Saturday, November 16, 2013

Why Google Should Acquire...

Yelp, Open Table, Snapchat, Tripit, Amazon, Netflix, UsingMiles, Yapta, Scottrade, and every other data/service/content platform. Alternatively, "Google Subsidizes Your Life" or "Should You Be Afraid of Google?" or "Should the NSA Acquire Google?" or "When Should We Shut Google Down?"  And since I now sound like your crazy bipolar ex, let's just throw in "I Love You Google."

I'm a futurist.  I dream of days when we will have seamless electrochemical to digital conversion, allowing for two-way pseudotelepathy.  All I have to do is think of football and voila, set top box menu populates with live football games.  Eye movement tracking = auto scrolling. 'call' [contact].  [begins speechless conversation].  Direct content delivery to your brain?  I want to wake up, be 'online,' have my coffee ready just as I step out of the bathroom, and have an Uber car waiting 30 seconds before I step out the door.  You're excited about Google Glass; I'm hopeful for Google Glass retinal implant edition.  It knows everything I'm looking at and feeding in.  It'll know I'm about to trip before I do.  Forget about 5% ad conversions.

I like for everything to be intutitive.  GPS, email, news delivery, shopping aggregation, tailored travel, etc.  Most of these technologies don't even teeter on the brink of AI.  Predictive AI requires complex (blackbox) algorithms and the ever so nebulous and evasive 'big data.'

Google knows almost everything about me.  It's terrifying to think about so I choose to blindly revel in its free offerings.  It's a little like Halloween.  You get all that free candy and you know you'll probably end up obese with cavities and diabetes, but in the spirit of carpe diem, oil drilling, and other unsupervised revelry, wheeeeeeeeee.  White people haven't paid yet for everything they've done, so why worry about sucking on Google's teat for another century.

Free email, free calendar, free search engine, free maps (and now, Waze), free blogging.  If I were reduced to 1s and 0s and lived in a cyberworld, I would essentially be living off of Google, all subsidized by advertising revenue.

If you look at a map or globe, it's a quick visualization of all 196 countries (give or take some territories, political instabilities, unacknowledged dark corners, OFAC sanctioned states, communist states, and whatever permutations there within.  Even resource visualizations are just superimposed on the same images. Diamonds, gold, oil, copper, etc.  The web is a bit more of a vast expanse, almost like the universe, constantly expanding.  If you map out the internet the same way you do the world, you end up with a lot of real estate.  And of course you can superimpose different themes or memes on this map.  By sector, by ecommerce, by cats, by porn, by dinosaurs, by Reddit categories, and so on.  But truly, the internet and its real estate valuation is driven by commerce.  And commerce is driven by advertising.  Ergo our syllogism, internet = advertising.

The entire web can be mapped out in terms of advertising space.  And the draw is basically cats, I mean content.  And how much of that advertising space does Google own?  A lot.

Let's go back to what Google knows about you.  Where you've been, where you go, where you'll be. What you read, what you type, who you talk with, how you talk with people, when you poop.  Google knows what you buy, who you call, who you text, calls you ignore, messages you ignore, your collaborative and private docs, things you like, your stock portfolios, your calendar, and maybe even your coding projects.  Oh, and Google knows everything you search for.

With minimal NLP, Google could differentiate the levels of relationships from my email communiques.

Now, Google + you = digital pimping.  Imagine all the ads they could slap in front of your Snapchats.

Strangely, we're not all that afraid or, at the least, wary of Google in the way we are of Facebook.  Is it because of Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg?  Or because it's blatant?  Everything Facebook does is mostly visibly under one roof.  While Google is a bit more diversified, sort of like Amazon.  But if you scroll to the bottom of Amazon's homepage, they're not really hiding their holdings.  The last time we flipped out at Google was when they decided to peruse email for ad embedding.  Blew over fairly quickly.  When pimp is also sugar daddy, we're alright.

Is Google a ninja like Akamai?

Sure, Facebook is a bit subversive about their methods, but who knows more about you?

The downside to all these acquisitions, aside from Google knowing more about you than the NSA or you know about yourself?  Skynet.  Damn auto correct, Google Now.