Finally! Driving directions to Olympus Mons!
Too cryptic? Then let me ask you this: Have you checked out Google Mars yet?
No. Seriously. Google Mars.
Building on the popularity created by Google Earth, Google Mars allows you to spend hours scanning the topography of our closest neighbor. While its current form is more akin to Google Maps, they are hard at work creating the same functionality Google Earth has. A boon for astronomy geeks, it seems to serve little purpose other than as a mild time waster. Perhaps Google is just taking a very long view, cornering the market on creating useful Mars maps now? It could prove very useful when we start sending colonists there… in eighty or ninety years.
As of this writing, there has been no word from Maxim Magazine telling when they will place an over-sized magazine cover of Eva Longoria on the Red Planet.
One has to hand it to Google for sheer chutzpah. While every other search entity in existence claws ferally for market share, Google flaunts that they have nothing else better to do.
Which isn’t true - and someone needs to tell them as much.
While Google is the current lord and master of organic and paid search, they have never successfully executed social media - bookmarking, blogging, news sharing, etcetera. That is firmly Yahoo! territory, and as people gravitate more and more towards this group-think approach to the internet, Yahoo! will reap the lion’s share of them.
While Google has done what it can to enter this arena with sites like Google Co-op, Google Trends or Google Notebook, each of these sites are approached with the same lackadaisical approach of creating a new product, attaching the prefix, “Google,” and setting it loose. There is no thought to creating an audience for it, or even making it easy to use. (If you define yourself as a “casual web surfer,” I defy you to make Google Co-op work in less than a day.) They have purchased YouTube, which at least has the virtue of built-in traffic. But they also purchased other sites such as Writely and Blogger, without ever having successfully built up (to say nothing of monetized) those sites’ traffic. So it remains to be seen what they can accomplish with YouTube.
Still, Google unquestionably dominates the search market, and so they don’t need any of these odd new toys of theirs to work, just as long as Google Adwords does. As a young company that has not yet had to suffer an evolutionary shift in their marketplace, this lack of foresight may prove very costly to them in the coming years.
Google, you are good - just not so good you can allow yourself to be distracted.
