There’s been so much news about Google lately that its all been a blur. Ironically, searning for actual information regarding on Google using Google is quite painful. Inevitably the first few pages are link on Google’s website or affiliate pages, none of them give any new insights or information. But I digress.

So I was talking about Google. Hell, everyone’s talking about Google. Just look at them: first the search engine, then desktop search, then blogging, then photo management, then gmail, then google maps, then google scholar, then local search, then sattelites, then video searches. Using innovative user interfaces built using existing technology, Google has taken web applications to an entirely new level. Google maps and gmail are just as interactive and perhaps more responsive than most of our desktop applications. Combine that with the fact that in the near future, a signifant fraction of Internet users will be connected using broadband and we’ve potentially got the next **big** thing happening.

No wonder a lot of people are worried. Grapevine has it that Google might be working on a whole slew of web based applications. If Google can do for desktop publishing and home office what it did for maps and mail, it could revolutionize the desktop market. Consider this scenario (this idea is not original, I read it somewhere, but can’t locate the source now. Please let me know if you find it): you have just one software on your desktop: a web browser. The rest of the stuff is hosted on Google: Google Mail, Google Photos, Google Maps, Google Office, Google Telephony. The cost of your desktop goes down tremendously! all you need is a thin client able to run a browser, and a good Internet connection. You don’t even need a hard drive, Google stores everything for you. Best of all, you’ve got instant accesibility from all over the world for free. Would you even need a laptop now?

Here are some interesting recent reads on Google:

* [[http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,1050065,00.html|Search and Destroy (on Fortune.com)]]
* [[http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050322.gtflgooglemar22/BNStory/Technology/|The God Good Google]]
* [[http://adamjh.blogspot.com/2005/05/graduation.html | Graduation speech]]
* [[http://www.betanews.com/article/Google_Preps_Video_Distribution_Service/1113441557|Video distribution platform]]