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Google goes local and more local

6 comments on Google goes local and more local

Google goes local and more local

: Google buys localized social networking tool Dodgeball. A founder celebrates. Their teacher celebrates. Rex Hammock says they didn’t acquire a tiny company with two talented founders; he said they acq-hired.

Google moves past organizing the world’s content to creating the world’s content (Blogger) to storing and serving the world’s content (video) to organizing your own content (desktop ap) to organizing your town (local) to organizing your friends (Orkut and now Dodgeball).

Just now, I said to Michael Powell at lunch (more on that later) that what we really want to do is Google our lives.

: ADD: Yelvington.

6 responses to “Google goes local and more local”

  1. Lance Avatar
    Lance

    I think it’s only a matter of time before Google steps into “real world” applications in peoples’ lives. They are a company that people really trust and view as a philosophy as much as a company. Right now, many people would welcome Google into their life. Could be a bit scary also…

  2. Dan G Avatar
    Dan G

    Check out Gordon Bell’s project, “My Life Bits”.

  3. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Lance:
    Like what? Intriguing. Any examples? The Google Plumbing Company? Google Soda? Google Detective Agency? That sort of thing?

  4. rcjordan Avatar
    rcjordan

    >company that people really trust and view as a philosophy
    While I agree that the general public still holds G in some esteem, there’s a HUGE disenfranchisement underway amongst bloggers and webmasters. The ‘google grid’ worries them quite a bit –a new type of walled garden.

  5. jonny goldstein Avatar
    jonny goldstein

    Big ups to Alex and Dennis. They may look like inebriated slackers, but they are some of the hardest working inebriated slackers I have ever played Big Buck Hunter with.

  6. alex kaufman Avatar
    alex kaufman

    I’ve noticed you’ve mentioned Orkut a number times, usually in the context of vague insinuations about Google’s creeping stranglehold on information about our personal lives. Let me just say, though I know nothing about Dodgeball and the rest, your concerns regarding Orkut are really, really unfounded.
    First off, Orkut is hardly used by Americans at all. It is used by Brazilians. Though I don’t have the numbers, my estimate is that upwards of 95% of all Orkut members are Brazilian. This is not by design I assume — it’s just that once a networking service begins to catch on in a place, by that very fact it will become more attractive for others in that place to choose it over competing services. This is, after all, networking.
    I’d estimate that Orkut has less than 5% of the US share in friendship network services. The American services of choice are Friendster and, increasingly, livejournal and thefacebook. Friendster, incidentally, is currently growing huge in southeast Asia.
    Second, Orkut is dying a slow death by neglect. It appears that the programmers haven’t fixed a bug in many months now, and the service is now so slow and buggy as to be nearly unusable. Services like Gazzag are now stepping in to try to steal the Brazilian market. Considering how they’ve allowed Orkut to decay, it seems unlikely that Google sees Orkut as an important plank in their grand project of information gathering.
    Given all this, I think you can safely strike Orkut from your list of scary things about Google.