Google Health

The American medical system is a mess. If you ignore the inconsistent and expensive nature for a moment, there is still the nightmare that are medical records. Unless you go to the same doctor for the entirety of your life, you're bound to have fragmented pieces of your history spread across countless practices, specialties and even states. There exists no unified system and because of this, most doctors use proprietary software to manage their patients' information. The end result in rehashing your entire medical history every time you visit a new doctor and in extreme cases, injury or death result from a conflict due to an incomplete picture. As someone who isn't afraid to visit as a specialist when it's necessary, I know I loathe the idea of having to fill out pages upon pages about my health.

Google wants to change this with Google Health. Not yet realized as the one stop record shop they hope it will be, they're encouraging people to use it for various medical directives as a start. I suspect the tool doesn't get a ton of usage and they're promoting it in hopes more people will buy into it.

The question is, do we trust Google? People tend to be very sensitive about their medical histories so is hosting that information "in the cloud" something we're ready for? Is our information secure both from internal and external threats? Will an increased dependency on a hosted solution leave us in the dark in a time of peril? As the company aggregates more and more of our lives (email, calendars, docs, voice mail), are we in danger of one day waking up with a Google hangover?

Google Chrome OS

Google recently announced their plans to release Chrome OS, an operating system that is built around the idea of running the Chrome web browser as the primary applications platform. No one has seen nary a peep of the software and yet it already has everyone talking about what it means to the likes of Microsoft. Touted as a new way to think about the OS, Google believes it will change how we think about netbooks and the things we use them for.

It's probably no great secret that I don't find the news at all surprising. I'd previously written that the Chrome web browser was more application engine than actual browser and the progression of the Chrome OS seems like the natural next step. In the purest sense, Google's vision of the future has us running all the programs we used to on our desktops via web applications hosted and delivered via the cloud (although that term is grossly overused). They built a browser to run the programs faster and now they're building an OS for that browser to run on. No bloat, no messy installations and everyone is using all those fancy web apps that Google has been spending all their time designing. Hmm.

Give it another 5 years and we'll all be talking about Google like we talk about Microsoft now. They really are changing the way we use our computers and like any great behemoth, we'll eventually cry monopoly all while begrudgingly using their products to become more efficient and effective at whatever it is we do. I, for one, welcome our new overlords.

Google Voice

It was recently announced that Google has snagged up 1 million phone numbers in an effort to prepare for the opening of Google Voice to additional customers. Google Voice, a product that has not gotten much press since Google acquired GrandCentral and changed the name, allows users to have a single phone number ring any combination of phone numbers they own. It's currently not open to the public but it's my belief you're going to be hearing about a lot more in the near future. Before we talk about the why, let's look at some of the benefits.

Get a call on your cell phone through GV you don't want to take it? Send it to voicemail and the message is available in your browser whenever you're ready. Talking on your work phone and need to leave to pick up the kids from daycare? Push a few buttons and transfer the call to your cell phone with having to call anyone back. Want your boss to be able to reach you on your cell phone but not when you're on vacation? Create a "Work" group and disable forwarding to your cell phone for some peace. There are plenty more, but you get the point.

The reason you're going to eventually care about GV, or at least the technology it uses, is that it's another step in the direction of blurring the line between our daily lives and the Internet. Yes, it's very convenient to give everyone one number and have that ring your work or cell phone when you deem appropriate, but the real meat of it comes from a fairly seamless blending of dumb technology like your house phone and VOIP. In essence, it uses the Internet to connect devices that were never meant to be connected to the web, let alone each other. Whether you're ready or not, this is more proof all electronic devices will be interconnected and feeding off the same massive hive that is the Internet.

As a Google Voice user, I welcome you to the collective.

Google Chrome 2.0

Google recently released the 2.0 version of their browser, Chrome. Like the 1.0 version, the new version has received luke warm reviews. Like the linked article, most critics concede that Chrome is the fastest browser out there but is severely lacking in the features and usability that make other browsers more preferable. It is my belief that the problem with this sort of comparison is because people are assessing Chrome purely as a browser and not what it's really to be. While other browsers tend to be more geared at consuming information on the internet, Chrome seems to be more designed to allow for the consumption of rich internet applications (RIAs).

At some point in the (near?) future, web applications will match and replace desktop functionally. For them to reliably do so, they need to start offering operating system-like functionality. Users want the same experience and access to all the same data, regardless of machine or method used to access it. Google, in a weblog post about Chrome’s initial release, cites this very reason as to why they created Chrome in the first place. Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management, is quoted as saying “We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.”

Google understood they spent a majority of their time working inside a browser and having professed to the use of one to search, communicate, collaborate and spend their free time, wanted to optimize both current user experience and drive future innovation. In a discussion about the future of web applications, Sergey Brin, President of Technology at Google, says there are an abundant number of things that are difficult to do on the web today but that he believes there will be “more and more web apps, of greater sophistication.” Brin believes there is key functionality, like image styling currently offered by PhotoShop and similar programs, that users will want to remove from the desktop space and still get the same functionality within a browser.

So yeah, as a web browser Chrome doesn't really measure up. When using the yard stick Google intended, however, it is the first real step towards an internet application engine. At some point, we may look back and realize Google's path was the right one.