PhotoDude.com

Thu. Jun 30, 2005

Google Ooze

It sounds a bit clichéd to ask “what did we do before Google?” But recent events caused me to pause and wonder … how did they ooze into my life as much as they have?

Of course, it all started with search, but it’s become so much more. I think the full scale ooze began for me when I got DSL in September of ‘99. Suddenly, Google was always at my fingertips, with a quick answer to any obscure question that had popped into my head while watching some TV program. Over the course of the nearly six years since then, I’ve come to think of Google the way I think of electricity and water (and the Internet) ... it’s just there, whenever I need it.

Google remedies brain farts. As I asked then, “What did we do before we had Google to function as our brain annex?” We walked around with that unanswered question distracting us like a hovering black cloud (“Dammit, who was it that sang ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup’?” * ), until, at some random moment in the future, we suddenly stopped wherever we were and shouted out the answer like a ranting homeless person.

Well, er, at least that’s the way it used to be for me. But no more. With always-on broadband connections, wireless, and WiFi, why, Google is everywhere!

So they’ve now excelled at the search business so completely they’ve reached that exalted place in American Consumerism few achieve: their brand has become a verb. To the list of phrases like “just Xerox it,” we’ve added “just Google it.” When a brand has become a part of daily language, it’s hard for competition to catch up.

This is a phrase you can use in a business meeting and still be taken seriously … “just Google it.” As opposed to, say … “do you Yahoo?” ... which will likely bring only stares and pained silence.

Having conquered the world of search, they next oozed further into my life via what many have called “the killer app” of the Internet, e-mail. After all, no matter what your specific interests are on the Internet, or how you use it, everybody uses e-mail. Well, it’s been in beta for about a decade in Internet Years, but Google does have a damn sharp webmail service, Gmail. I’ve written before about Gmail, which I’ve been using as my full-time e-mail interface for a year now (“You are currently using 330 MB (14%) of your 2346 MB”). The rare times I have to open Outlook to find a message over a year old, it feels a lot like running into an ex-wife.

Along the way, Google has come to return the love to this site. Sometimes too much. We’ve become the #1 search return for “rotten kitty”, I’ve gotten a Googlelanche, and much more.

What’s this all leading up to? The whole damn planet. Google Earth. It’s now getting a lot of attention due to the latest free release, but it’s been around in various forms for some time. It used to be called Keyhole, and sometime late last year I downloaded a demo of it. I didn’t install it, just downloaded it, as I tend to do. It was months later in December, while reviewing things I’d downloaded and never installed, that I stumbled across the download, and finally checked it out.

It was so wicked cool that I dropped $29.95 for a year’s subscription to the service almost immediately. One of the reasons I was willing to do this was because I knew that Keyhole had been bought by Google, and thus would be around in some form for a while.

A month or so ago, they came out with a beta for Google Earth, which is the successor to Keyhole. Anyone can download it for free, and my one year subscription got converted to a two year subscription for Google Earth Plus, which, frankly, ain’t that big an upgrade in features.

So you should definitely check out the free version. It’s literally the whole Earth, so it’s great for tracking down locations in the news, but it’s become more than that. It would obviously depend on the resolution they have for the region in which you live, but in my case, it has become my “map app.” That used to be Mapquest, and the newer Google Maps is pretty cool (especially since it includes the satellite view option), but Google Earth eclipses both.

It will not only plot directions for you from Point A to Point B … it will fly you through them. With a decent amount of magnification and some tilt, you get a bird’s eye view of your path. But what I find helpful in Atlanta traffic is not only knowing the directions to the location, but being able to zoom in on a satellite view of it so that I can even see exactly which drive to turn in to get into the parking lot.

And if you have to go into town, well, you can get oriented in 3D. Here’s a flat satellite view of midtown Atlanta, viewed at an angle. You can tell there are tall buildings in the area only by the long shadows they cast. And here’s the same view with 3D buildings.

Did I mention you could fly through them?

Like I said, it’s wicked cool. Spend some time poking around, and you can find all kinds of things. Like a plane landing at Hartsfield. And my truck.

* A 35 year old song by The Foundations, now available, perversely, as a ringtone. **
** Asterisk subreferencing blatantly stolen from Reecie (now available in peach and pink).