I am a Google Zealot. This is nothing, new, especially to those that know me. There are many, many aspects of my identity and the data that goes along with it, which are tied to one or more Google-related products. This is not to say that my life is an open-book, prone to scrutiny by random web-users from Buenos Aires or anything. I’m quite careful about the information that I opt to post online, as should everyone of course.

However, I was organizing/clearing out some items in Gmail the other day, when my eyes casually fell upon the indicator at the bottom of the screen that lets you know how much space you have left in the ever-expanding Google datastore. “You…blablabla…3% of 7400MB. Wow, 7400MB is a lot of-…wait. 3% I’ve got about 250MB of stuff on here.” I sat back and thought about that number, drawing relatively silly, almost cartoonish analogs just to get a sense of how much data that really is.

~230 floppy disks (remember those?).
~17,000 average (15K) Word documents, or about as many email messages of similar size.
~125,000 Twitter posts (to get even sillier, this is roughly equivalent to 14 tweets per hour, for a year)

That’s quite a bit of data!

…Sorry.

Then I wondered what I would say if a company were to come to me and say “Hey. So would you let me follow you around for a year and record what you say 14 times an hour? Oh and we’re not going to pay you for this information either. Oh and we’re also going to use this info to show you some advertising here and there.” Were I walking around just going about my daily life, I *might* have a problem with this. I mean, I don’t know if my shower-stall rendition of “Poker Face” is anything I want people listening to, never mind recording (Note: I do not actually sing in the shower.)

But the fact of the matter is, as I mentioned before, I’m making a conscious decision to post information online. As such, I’m aware that when using a Google service/product (for free), that information might actually be looked at. This is not to say that I’m allowing them to do whatever they want with it, mind you. Depending on the context (more on that in a second), I usually take a conservative approach and just presume that whatever post online will be considered public domain. Period.

What’s this about context you say? Well, truth be told, there are in fact some small corners of the internet that are marginally more “obscure” than others. I’m not talking about seedy underground file-sharing sites or any other “non http” source. I’m referring to the fairly niche clusters of community-oriented sites, blogs, forums and portals that serve members with similar interests. ArsTechnica, xkcd, Orchid Forums, and even certain social networking groups are just a few examples. Popular in their own right, and yet focused enough to attract users who search for information within a particular subset of info.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t be cognizant of material that you post in these instances, but it does tend to be the case that the level of familiarity amongst users in these sub-cultures is high enough to allow certain things (Vacation photos, discussions regarding family members etc…) to pass. But I digress.

As time goes on, more and more of your information is going to end up in the cloud. It is inevitable. The netbook segment of the hardware market is exploding. Businesses are adopting cloud infrastructure, enabling their employees more flexibility and freedom to work wherever they want to, physically separated from their information/data. Data storage limits are at a point where petabyte thumb drives (~1,000,000 Gigabytes, people) aren’t that far off. As far as cost/benefit goes, it just makes more sense (for now). We look at the concept of “unlimited storage space” today, in very much the same way we looked at the concept of smart-phones 5 years ago. Nifty sounding tech, but there are too many limitations to make it feasible for the consumer market… look how that turned out. So as this data migration occurs, it just makes sense to realize that parts of our identity are going to do the same.

I’m allowed 2 TNG references in once post.

It’s Christmas morning, and you’re 5 years old. You rush downstairs before everyone else and start tearing into that one gift that’s been teasing you with its shiny wrapping and big red bow for what seems like forever. Shreds of paper begin to rain down as your eyes widen at the sight of… a brand new chemistry set.

That’s pretty much how I felt about Google Wave when I first looked received my invite. It could be awesome… later, once I actually figure out what to do with it. But because it’s in limited beta right now, there aren’t really enough people that I can interact with in order to take advantage of all of its features. … Ok, a chemistry set isn’t really a social device, but you get my drift.

Don’t get me wrong. I “get” why it’s awesome. I just haven’t been able to experience it for myself. Depending on how long it’s in beta (which is likely to be quite some time, given their track record with their other products) I suppose the userbase will grow, and soon we’ll all be engaged in really rich conversations about the most recent episode of House, or how much I loathe green peppers or something.

That’s one of the things that amuses me about the mass audience (myself included). We seem to crave really cool, ever advancing technology to perform the simplest of tasks. The vast assortment of new applications dedicated to interesting ways to churn out 140 character posts on Twitter is proof of this. What do any of these apps do that’s really THAT much different from sending a text message to one or more people? Further, given that there IS a difference, how many of us take full advantage of even the most basic features? Given the iconic nature of the image below, I’m willing to bet it isn’t many.

If you’ve seen any of the trailer videos for Google Wave, they make a pretty good case for how it could be used in the course of daily events. A near seamless blending of email/IM/texting etc., making the sharing of information that much easier. But given the ever present challenge of convincing people to change their online habits (IE is still the leading web browser, despite Firefox/Chrome/Safari being better products in my opinion), I’m a little apprehensive about how fast this will take place. This isn’t merely a new tool, it’s a new toolset that’s going to require people to change the way they think about how they communicate.

I guess, as with most things, we shall wait and see. If anyone else out there has access to Wave and wants to give it a spin, drop me a line at my Gmail account (Chris DOT Baboolal).

[I apologize to any Bjork fan who reads the title of this post and now has that song stuck in their heads. ]

It’s no secret that I’m fairly liberal when it comes to my views on online privacy, so long as a few important caveats are considered. Be conscious of what you post online and where you post it. Where possible, make sure that you have a copy of all information you post online. Resign yourself to the fact that once you post something online, it is PERMANENT, and chances are slim that it will ever really disappear. Falls into the realm of common sense when you think about it, but it’s usually the case that we start freaking out whenever we’ve posted something online and one of those tenets have been ignored.

This isn’t me by the way… I swear

So that being said, I was wondering, where do you draw the line, when it comes to protecting your privacy online? How far do you go to make sure that photo of you doing the Elaine Benes at last year’s office Xmas party doesn’t spread further than desired? Think about this. You’re at said party and you’ve had a drink or two, and you start to bust a move on the dance floor. There are a couple dozen people around, and there’s a good chance that most of them have a cellphone that can snap a sub-par image of you kickin’ those heels at awkward angles. There’s also a good chance that some of those cellphone shutterbugs have access to a Facebook/Twitter/Blog account of some sort. Further, with almost frightening ease, that same image can be online and available to hundreds of thousands of people before you’ve had a chance to stumble off the dance floor.

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve instilled the fear of God in all of those around you, there’s actually nothing you can do to prevent your submission to become the next iconic YouTube star. Now sure, should you become aware of embarrassing content, you can always go through the process of trying to have it removed from the internet. That’s always worked in the past, right?

This makes me think about the intense amount of effort that’s going into making behemoths like Google and Facebook try to conform to privacy legislation. Presumably the point of such legislation is to ensure that when you sign up for services provided by the Goog et al, that you are explicitly made aware of what information you’re providing and how it could be used in the future (which, as you’ll recall is related to one of the caveats that I listed above).

Even if this is accomplished, it does nothing significant to allay peoples’ actual fear of unwanted information being released/exposed to other people. The reason for this remains the same; people post information online without full realizing what they’re doing, for whatever reason. A recent by-product of this type of behaviour is the “Texts From Last Night” (TFLN) website (link), a site which allows anyone to submit text messages that they’ve received, to be broadcast to the world. Names and other personally identifying information are usually unattached, but it’s an example of how the onus should always be on the user to monitor and control the information that they make available to others, and to accept (or at the very least be aware of the consequences of doing so).

And yet, we still give our credit cards to complete strangers and watch them disappear from sight when we purchase things offline.

As far as the Digital space goes, a mountain of information has been absorbed into the collective consciousness of the world in the last couple of weeks. So much so that it’s hard to measure or even comment on exactly what it means.

The Chinese government hobbles Google, Twitter becomes the de facto source of connection for the Iranian election conflict, Bing says hello world, the Palm Pre makes a surprisingly impressive entry into the marketplace, and the web itself felt the strain of half a dozen celebrity deaths.

With each of these events comes the maelstrom of online commentary, as people attempt to reflect and organize the information into digestable units. But in recent weeks it seems that there hasn’t been enough time to consume one event before another explodes onto the scene.

How do you think this affects our overall ability to communicate about events that occur all around us? Do these things go into a queue for future processing? Do some things get filtered out? Is it possible to process them all in parallel? All of the above?

The first thought from many of you is going to be “Yup, he’s on the sauce again.”

10am Drambuies notwithstanding, hear me out on this. I was thinking about the way technology is moving forward and how we’re all collectively responding to our innate need to find stuff. The internet is built on a system of requests and responses. The very first “computerized” searches came in the form of relatively crude algorithms that were designed to brute force their way through reams of information to return the closest match to a given query. Present day search systems are much, MUCH more sophisticated. Predictive algorithms, organic search mechanisms, and multi-modal search engines (voice search for example) are just some of the ways that we’ve attempted to make “finding stuff” easier.

There’s just one problem. Finding stuff isn’t really easier because overall, people still don’t know how to search. Think about it. There’s still a massive disconnect between the way that the average person thinks, and the mindset that’s required to search for something “properly” online.

Take for example, a question that’s the de facto litmus test for a search scenario; “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” Now, if *I* were to start searching for the answer (and yes, I am somewhat snobbishly excluding myself from the general public in that I think differently when it comes to online searches), I would go to Google, make sure I’m cookied for Canada by signing into my Google account, and then I’d type something like the following into the query field:

The first result is a rather simple site, but it’s a list of lots of restaurants with links to their website. For a general query, it’s not that bad. However, if you type in a much more natural query like: “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” (still signed into my google account mind you), the results are markedly different. The first result is a Yahoo Answers page from Australia:

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071130191037AAZmpb2

Now, there are of course some very valid reasons for the differences between the two sets of results. My question is a qualitative one, for starters. By asking a natural question, I wasn’t explicitly asking for a list of restaurants. How would the system know which restaurant I “should” go to? It doesn’t necessarily know what I like (yet). The system also doesn’t really know where I am unless I tell it (either through the query itself or via GPS if I’m using a mobile to execute the search). There are in fact a lot of variables that make “natural search queries” quite difficult to handle by a system that doesn’t know who you are.

A ha. Therein lies the reason why the current method of search engine optimization (from the search engine’s perspective) is flawed. It starts off by assuming that the system is completely disconnected from the person asking the question. The goal is to provide enough information to this blind user in order to make the search result more relevant. Queue meta-tags, content strategies, and any other number of mechanisms to make this happen, and make “possibly relevant” results float to the top.

Well, why bother with that assumption in the first place? The only other activity that rivals searching online, is social networking. Ok, fine. It’s actually porn, but we’ll just assume that’s a given and continue on with the story. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone with access to the internet that didn’t have some kind of profile or identity online. Between Facebook, Twitter, … and all of those other communities, nearly everyone is linked to one of them. Everyone’s got some kind of profile online, and most of those will continue to evolve as they accumulate history. Now, before I go on I’d like to clarify that I know the reasons why profile-related search results are perceived as a scary concept to some. Regardless of the fact that many are quick to enable things like search histories and information-sharing between websites, there are some that focus on the potential dangers of doing so. There is merit to these concerns, but it also represents a whole other series of potential material to cover. So for now we’ll move forward.

Think about it like talking to your Doctor or your Lawyer, your Accountant or even your friends. All of these people could be considered systems which are profile-aware. They know you in some specific context and as a result, they can provide you with answers to pretty vague questions (“I’ve got like…a thing on my arm, and it hurts. What’s wrong?”). With the exception of your friends, they’re legally bound to keep your information private but if you think that they all adhere to those regulations 100% of the time, I’m sorry but you’re fooling yourself.

Now think about how this translates to an online search. All of a sudden, “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, does it? If there is a shift in focus from making disconnected information “possibly relevant”, to making relevant information accessible, the way we all “find stuff” could drastically change in the next few years. All of the pieces are already there. The same sophisticated search mechanisms I mentioned above wouldn’t have to change at all. Social networking is already set up to gather information about us. The only bit that’s left to do is to connect the two properly.

Though, I guess the whole thing is really going to get weird when you start seeing stuff like this in response to a dinner selection query:

Thoughts?