Jan
21
2012
Google Is More Than Just Search; How the G+ Team Is Out to Change Own the World
people actively using its Gmail service and more than 90m registered users on its Google+ social network, it’s clear that Google isn’t just a search engine.
It’s not a surprise to anyone that Google is shaping everything we do on the internet. While search is the core business and the core revenue stream, Google has its hand in many pies that go well beyond the net. Examples:
- Google Voice – add a virtual phone line in any area code;
- Google Maps – can you imagine a world without Google Maps? Maybe if you owned a GPS display unit, back in the day, Google Maps and smartphones have made TomToms obsolete.
- Google Android – the only alternative platform to Apple’s dominate iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch)
- Google Health – the electronic health record will become required in the next 2 years
- Google E – energy usage monitoring and conservation efforts
- Google Labs – just look at the ideas Googler’s are floating around in their free time.
And while Google Plus (G+) is an amazing start, Google has plans that are much bigger than Facebook’s 800 million users. If there is a big brother growing on the web, knowing everything about us, it’s Google. If you believe in their "Do No Evil" mantra, then perhaps this is not a problem for you. But if you begin to see Google’s profit motive as driving many of the deep decisions that we will never know about, you might begin to wonder where it will stop. At what point does Google know too much? If Google and Amazon (the largest shopping network in history) were to freely exchange data (or exchange it for a profit, more likely) would that create a global mind that could predict not only shopping trends, but could that network be used to influence financial markets or political structures?
I’m not a black helicopter or chem trail spokes person, but I do believe we need to pay attention to the issues that EFF fights for every day. Even SOPA and PIPA, a fight that the "internet majority" seems to have put off for the moment, is part of a control and influence structure that SOMEONE WANTS CONTROL OF. And there is more money to be made with that information and influence than you or I can even imagine. Money that’s so deep and so essential to the functioning of the net that we are powerless now to stop it. We can slow it down. But if you don’t think Google owns your data, regardless of what you have set on your "sharing" or "privacy" settings, you might need to wake up from the utopian dream of global net democracy.
I willingly sell my data to Google in exchange for great services that appear free. I don’t even bother with the "privacy" and "don’t share" preferences any more. I’ve seen the man behind the curtain. You can too if you look into the matrix just a little bit. A book like CLICK will open your eyes as wide as Neo’s in The Matrix.
When my credit score is searchable on Google for free, and when my social activity or purchasing habits can influence that "credit score" or "potential value to the advertising buyer," I think we may have crossed a line. And when a credit agency like Experian buys the worlds largest aggregator of anonymous user data, Hitwise, I think we are heading down a slippery slope towards Google’s Utopian Dream.
Suddenly "Do No Evil," actually sounds kind of evil.
@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)
permalink: https://uber.la/2012/01/google-is/
References:
- Google experimenting with new signup form
- Create a New Account (New Google Sign-up Form)
- EFF.ORG (Electronic Frontier Foundation) fights for your online rights and privacy every day
See the Google Tools page & the Facebook Tools page and these other Google Posts:
- Why Google+ Is Not Competing Against Facebook; The Google+ Platform Play
- The Most Important Social Technology – Going Global w/ Google Hangouts
- Google+ Circles: Understanding Your Public vs Private Social Networks
- One Google+ Extension To Rule The Stream; An Essential Micro-Review for Google+
- Problem with Google+; The STREAM is Too Fast – Filter the Stream or Pause the Stream
Check out these other posts about learning social media:
- How To Fix Dell.com – And Dell’s Branding Crisis (they aren’t asking me any more)
- My Dream for You; How Social Media Can Change Your Life – This Is What I Do
- How to Get Useful Business Information Out of Twitter: Hashtags for Social Media Research
- The Twitter Bubble; Don’t Let Your Followers Fool You Into Feeling Influential
- Social Marketing Strategy: Thinking Beyond the Page (VIDEO)
AMAZON LINK: Click: The Forces Behind How We Fully Engage with People, Work, and Everything We Do
Jul
05
2009
Cisco Draws a 4 Tier Map of the Clouds and the Future of Cloud Computing
The Four Tiers of Cloud Computing according to Cisco.
[Excerpt: from the Register: Cisco cuddles all clouds but one]
Clouds mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Warrior explained that Cisco sees cloud computing as having four tiers. The lower tier is an IT foundation, including servers, storage, and networking, and that the whole point of UCS was to be a player for infrastructure. In this area, Cisco plans to compete with IBM and Hewlett-Packard as well as partner with EMC, VMware, Microsoft, and others.
The next tier up is what Warrior referred to as infrastructure as a service, which means selling cloud computing capacity like Amazon does with its EC2 compute utility and S3 and EBS storage utilities. Warrior showed a slide that pegged Amazon, AT&T, BT, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems Oracle, Savvis, Telstra, and Terremark as the key suppliers so far. And Cisco will not be one of them, even though it must be tempting to build a cloud at cost and sell capacity on it.
Now, taking a step up in the abstraction layer of Cisco’s cloud computing model is something Warrior called platform as a service, and this is really providing cloud infrastructure with software development frameworks that allow companies to deploy applications. This is more like Google App Engine, Windows Azure, and certain parts of Amazon Web Services, and in Cisco’s case, the application framework is WebEx Connect, which is evolving from the online Web meeting platform of the early 2000s into a collaboration framework with APIs for integrating other applications into the Web conferencing, chat, and collaboration tools that can be mashed up as IT organizations see fit.
