Is Google becoming - "The Internet" ?!

Google just launched another service - a traffic analysis (see also Slashdot | Google Launches Web Traffic Analysis Service ). It is just one in a wide variety of new, FREE services Google is starting to build around its core - the data mining according to user preferences or as the average internet user would call it - Searching the Web. Adding to the services suit of recently its free wifi-service in CA,USA and starting to invade eBay-Territory with base.google.com, Google Talk (VoIP) and the oh so controversial Google Print.
It is awesome to be able to do so many things online and for free but as Microsoft has such market-power on desktops, it seems Google is aiming for dominating the Internet. I get the feeling that Google is becoming too big and too diversified for its own good. Hope they proof me wrong! As long as Google keeps "not being evil" it's all good but who says that it will stay that way? I feel a little uncomfortable seeing Google jump on every hype that is coming up these days.

Another area of concern for me is the fact that Google's P/E is sky-high and does not seem to know any boundaries. Is the next stock market hype near or is Google really worth THIS much? I can hardly see it. And while I agree with GF Colony of Forrester Research that the company has the power to define the future of software, the thought of having ONE company dominate an area as vital to everybody in todays world as the internet, still makes me uncomfortable. But then again - if someone has to dominate - then why not the "so not evil" - Google?!

technorati tags: Google, Internet

The new era of Webbrowsing - making the "social" Web2.0 reality

I recently came accross the Mozilla Firefox derivative FLOCK. Even though it is only a developer preview version, it looks very promising. Flock is derived from Firefox, so that most of the extensions (and themes?) should (with little adaption of the community) work with Flock. It has added features though which enhance it towards the social features of the internet aka the Web 2.0

These scial features manifest themselves in elements like a WYSIWYG Blog editor, which works with some popular blog services (as a matter of fact, this blog is written in Flock ;- )

Further Flock introduces favorits instead of bookmarks, which can be shared online on a service http://del.icio.us . In addition to them being possibly viewed by the world, they can also be searched and organised with the help of tags - thus making the organisation much more flexible than the old-style bookmarks.

It also includes RSS feed reader, caching and on-the-fly aggregation.

There is much more to be checked out ... http://www.flock.com

Flock certainly has the potential not only to become a major threat in terms of browser market share, but it definately holds the possibilities to revolutionise/socialise the web browsing experience.