Google will organise your life

Google have released a calendar, as part of their mission to “Organise the Worlds Information”. While it is what you expect from Google, the Calendar did not impress me a whole lot. It does have an intuitive interface, that is easy to use. It does integrate with Gmail, although the full extent has yet to be seen, as they fall short of mentioning it in Gmail at all, but I would expect this to change. I see great potential for users though, and where Google is heading. They will eventually integrate it with GoogleTalk and Gmail, producing a hybrid interface where you can organise a conference on GoogleTalk, schedule it on your calendar (which is syncronised with your PC and your workgroup server [therby informing fellow employees]), submit video of it to Google Video, write minutes with writely, email minutes with Gmail, that mail (with document and video) being attached to the meeting on the Calendar, which is in turn archived on your PC in Google Desktop and your Gmail Drive. While that is only one scenario, it is very possible. Google have already leaked information on their eagerness to hold the entire contents of ones’ hard drive on the internet.

This of course leads to privacy fears, will the U.S. or Chinese governments have access to literally anything on your computer? The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an online rights advocacy group, and they recently discouraged people from downloading the latest Google Desktop, due to the fact it will backup your information online for 30 days. You can exclude folders and files from Google Desktops index, but this is a manual process. So where will the future lie, and how far will Google go to get the most relevent results? Who knows, but one thing is for sure, with their increase in market share at expense of MSN and Yahoo, Google is here to stay.