The top and final tier of the cloudy world that Cisco is helping us all build is software as a service, and here, Cisco absolutely has plans to be a player alongside Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and Google. Up here, WebEx will be the brand. WebEx Mail, a mail and calendaring service based upon the PostPath acquisition from last summer, will be added to the WebEx mix and delivered as a service atop Cisco’s own cloud infrastructure. Dennerline said that WebEx is hosting 220,000 meetings per day and over 4 billion meeting minutes per month and that this was supported from nine data centers around the globe. He added that there are over 450 million knowledge workers on the planet and that the collaboration software and services space would comprise about $34bn in sales and that "we certainly don’t have our fair share yet" of that space. As for how Cisco will get its fair share, it’s the same old mantra: build, buy, and partner.
I think that’s a pretty good demarcation of the space.
@jmacofearth
permalink: https://uber.la/2009/07/map-of-the-clouds/
May
27
2009
Music Discovery and Community – a Sub-Semantic Connective Network
[Sub-Semantic: my own word, meaning sub (below) semantic (meaning) music networks]
Update: Today I turned off my Blip.fm to Twitter connection. While I was enjoying the DJ aspect of Blip, I was also aware that the "value" of my Tweets were NOT in musical recommendations. So rather than flooding my twitter stream with blips I am now keeping Blip to itself and adding them to my FriendFeed stream rather than broadcasting them on Twitter.
There is a universal thread that is beginning to run through many of my networks. I call it Music Discovery, but it goes by the names of Blip.fm, Last.fm, Bebo, Pandora, Reverbnation (on Facebook) and many others. And what makes this network different from any others is the nature of the connection is MUSIC. I will cover each of these services in subsequent posts.
So unless you are in the music business, there is no ROI on participating in this game. But what it has given me, in terms of "discovery" over the last three years is amazing and I wanted to share a bit about how the services work. If you are not a music fanatic, then you might want to skip off to another post. But if you are interested in finding new songs, new bands, and exploring the non-business aspect of social media, then this could be fun.
For this first post I am going to share my newest favorite Blip.fm and the most recent blow-your-head-off discovery that I made using Blip "Again And Again – Bird And The Bee" http://ff.im/-38KTY
Here’s how that looks in my tweetstream. (not anymore, see update above)
And on Blip, if you are looking at the a playlist, it would look like this:
Or on the public timeline, it would look like this.
So imagine a Twitter timeline, that is just passing songs that people are promoting as virtual DJs. TweetJays perhaps.
So here’s a look at the public timeline, and the magic that is Blip.
It looks like Twitter doesn’t it? So the cool part is the little red "play" link will start the song immediately, no lag. So scrolling down the list, I can choose a familiar song, CSN’s "Teach Your Children" or I can click on a song/artist I’ve never heard of. And from this process alone, I have discovered the following bands/songs recently. And these are the ones that have floored me with their originality.
I might have heard OF them, or heard ONE of their hits, but these bands are now in my high rotation slot. [Okay, so here’s where the business comes in, Blip does make it easy to BUY the music, with handy links to Amazon and iTunes. And I highly recommend you buy them. But listening on Blip.fm is FREE FREE FREE, kinda like Radio.]
So here’s what a blip looks like as I am creating it:
And let me dissect the blip for you. Nada Surf – the band, "Always Love" the song title, @lucianan the person who bliped the song originally, I am REBLIPPING his selection and thus giving him credit (just like a ReTweet but a ReBlip). then I give a short snippet of the lyrics that are meaningful to me "to make a mountain of your life is just a choice" and finally, I am leaving @lucianan’s comment in what looks to be Portuguese. And when I hit the OK button, it puts my blip on the public timeline and it also blips the song to my Twitter stream. [I am thinking about this, because I usually control my Tweets pretty judiciously, and I am not sure about the “value” of putting all my musical blips out there, but I’m still thinking about this.]
I would like to hip you to a couple of bands I have been grooving out to, and longing to sound like, but probably won’t.
- Silversun Pickups – Catch and Release
- Nada Surf – The Voices
- Ken Andrews – Alergic (an in the studio look on YouTube)
- Band of Horses – Is There a Ghost (on YouTube)
- Snow Patrol – Open Your Eyes (on YouTube)
- Minus the Bear – Studio Promo (YouTube)
- Future Clouds and Radar – The Epcot View (Robert Harrison was the primary song writer for Cotton Mather)
- Porcupine Tree – Arriving Somewhere But Not Here
- Sunny Day Real Estate – Television (an acoustic session on YouTube)
I think these bands and songs sort of typify the term "darker side of pop" that I use in conjunction with Buzzie. Cause I’m Pop and I’m Rock and I’m Americana and … And I want to ROCK darker!
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/blip-fm
You might be able to find most of these on my Blip.fm playlist.
Also of interest might be:
- Buzzie (power pop rock)
- John’s song : poem : moment
- Martian Dust Devils (cinematic ambience)
- Felix Culpa (progressive pop)
And the two seminal books on music as life are:
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature