Big Brother Google
An article “Who Gave Google Permission to be the Judge and Jury of Mobile Content?” in Mobhappy caught my attention this morning. In another stroke of why didn’t I see that, Russell Buckley discusses how Google is now determining what mobile users can see with their mobile phones. .
But then, think what they’re doing. They are taking a website and deciding what you should see. And that includes taking out advertising too.
For a publisher, or a content owner, this is pretty hard. For the most part, online publishing is all about selling ads round the content. Any publisher who needs to make money from his site (ie they are a business) has to sell those ads, or the site will disappear - it’s that simple. So by stripping these ads out, Google is effectively depriving publishers of income. You can’t argue (like Google News) that you’re sending traffic to sites by offering a taster of the content. They are simply taking traffic away from exposure to the publisher’s advertising.
He is refering to Google’s automagically converting websites into mobile friendly form. When I saw this at first, I have to admit that I was pretty impressed by the feature. But soon after, you realized that Google really is moving towards world domination. There is Google will control all your information, Google now has all your email, Google will soon know what your are doing and now Google will control what you see. In this ominous Orwellian turn of events, is Google becoming Big Brother?
March 17th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
[…] Well nothing changed and the debate continued without any feedback from Google, follow it here, here, here,, here and, here. […]
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:17 am
[…] With the recent stories about Google beta testing it’s Google Finance service, this definitely nails Google’s agenda to the coffin. World Domination aka Do Everything The Google Way. This article from Techcrunch gives us a sneak preview of this new service by Big Brother Google. The article says that it is no more than a “me too” to Yahoo Finance. However, Google has definitely more up its sleeves. […]
March 24th, 2006 at 12:35 am
[…] After writing about Google as Big Brother, I just remembered another Google project that points in this ominous direction. The project is Google Compute. Google Compute is a new feature of the Google Toolbar. The goal of Google Compute is to make a contribution to science by enabling Google Toolbar users to easily donate their idle computer time to worthwhile causes. The Google Compute version of the Google Toolbar detects when a computer is idle and puts it to work on complex mathematical problem from such fields as drug design and global climate modeling … The first beneficiary of this effort is Folding@home, a non-profit academic research project at Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses. […]
March 29th, 2006 at 1:02 am
[…] In a Slashdot article, it does make the suggestion that this is one of Google Big Brother’s World Domination plans. Another case of pushing people to do things the Google-way? […]
May 10th, 2006 at 12:44 am
[…] This move by AOL makes sense since they have a pretty big AIM community to start with (particularly in the United States). The buddy list in their AIM accounts can also serve as their buddy list in their AIM Pages account. In the true Web 2.0 fashion they are mashing up multiple concepts together: Google Pages, Google Personalized Home Page and Friendster. Now, it makes me wonder by Google Big Brother has not made a move into this space yet? This is can potentially add a large amount of Google Adwords Advertising Space which they need. Or will they buy one of the unaffiliated MySpace clones? […]