I'm almost completely around the bend for Google.
I'm excited about the new stuff Google is kicking out this way to us consumers. I got my invitation to Google Wave, and even though I thought the demo was insipid, I'm getting some new interesting ideas about the value of flat organizations and collaborations out here in peasant territory. So Google is our friend because they deliver applications for infinite scale, which makes it so easy for us to expand control of our own properties - since Google gives us more than we might generally merit in a more vertically oriented world.
But what really has my knickers in a twist is Google's facial recognition that it has embedded in Picasa 3.5. And even though I'm signing up for Photoshop.com because it integrates Picasa, Facebook and Flickr, the first really useful thing I'm excited about is Google's face tagging. Seeing as I have some 60GB or so of snapshots, I love the idea that I can pick a few pictures of my kids and Google will go through and match up the other thousands for me. We'll see how well it works, but on a small set it has done pretty well.
Well, since I started writing this four days ago, I've had a lot more experience with the new Picasa, and I have to say that it is successful to a creepy degree. My daughters are in a theater troupe and so we have lots of pictures of lots of kids at lots of performances, offstage etc. It's one thing to say I know three or four of the kids my kids hang out with, it's another to have software that has identified 80 snapshots of them. With a little help from my daughter peering over my shoulder, I've got the faces hooked up with the names. I feel like a CIA analyst. But now I know what a CIA analyst must have. It's obviously not as good as human face recognition, however, combined with a human confirming or denying its recommendations, Picasa is a very powerful tool.
The only thing Google has done to tweak me wrongly is to discontinue the Google Notebook extension for Firefox, and the service itself for new subscribers. I found it a brilliant way to clip information into a very nice organizational form. They are keeping the service alive, but if they abandon it, I think they should GPL the code and leave it for somebody else.
I say this because the other thing that I wanted so very much from Google was in fact a 'Google OS'. As soon as I heard about BigTable, I began following that thing which I believe will put my Oracle consulting business at a severe disadvantage, which would be not MySQL but MyDW. But Google was not interested in publishing the 'Google OS'. What we got was in fact better. We got what Cloudera has come to be, the Redhat of Hadoop. All open source stuff for building the ultimate file system.
Google's philosophy of thinking at scale has delivered an entire new kind of computing over the years that I never imagined when people first started talking about grid computing. I expected something like IBM Regattas and Veritas servers with all the approachability of supercomputers. It's nice to be wrong.
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