give an email address that could be traced back to you—you could use a fake address, but then you‘d have no way of receiving legitimate communications.

As the Internet evolves, it begins connecting our offline personae with our online ones. No longer is the Internet just a network on which we push emails back and forth. Now we’re uploading videos, torrenting television programs, tweeting, blogging, using Facebook—much of this relying on our own offline identities to make it relevant. When I update my Twitter status, it shows up on Facebook and on the homepage of my website. People who want to know what I am doing can look at my status.

But if one is not careful, too much information can lead to problems. Put your credit card number in the wrong form, and suddenly someone has stolen your identity. These are real problems that we as a society are going to have to solve. We have to give our private data to someone, but to whom?

Sell Your Soul For a Fiddle

How do you decide if a website is trustworthy? Friends‘ reviews? Newspaper articles? The number of people on the site? Which services deserve to store our private information, and which ones are untrustworthy for one reason or another?

If you have a bank account, then you probably have access to your finances online. Your bank stores massive amounts of personal information about you from your name to your credit history. What makes a bank more trustworthy than Google? Companies often try to sell themselves by promoting how much experience they’ve had, how long they‘ve been around. My bank, Bank of Montreal, is Canada’s oldest bank, founded in 1817. That’s much older than Google, which will be celebrating its tenth birthday in three days! If age is a factor, then my bank must be a more appropriate institution to trust with my data.

Banks don’t have the best track record for keeping private information private, however. It seems like every couple of months there’s another article in the newspaper about one bank or another misplacing or accidentally leaking the private information of thousands of people. Whoa. When was the last time Google did that? In July there was some concern when a court ordered Google-owned YouTube to hand over some information to Viacom. YouTube’s handling of the situation seems to indicate that Google has our privacy on its mind. And that makes sense. Google is a business as much as banks are, and no business wants to become notorious for disclosing private data.

ScapeGoogle?

So when our data does get disclosed, who is to blame? In the case of accidental leaks, the company often hits the age-old tome of excuses to produce classics like, “The postal service lost the package containing the data,” or “An employee forgot to clean sensitive data off his or her thumb drive before giving it away.” We are all human¹; we make mistakes.

If the court orders the company to share the information with a third party, then we blame the government. And this is an important point: even in so-called free societies, legislation exists that gives the government access to data you store with private companies. If the U.S. government demands that Google hand over some of its data, there is nothing much Google can do about it. Google’s lawyers can fight the case in court, sure, but in the end, if the government wins the case, then it’s not Google’s fault that the government has that power. That is the price Google pays for operating in such deprived countries, much like Google’s self-imposed censorship is the price it pays for operating in China.

Thanks to the networked nature of the Internet, this creates headaches for people who don’t even live in the United States. Any data you send to Google’s servers is going to end up at a machine located in the U.S. at some point, which makes it accessible to the U.S. government. Avoiding such an eventuality requires a great deal of effort². So the options become just accept the inevitable or boycott Google and its ilk³

Let’s All Go Amish

Boycotting Google is an acceptable, if extreme, method of protecting one’s privacy. However, it is impractical to boycott every possible source of privacy infringement. I suppose that one could cut up one’s credit cards, debit cards, government-issued IDs, etc. There are people who do this—but they are not a majority. Most people accept that some level of compromise is required to keep up with the relentless march of technology.

Ah, now the real demon comes to light: technology is evil! Mmm … not so much. We could destroy all of our advanced technology, but that doesn’t eliminate our privacy concerns. Also, it would utterly wreck civilization as we know it—you can go ahead and claim that a more pastoral existence is the paradise humanity requires, but that’s beyond the scope of this entry. The reality is, we are dependent on our technology, and that dependence comes with a price.

Be careful with your private information, of course. You’re going to have to give it out eventually. Be frugal about to whom you give it out. Tools like Facebook are not inherently dangerous; it all comes down to how you use them⁴

If you really are bothered by how society treats privacy these days, then make noise. Don’t just blog ineffectually about it like I am—write a letter to your representative of government (if you live in a “democracy”), form activist groups, make T-shirts, make pies … whatever it takes. Fight for change.

Me, I’m more worried about tethered appliances (such as the iPhone) and companies having the ability to remotely terminate products we “buy” as opposed to the data on those devices. But that’s an issue for another day.

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• [ 1 ] Except for Stephen Harper, who is a robot
• [ 2 ] Time better spent drinking tea.
• [ 3 ] Yeah, I used the word “ilk.” I went there.
• [ 4 ] And how much common sense you have when accepting offers from widows of deposed Nigerian dictators.

Google made a splash on Labour Day when it announced the release of its own browser, Google Chrome.

It’s important to note that this is only a beta release, and Google’s made it clear that they are going to make major improvements to it. Check out the comic book that explains Google Chrome for techie details. A comic book—how cool is that?

