Googleland


by Chantelle Schmidlin - Date: 2007-01-19 - Word Count: 644 Share This!

"A brand is not a brand until it's a verb in the dictionary". Those words were uttered by a friend of mine the other day, and they got me thinking. When does the internet get renamed Googleland? When does Google get more power than the Governments that rule the world? When do we all become Googlelites?

Everyone is talking about googling this or that and the word has officially been added to both the Oxford English and the Merriam-Webster dictionaries as a verb. So lets look at Google, it's products and why it is the world's longest lasting "buzz word".

If Google keeps churning out valuable little bits and pieces (lovingly built by the engineers in the GooglePlex) that make our lives easier or more convenient at the rate they do, its not going to be long before we're renaming the planet "Googleland".

Take Google Earth for example. Currently, it carries images that cover the entire globe taken some time in the last three years and updated on a rolling basis. This changes the way we look at the world. We can plan holiday's and tours, research neighborhoods, get driving instructions and so much more really beneficial stuff. Now imagine if they develop some way for those images to be streamed to the world's users in real time... Who knows, maybe Google's brilliant engineers will build their own satellites to orbit the world taking photo's of us as we need them. OK, actually forget I said that. That's just scary. Kind of becomes a national security topic and I am not going there! Shades of "Enemy of the State" in that statement, and I haven't even mentioned Google Maps yet...

The search tools on Google are also so extensive that we really don't need to leave our homes to live life. Its so
sad! We can find information with a few clever keywords, we can read other peoples opinions, and make our own heard. We can search the full text of books, we can shop, we can organise ourselves, we can join like-minded people in discussion groups, we can edit and share photo's, we can download open source code, we can stream video (giving advertisers a whole new scope to attack our senses), we can get Google to utilise our mobile phones, enabling us to search using SMS or WAP. We can even request maps from our phones!

Its just absolutely crazy what we can do with the tools that Google has given us. So thats obviously the answer to the question of their continued popularity and why "google" has remained a buzz word for as long as it has. But we still have the question of the renaming of the planet... How long will it be? Will it happen in my lifetime? People have said by the end of the decade Google will have so much power that they will be able to take on Governments.

The feeling is that the bigger fish in any situation always squashes the small fish. The small fish only has to be
threatened with some kind of legal action or equally intimidating situation and he backs off. So in this case Government is the bigger of the two and so could therefore, quietly deal with Google. But Google finds itself in rather a "tough" spot you see. They may very well be getting big enough to be able to take on the now not so big opponent fish.

So my suggestion is this. Sit back, enjoy the little conveniences that Google keeps feeding us, and wait for the bigger of the two ego's to win the battle of the territories. How does the word "googleland" float off your tongue? Does it feel like a good fit?

So with that as good food for thought for now, I must sign off, fellow Googlelite... But wait, is that Microsoft-Ville over the rise?

Related Tags: google, google mobile, google maps, google earth, google products, google news groups, google directory

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: