okay… so Google has all this stuff that they have bought up – Orkut, Blogger, Babelfish, the desktop apps Keyhole and Picasa, the desktop search engine, gmail… lots of stuff.
(David Allen’s stuff definition: “anything that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step” -pg 17 of GTD)
They really have yet to do anything with it. Maybe they have a plan, maybe they don’t, but no one is sharing it with me, so I make one up.
Orkut and Blogger: These are “social” tools – neither of which are over the top terrific. Orkut is slow, Blogger isn’t as cool as MovableType or LiveJournal but both of them are interesting. Let’s ignore the slowness of Orkut, since I presume that is a technical problem that can be engineered away. My gripe with Orkut is that it doesn’t integrate with any of my other social tools. I like Orkut, but it is behind a big wall… it is essentially extraneous unless I intentionally place it at the center of my universe, which just ain’t gonna happen.
Orkut needs some holes in the wall. FOAF and DOAP support would be a good place to start, as would hooks to flickr and del.icio.us so that one login gets me my blog, my social network environment, my social bookmarks, and my community photo album. (you don’t really expect Google to not try to buy flickr or del.icio.us, do you?)
Blogger needs so bells and whistles. FOAF and DOAP are that, but not particularly sexy. The 43 Things idea of sharing your to-dos is a nice one, and if it can be wrapped up into something that takes advantage of the rdf in DOAP, but makes it as easy as the tags in flickr & del.icio.us, even better. If it worked really, really well with a couple of decent personal productivity methodologies, that would be nice too. (Covey and Allen seem like the obvious choices.) A blog roll, built-in AdSense, full text searching, and a REST-ful API for making metadata queries would be nice too.
gMail having a dynamic addressbook built around FOAF-like always on identity profiles would be nice. As would the ability to build smartlists of mail that has to do with a project that has been defined in a DOAP-like way. Reaping the best benefits of formal ontologies and informal folksonomies seems like the surest way to take advantage of both. ATOM feeds from subscribed sources, as well as machine generated notices from my projects, gMail inbox, Orkut communities, and Blogger comments would be great. If it delivered those comments to a desktop feed aggregator that would be nice, but it if could deliver them to a gChat client hooked to a Jabber/XMPP network that would be pretty damn cool as well. Being able to set up pseudo-semantic rulesets using heuristics that can learn what is important enough to tell me via IM might be a perfect implementation. Can those things happen easily and without having to gut the internals of the application? Maybe, maybe not. It would be nice if they happened.
It seems like a foregone conclusion that there will be a Google browser built on Firefox in the near future. Such a browser could be syndication (RSS & ATOM), Identity (FOAF), and affiliation (DOAP & description of an organization) aware by default, as well as having right-click integration to Blogger, Orkut, gMail, del.icio.us, and gChat. The Jabber specification is in the wild. Heuristics + smart lists sounds like a job for a whole bunch of PhD Computer Scientists, which is what Google has always wanted to be known as.
The holy grail of shared information right now seems to be calendars & scheduling. Making events and reminders common currency between Exchange users and everyone else, without forcing people to dump whatever PIM they have grown accustomed to using isn’t a trivial exercise. A gCalendar application would be right in the middle of that – standardized format for events and reminders, with formal and informal metadata, extensible and portable, and viewable by everything from a cell phone or PDA to a desktop client, to a web page. One source for data, viewable anywhere, even as a shared calendar in Exchange or Notes. An open standard assures that php, java, C#, and perl implementations can all talk to one another. By creating this, Google could ensure that it is an interactive standard – imagine browsing a web page that contains event listings, say a sports or concert schedule, and being able to easily add an event to your calendar using a bookmarklet or a right-click. Imagine being able to have that event be evaluated and members of your social network, project teams, and blog readership who you think ought to know about it have it shared with them.
That would be something. And it can happen. The question is, will it?