Google's recent acquisition of Upstartle, the makers of Writely, seems to suggest that they're attempting to create a "Web 2.0" office suite. I would be on board for that, as long as they didn't try to scan all my personal documents for ad placment. I don't mind so much that they do that to my email, but personal documents is a bit much.
Also, the recent leaked screenshots of Google's private-beta CL2 calendaring application add fuel to the rumors.
(Is Google prepping an office suite? | News.blog | CNET News.com)
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The Geek Code desperately needs updating, but in any case here's mine (as of 2010-02-28):
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GIT/MU d+(-) s:+>: a C++> ULXB++++$ L+++ M++ w--() !O !V P+ E---
W+++ N o++ K? PS PE++ Y+ PGP t !5 X- R- tv+@ b++ DI++++ D--- e*++
h--- r+++ y+++ G+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
If you really care about knowing what that all means, you either know the code already, or you can get it decoded for you here.
4 comments:
Not sure how I found your blog, but as a fellow musically inclined /former IT guy named Brad I'm not surprised that we think & blog similarly...
That being said, how would you expect Google to support a free Office suite online without scanning your documents? I'm pretty sure my e-mail is more personal than most documents I create, but I'm still a happy Gmail user...
Well, they could try being just a hosting service when it comes to personal storage. They could provide the disk space and not use keywords from inside documents to target advertising.
My e-mail is definitely *not* as personal as, for instance, my budget spreadsheet. All of my bills that I get via email contain only links to the site where I pay them, and no personally identifying information.
Sure, my email contains personal things about my life sometimes, but it doesn't contain identifying information regarding my bank account, my taxes, etc. I'm looking into setting up a process whereby my wife and I will scan all of our receipts instead of keeping so many little bits of paper around... I'd love to have a way to store those easily online, but I don't want anybody to be able to access the data contained therein.
I'm a gmail user, and I trust the google-bots that scan my email for targeted ads, but if the google-bots had access to bank information I fear that it could possibly fall into the wrong hands at some point.
By the way, Bradley, where is your blog? It doesn't appear that you have a public profile on Blogger...
whoops - i enabled my profile w/a link to my blog
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