Google Desktop and P2P

Now this was an interesting opinion piece - Google Desktop Is P2P in Sheep's Clothing at Publish

The article says

Everybody realized that Google wasn't building the Memex, it was building an advertising empire. Blogger was the first big step. Blogger meant freshly minted Web pages at the rate of millions per year. And on those pages, freshly minted contextual advertising.

Then came Google Base.

But the problem with Google Base is that it relies on people to push data to it. The upload mechanism right now is a bit inefficient.

So now we have Google Desktop on USB drives and which can be used to automatically upload content to Google Base.

And as Google's desktop applications land on more and more hard drives, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Google get into the P2P space. Imagine searching, not only the Web, but also the information that other people make public on their hard drives. Next year, don't be surprised if there's a little check box during Google Desktop's installation which says "Share my files."

Farfetched, but interesting. But the idea that the content has to be uploaded on 'the base' makes it essentially non P2P and just a brute force workaround with limited scope - storage doesn't come free, even for Google.

RSS Integration in Outlook 12

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has posted that next Outlook release will have RSS integrated as announced by Outlook program manager Michael Affronti. Surely, a step towards widening the user base of RSS.

It's easy to make people try out new technologies on a browser with hype and curiosity, but majority of such audience is ephemeral.

Bring it to the desktop - if it's truly valuable, it'll change people's life.

History of Search Engines

I just stumbled upon 'A brief history of Search Engines'. I liked the part how search engines were named like Archie, Veronica, and Jughead, that came up in the pre-bot era.

Searching has changed over the years, and it is getting increasingly difficult to organize the data if it continues to grow as it is. Tagging is one way. But then, wouldn't it be expecting too much from content creators? And how scalable is that!

On the other hand, there is this comment in Tim-Berners Lee's blog, talking about how it should be easy to create and publish content, not just through blogs and wikis, but even otherwise. How would we ensure that all of it is accessible?

Blogs are not the right media. See how it devalues the archived content. The content becomes practically inaccessible once archived. Problems of wikis are evident from so many caveats you see in Wikipediia these days.

G2G is dead

As predicted, Google had let G2G know that their website is against Google's policy. And so, the G2G is dead now.

AJAX, nice but just too much error prone

AJAX is just too much error prone. I have had so many Gmail pages locking up within last few days. Moreover, sometimes page doesn't refresh itself when tagging a message or marking unread/read.

Perhaps, the requirements are so complex that even mighty Google cannot churn out bug free interface.

Every time I see an AJAX implementation bug, I recall my earlier post on AJAX viability.