SDRNews SDR2009-02-02 Thinking About Googleclypse
- Open Networks New Norm
- Google Monoculture
- Most Wired Cities
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Thinking About Googleclypse
by Andrew McCaskey
More Serious Than Banks
In our culture, when something or someone has become a verb, that’s a pretty good sign that “twittering” has moved beyond a techie fad and into something more substantial. “To Google” passed the test years ago.
The Google incident this past weekend is the early wake-up call for overdependence on any one vendor, no matter how useful or handy. CMSWatch Trendblog spoke of the Google “monoculture” for both data and applications – and raises the question of failure in the Google cloud. In fact, as they note, failure would not be required, just instability.
Consider the impact on the US economy if, for a day or two Google went down. Not a pretty picture at all. Now consider what would happen if Google came back but was unstable in service levels and content for a period of weeks that allowed for all the GMail, Google Documents, Feedburner, Blogspot or any one of 80 services that Google provides to the world became untrustworthy. Not the end of the world, but .. even more damaging than toxic assets.
Now, combine this with the fast emerging role of Open Social Networks envisioned by Charlotte Li – being as common as air itself. Social connections will be seamlessly integrated into other media – as we already see as Twitter messages being integrated , realtime, into lower third text over video of political speech and events. The possiblity that profiles are attached to emails as introductions. And that those profiles are linkable into data that shows who you associate with by email, IM and SMS. All of which is being gathered – and compiled – by none other than … Google.
The lesson of this weekend is not that a monoculture is bad, or that more and more information is in the cloud, or that things can go wrong.
The lesson is that this time, the errors were detectable. By everyone. What happens when the failure mode is subtle – linking or unlinking social network information – with changes in reputation at stake ? What happens when those errors propogate and become embedded in other documents and actions ?
More than the banking system runs on faith in the stability of underlying assets.
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