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Google Facebook clone

Google does Second Life

Not a clone, but Google is going to roll out an advertising platform that puts a crowdsourcing twist on ad targeting.

GreenBorder builds software that creates a kind of sandbox for your web browsing, so that any viruses, spyware and trojans you pick up during your session are deleted as soon as the browser is closed. Via Mashable.

At this week’s Webinnovators event (review) I particularly enjoyed the  DNSstuff.com demonstration. Following up on a question I posed during the demo, I spent some time at OpenDNS.com yesterday. While perusing the blog, I came across a post titled Google turns the page… in a bad way, which proved disturbing on a number of fronts.

David Ulevitch at OpeDNS had this to say about Google’s new software that comes pre-installed on Dell machines:

In short, Google and Dell have teamed up to install some software on Dell computers that borders on being spyware. I say spyware because it’s hard to figure out what it is and is even harder to remove. It also breaks all kinds of OpenDNS functionality. At the end, I’ll tell you what we’re doing about it.

167 comments on the post, which is informative and effectively goes to show how paid search can ruin the user experience.

I have mixed emotions about Google snapping up Feedburner, the RSS feed management service I’ve been a paying member of since day one. A nice exit for people like Brad Feld but I hope Google doesn’t do something like close down new signups like they did with JotSpot, which has been closed  to new signups for what seems like forever.

During the 2000-2001 era I spend a lot of my time tracking the fiber usage and tenants of the worlds datacenters for a consultancy called Stratsoft. We used the data for big maps as part of our projects with telcom providers like AT&T.

Robert Cringely has a great article about Google snapping up dark fiber and building out datacenters, immensely fascinating and a look into the crystal ball about Google 2.0.

I agree with the author that Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don’t.

Google is finally shutting down and killing off some of it’s weaker acquisitions. Supposedly Dodgeball is next. I was a user since day one, but never liked the manual nature of the service. Once everyone has usable GPS in the mobile, then we’ll start to see some useful apps. Until then the Location Based Entertainment stuff is mostly hype.

Google wants to listen to what you’re watching on television. The general idea is to provide personalized content to your computer based on what you are watching. More at O’Reilly Radar.