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Google web apps….taking over the world?
Google web apps….taking over the world?
Not yet, but given the huge number of ideas the guys at Google are pursuing it might not be long before we expect all our computing to be available online from anywhere.
Everyone knows about Google’s information provision services. The company was founded on Google search and this still generates massive revenues, but Google also provide maps & Google earth, froogle - the price comparison site, groups, news, video - now combined with YouTube, site visitor analysis, the list goes on…. But more recently Google have been developing web based applications such as gmail, Google Talk, calendar, docs & spreadsheets, blogging, image editors and a web page creator to name just a few. These and extended versions will eventually allow you to work from any where, on any computer connected to the internet, with all your data stored online. The end user’s online experience will improve as the web app interface becomes more integrated into future versions of Google’s toolbar plugin.
What else are Google trying at the moment? Google have their labs page (http://labs.google.com/) and Wiki provides a more complete list of their products (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products).
Obviously this isn’t limited to Google, there are hundreds of other companies and projects aiming for similar goals. All trying to get their foot in the door ahead of the others.
How is this relevant to us. In future people will expect greater control and functionality in the sites they visit. The days of sites presenting data based on standard templates are probably limited. People will expect to be able to change page layouts, select what data is visible and the format it is presented. Social sites, such as MySpace and YouTube, will extend their user interfaces so RSS feeds, external site content and user generated contented can be mashed together even more. Corporate entities will use viral marketing techniques and RSS feeds to get their brand included on other sites.
But will people want to use them? It will probably depend on the situation. At the moment manipulating files online is a slow process as ADSL upload speeds are relatively low. A lot of people don’t like the idea that Google scans all gMail email and uses this to target ads. If you had company work online, would you want a third party potentially reading it? Could you be sure that when you deleted the file it was actually deleted? What would happen if you were denied access to your data stored in another country? Do you want people taking data from your site, changing it and presenting it on another site? How do ensure that external content remains relevant? At the moment the technology isn’t perfected and new web technologies tend to be fad prone.
