Not a week goes by now without some kind of service announced by Google (via stealth at times). Last night, in a jealous fit of rage, I shook a Magic 8 ball and conjured up the following predictions:
Google .Mac service emulation. If you have not already done so, be sure to look through all the services that Apple bundles with their .Mac web service. Is there anything listed that Google could not or is not currently developing? Google already offers services for creating homepages (Blogger), for organizing photos (Picasa), for emailing, transferring and storing data (Gmail), for viewing and searching video content (Google Video), for chatting (GTalk) and for talking with like-minded individuals in custom communities (Google Groups). The Google Desktop already organizes a number of files types in a manner to which is easily accessible via search, so scratch Spotlight. In fact, they have “virtually” created the ‘network computer‘ envisioned by Larry Ellison.
To this end, I predict that Google will offer a service whereby you can ‘Sync’ all your mounds of data onto their servers. Gmail has helped prepare them for some aspects of remote-data warehousing (as have all their projects). Apple already offers a couple of services (iDisk, Sync & Backup) which provide the functionality that Google will probably offer. They could even provide various levels of “backups” — e.g. real-time (which is already occurring when Google Desktop is enabled) or in increments once-a-day or once-a-week. Whether or not they charge is another matter entirely (I personally would have no problem shelling out some bling for this “backup” service). Note: this is arguably a bittersweet move, while on the one hand you no longer need to fret about losing data on your computer due to Windows mishaps or pesky spyware, your data is the hands of someone else (however, it is in their best interest to guard to and protect your data).
Recently, Google now requires that all Orkut users migrate to logging in with a GMail account. I suspect that they will also integrate Dodgeball with this social service as well (seeing as Dodgeball is pretty much bare-bones without it). And since Google Talk is integrated with GMail, we have one big happy family of One-Click always-on connections (of which Android and Google Wifi will no doubt, play some role as well).
Of course, they could prove me wrong by teaming up, as rumors of an Apple-iTunes-Google triumvirate abound.
Not-all-is-a-silverlining
I do think Google has dropped the ball in a couple of areas. The first is integrating a bloglines-type of RSS reader into Gmail. It is not technologically beyond them to do so, as Rojo has shown (both are based of AJAX). The other main stickler is Orkut. It is very impersonal compared to competitive offerings such as Facebook (formerly, TheFacebook). Perhaps Orkut can emulate the same feature set that has popularized college-based social networks (while there is a community for Texas A&M students in Orkut, I cannot find out who is in my classes, who has similar interests, or are in different clubs, jobs, high schools, etc.). In fact, not only is Google pushing the aforementioned automated services to university students through their ‘College Life‘ campaign, they actually advertise these via Facebook (look at the URL wrapper). Perhaps they will invest in Mark’s creation next?
Part 2 will discuss the back-end and how ultimately the open-source community could replicate and implement Google’s technology onto devices mentioned in my FCC article (think IPv6 and mobile devices acting as web-servers).