Google Gears

Google Gears is an installation which extends the browser to allow web applications to provide offline functionality. Such as Google Reader letting you download some posts to then continue reading them even when you’re offline (I suppose some of the younger ones among us will have to look up that word in the dictionary!). Right now, Google Gears – an open source project which Google may be hoping will gain traction in the overall market as it may be neat Trojan horse to bring more power to web apps (last not least Google’s web apps) – is still missing for such services as Gmail or Google Docs. Maybe in 2008, we’ll be seeing it rolled out to those as well?

For all the activity, however, one thing seems to be inexplicably missing.

There have been almost no credible efforts to design stripped down mobile computer hardware to match the wealth of Web software.

PS - I’m against this paradigm - if you depend on a central site then you have a single point of failure. If you have stuff distributed, you are safer.

— Posted by Ted KOppel

Nothing discussed here is the real “cloud” - this just centralized computing circa 1970. The real cloud will occur when each of our personal computers is a low power networked machine/data storage, and the processing happens across massively multiple clouds of these low powered machines … the SETI distributed processing model as basic computing paradigm.

— Posted by Robert

Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster

Summary:


The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.

Information Scent: Predicting a Path's Success

The patch-leaving model thus predicts that visits will become ever shorter. Google and always-on connections have changed the most fruitful design strategy to one with three components:

• Support short visits; be a snack
  
• Encourage users to return; use mechanisms such as newsletters as a reminder
  
• Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways of increasing frequent visits by addressing users' immediate needs

• What gain can I expect from a specific information nugget (such as a Web page)?
  
• What is the likely cost to discover and consume that information? (Cost is typically measured in time and effort, though it could include a monetary component in a micropayment system.)

Con: Enrichment Via Information

by David Alan Grier, Phd, George Washington University

Google makes us more intelligent. Anything that gives us easy access to the vast and ever-changing body of knowledge is bound to stimulate us and make us think more deeply about the world.

Google. Who's looking at you?

It wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?

According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born?

How will we feed it?

How will it be tamed?

And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?

Google's magical ability to distribute a search query among untold numbers of processors and integrate the results for delivery to a specific user demands the utmost central control. This triumph of centralization is a strange, belated vindication of Grosch's law, the claim by IBM's Herbert Grosch in 1953 that computer power rises by the square of the price. That is, the more costly the computer, the better its price-performance ratio. Low-cost computers could not compete. In the end, a few huge machines would serve all the world's computing needs. Such thinking supposedly prompted Grosch's colleague Thomas Watson to predict a total global computing market of five mainframes.

The advent of personal computers dealt Grosch's law a decisive defeat. Suddenly, inexpensive commodity desktop PCs were thousands of times more cost-effective than mainframes.

All these features don't exist yet, though.

True. Google docs and spreadsheets don't work if you're on an airplane. But it's a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.

When you joined Google it was just a search engine. It has grown into much more. How should we think about Google today?

One is as an advertising system. Another one is as this end-user system (the search, email, and other applications Google delivers to users through an Internet browser). A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And then a fourth way is to think of Google as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values - all that kind of stuff.

You just recently joined the board of Apple and have talked about potential partnerships between Google and Apple. Explain.

Google's architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We're a perfect back end to the problems that they're trying to solve. And they have very good judgment on user interface and people. They don't have this supercomputer I'm talking about, which is the data centers. What they have is a manufacturing business that's doing quite well. And the obvious example is the iPhone, which they announced has in it Google Maps.

Which generates more pageviews, which generates more advertising revenue.

You got it.

The other interesting thing about pageviews is that we make our money by improving the quality, not the quantity, of ads showed on a page. This is very confusing to people. In a normal media business, you make money by showing more ads.

What does it take to improve the quality of ads on Google?

More computers, basically, and better algorithms. And more information about you. The more personal information you're willing to give us - and you have to choose to give it to us - the more we can target.

Don't you guys do that?

Well, we certainly don't make the ads, and we're certainly not the creative people. All we are is a targeting mechanism. We're just a distribution channel.

Google's revenue and employee head count have tripled in the last two years. How do you keep from becoming too bureaucratic or too chaotic?

It's a constant problem. We analyze this every day, and our conclusion is that the best model remains small teams running as fast as they can and tolerating a certain lack of cohesion. The attempt to provide order drives out the creativity. And so it's a balance.

What about "20 percent time" - the time everyone is supposed to allocate in their week to personal projects?

It's still essential. Virtually all of the innovation at the company is still coming out of 20 percent time.

Google gets its revenue from online advertising. One could make the argument that it is not diversified enough. Is that something that you think about? If so, what are some of the things you are doing about it?

The criticism is correct. We do get the vast majority of our revenue from advertising, and it's a business that a lot of other people would like to be in. So the first thing is, let's understand that we're in a great business. Also, there are some emergent models for revenue that are very interesting. The one that is probably most interesting is Google Apps. We're now beginning to get some significant enterprise deals. Basically, companies are tired of dealing with the complexity of the old model, and our products are now strong enough that they really can reliably serve a corporation.

Why do you place such a premium on hiring the smartest people and developing and releasing software so quickly?

Fast learners win. We're in new, uncharted space. So the traditional assumptions that you and I might have about the future might actually just be wrong. There might be a new answer. And the only way to discover that is to put out your idea and then test it. And we track the results of that very, very, very rigorously, and this is not something we talk a lot about, but it's critical for us. How are these new ideas doing? What's their growth rate? What are the issues around them? And we push. What can we do to accelerate the development of this feature? What's the new problem? What's the new opportunity?

WIRED: When you joined Google it was just a search engine. Now it's redefining the way the world thinks about computing. Explain.

ERIC SCHMIDT: It's pretty clear that there's an architectural shift going on. These occur every 10 or 20 years. The previous architecture was a proprietary network with PC clients called client-server computing. With this new architecture you're always online; every device can see every application; and the applications are stored in the cloud.

I think there will be three sources of apps: (1) the basics that you mention, which will be supplied and served up by Google-Apple; various consumer apps, including games and web 2.0 stuff, that will be served up over the net as they are today (ad-supported or for fee); and specialized, pro apps that will be designed by developers to run on the Google-Apple platform (incorporating app-cacheing techniques to ensure the necessary speed and responsiveness) and that you'll either license for a fee, as you do today, or subscribe to for a monthly fee (with consolidated billing from Google-Apple).

Nick

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