Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Google Continues to Progress Toward Running the World

Not that I particularly object. I happen to love Google-- I'm an active user of Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, YouTube, Blogger (obviously), GCal, Google Notebook, Google Scholar...not to mention the Google search engine. Google is generally reliable, fast, efficient, and has helped me to consolidate my online life (except for Facebook, Twitter, and news and college-related sources). I have not yet downloaded their new web browser, Google Chrome (I'm kind of waiting until it morphs a few generations and works out any initial bugs), but I expect that I might eventually, if it ever substantially outstrips Mozilla Firefox for quality.
Yesterday, though, Google took a large yet natural leap and announced their latest development: the Google Chrome OS (operating system). The really unique thing: like just about everything Google does, it will be predominantly Internet based. While there will be some ability for users who are not able to be perpetually connected to the Internet to still access files, the system will predominantly operate from online.
This is all very interesting stuff, although somewhat over my head (my dad and some of my friends may be serious computer people, but my knowledge is basic by comparison). What I perhaps found most interesting (aside from being able to access my data anywhere, from any computer connected to the Internet) was an idea posted by Leo Babauta on Zen Habits-- that a Google Music would be the logical next step, allowing you to access your personal music files (mp3s) from anywhere on the Internet. As long as they're not restricted to being Internet based, that is an idea I could seriously get into.

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