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In the High Stakes Game of Ruling the Internet, What's Going To Fail?

I can't get out of bed this week without hearing something about Google Music or Google+. The internet overlord is indeed unleashing the big guns right now. You know what though? The sort of high-stakes world Google plays in is win/lose, and something...

I can’t get out of bed this week without hearing something about Google Music or Google+. The internet overlord is indeed unleashing the big guns right now. You know what though? The sort of high-stakes world Google plays in is win/lose, and something is going to fail. So which is it? I’m saying Google Music. Hardware before hype, you know? I threw in some other Google endeavours to keep it interesting.

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Google+

I don’t know anyone that hearts Facebook and thinks of Mark Zuckerberg as anything other than a villain, but I also can only think of like, two people I know that don’t use it. If Google doesn’t fuck this one up somehow, like Buzz, it’s nigh time for another mass social media migration. In the end, it doesn’t matter how many revolutions — literal and otherwise — Facebook started, it’s the concept that matters, not the product. Also: Circles!

By the by, if you are Google, please send an invite this way.

Google Goggles

As a guy that doesn’t know shit about stuff but nonetheless plays web-futurist like I fucking own it, I think the web of the future will be less text-based by several orders of magnitude. As more and more corporations/businesses/whoever figure out the making people watch a commercial before watching something they didn’t want to watch in the first place scam, the world will regress back into drooling, glazed basic cable 1990 mode. Google Goggles searches based on images, not words, so it would seem to be on a good trajectory. Right now, it can only identify crap like landmarks and wine labels. If Goggles can ride out its gimmick stage, it might have a chance.

Google Music

People will gravitate to the cloud service that has the least restrictions. Like, where you can stash the absolute most of your music for the least amount of money. For nothing, you get up to 20,000 tracks (100 gigs) stored at any bitrate with Google Music. It supports lossless files, unlike Apple or Amazon, which is neat. (Though the cloud automatically converts FLAC files to .mp3 files.) Google’s cloud won’t support old DRM protected files from iTunes, but I imagine people buying that much music from iTubes are the sorts of people that will use Apple’s cloud.

In any case, what works against Google Music and everyone else is that the hype is way ahead of hardware/technology. A cloud is great, but you have to stay connected to it — all the time. I guess Google’s Android app will let you play some recent songs offline, but still. And, honestly, I don’t like the idea of Google having 100 percent access to all of my music, and where that music may have come from. Not sure how any of these services can address paranoia.

Jaiku

This is old, but it’s here because I had no idea it existed until now. This is Google’s Twitter, or became Google’s Twitter when Google bought it in 2007. They made it open-source in 2009, which is the last time its blog has been updated. Though it seems to still be functional.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.