Of course, Google has set a high standard for itself in the past. Reaction to this “beta” has been negative from some people (particularly those less tech-savvy who are underwhelmed by the interface), and Google has itself to blame for ruining the “beta” label with stable services like Gmail. However, it’s important to look beyond Google Chrome as just a product and examine its significance to users and the Internet as a whole.

For me, Google Chrome is significant because it is open source. Google has a history of supporting the open source community, but this is the first really big open source Google product. I love Google’s other apps, but their proprietary nature has always made me slightly uneasy. By making Google Chrome open source, Google is signalling that it isn’t entering the browser business just to make a new competitor for the other good browsers out there already. As the comic book explains, they’ve built it on a major open source rendering engine (Webkit) and the JavaScript engine they‘ve used is open source and independent of Google Chrome, so other browsers could even incorporate it too.

Google has a history of raising the bar with its inventions. Gmail’s initial 2 GB space, free POP access (and later, free IMAP access!), etc., caused other free webmail providers to step up and increase their offerings. I‘m hoping that Google Chrome does the same thing to browsers. We’re going to see cool new ideas—such as each tab being a separate process to save memory and prevent hanging—and some interesting takes on standard methods—such as the omnibox combining the address bar and search bar.

I love Firefox, and other browsers like Opera and Safari are great. However, all our browsers today are still clinging to the legacies of those that came before them. It looks like Google has stepped back and taken a look at the Big Picture of the World Wide Web, which has evolved at a frightening pace since its inception. The Web is no longer about connecting your computer to a box and slowly accessing text and images from other locations. Nowadays the Web is an interactive, ever-changing media. We have “web applications” instead of “web sites.” Some of Google’s methodology behind Chrome indicates that they’re attempting to turn the browser into something that works well with web applications instead of just a tool for viewing web pages. Because it’s open source, other browser makers can incorporate their innovations into their browsers, and they are now challenged to come up with their own.

This is exciting! Even if you aren’t a die-hard techie, you can appreciate the fact that we’re experiencing a pivotal moment in the development of technology. Interfaces started as a very basic, command-oriented idea. Then came the great era of the graphical user interface: everything is “point and click.” But we can still do better. The next step is truly making interfaces intuitive, moving beyond point and click and seeking solutions like natural-language interfaces. All of us already speak at least one language; we shouldn’t have to learn another just to operate our computers.

Google Chrome is a stepping stone, even if it doesn’t turn out to be the Next Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.

Tomorrow, I’ll have my take on the controversy surrounding Google Chrome’s Terms of Service.

Anyone else noticed this new iGoogle thing that Google has going for it?

What’s with the name? You would think that a company as creative as Google would be able to come up with a better name than something that—well, frankly, that sounds like a bad Apple rip-off. And this isn’t just Google’s problem. iWhatever has become the new “Whatever X” of our generation. I feel sorry for the poor letter—it’s not even uppercase! And it’s being attached willy-nilly to products and services just because it sounds cool.

In fact, if the current trend continues, we’ll run out of i’s to use in every day conversation! Soon conversaton wll look lke ths, because we wn’t have enough eyes to go around.

• wll be the end of cvlzaton as we know t.

But I digress. Anyone else tried iGoogle? It looks interesting. I use regular Google as my homepage because it is quick to load, but I think I will try out iGoogle for a week or two to see if I like having all this information at my finger tips better.

I was proud of Google for refusing the United States Justice Department’s request for that information. Unfortunately, it seems that Google’s done a total 180° on me… .

They’ve agreed to censor their services in China, including censoring words such as “democracy” and “human rights” from their search engine. Apparently the decision was “painful” but they think some access for China to Google is better than none.

I think that regardless of how they rationalise it, the decision was about business plain and simple. Google just didn’t want to lose its market, so it compromised.

So Google has this new instant messenging client, Google Talk. I downloaded it to try it out. Smartly, Google has used a standard protocol, XMPP, allowing clients such as Trillian Pro and GAIM to connect to it. This means I can supposedly use Google Talk even in Ubuntu.

How does it stack up to other IM clients? Overall I say it loses, simply because it lacks so many features other clients have. For example, no emoticons. The overall interface is smooth and rough at the same time: it looks good, but handles roughly. However, it is new. I’ll give it time to improve and gain features, like Gmail, because it looks good right now and so far Google hasn’t let me down.

Google Talk at least allows a degree of text formatting (using *bold* and _italic_) and promises rich text formatting in the future, unlike MSN Messenger. And its call feature (audio conversation over a microphone) is superior to MSN: faster to connect by far, and no ‘network issues’ whatsoever. Take that, MSN.

The way it groups conversations into one stacked window reminds me slightly of GAIM but handles better than GAIM. It took a few minutes to get used to it, but at least it doesn’t clutter up my taskbar, so I’m all for it. Kudos to Google on that one.

Overall it needs work, but that’s what the “beta” stamp is for, I don’t expect it to beat MSN, AIM, and YIM in one release. So far it looks very promising. If you have a Gmail account, try it. If you don’t have a Gmail account, where have you been the past year?