Big Brother Google
(A)Tipical Day?: Its morning, you get to your computer, go check the gmail, ah there’s some some news fotos on web picasa from a friend, lets check them out…
Then, whats new today? lets check some rss feeds from the google reader and by the way, how is the real world doing? lets check the google news, humm this is interesting, lets do some browsing on it. Open google search …
search, search, search …
Lunch time, check gmail again, then the gtalk inside the browser pop’s up with a friend asking how you doing, you make a little talk.
Lets take also a peek at how the stock options doing on google finance.
search, search, search …
Its late afternoon, you scheduled a dinner and you wonder: exactly where is that restaurant street? lets check google maps, (or google earth for an even cooler experience), you find out exactly where is the restaurant, even add a placemark…
Get back home from dinner, download you digital camera pictures onto computer, upload them into web picasa, make a blog post(on google blogger) showing a picture from that night adding some comments where you where, and what you did, and who you were with.
Check your mail again, and your friend sent you and youtube video, lets check that out, and maybe 1, 2, 3… 10 videos more …
Besides all these you might also use google for making your home page, share documents, share a calendar, google analytics for collecting your web site stats, google desktop search to make fast searches on your computer? google shopping, google images, etc, etc…
So overall, how many google applications are you using? how much information does google has or can potentially have about you? By the way, note that being able to handle this amount of data in a usable way is no easy task but… still we can only imagine …
And actually, from a data mining perspective, this is a dream situation almost, imagine the knowledge collected from all the situation described above; the searches you do, the photos you make, the places you look at in the world, where you go, what images you search about, what you click on, what are your interests, what you blog about, what news you subscribe, maybe some information on what you work on, and maybe some information of your school, with google desktop indexing all documents…its endless, your agenda, your shopping habits, etc, etc…
Soon, Google knows more about you than you do, imagine the ultimate google application, where you type the following into the search box:
Me: Show me what’s new today!
Google(all the news you are interested about):
- Video of the new MacBook Air
- Ruby 1.9 released
- News on Skype new version for mac
Me: Entertain me!
Google: Do you want to?
- play a Joe Satriani cd.
- watch Seinfeld episode.
- Check out a chocolate cake recipe
- Buy a chocolate cake
Me: What is my favorite color, movie, drink?
Google: black, simpsons, coffee!
Google: Hey!!
Me: yes?
Google: haven’t you forgot to pay your water bill? And don’t forget that your gradma birthday is in 3 days, go buy something nice!
Me: humm … ops …. yeah thanks
Google: Maybe you want to check out this cooking book(link), 13 recipes contain ingredients your grandma likes… and shipping costs are free to her address area.