Did I tell you that I love Google?

Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Google Reader, Google search …

I go to these applications every time I get connected and am online. I am online almost or more than 15 hours daily… so imagine all the time I spend on them. If someone analyzes my “history” are going to see that half of the time I am in google and his applications … and the other half on Facebook. (Let’s not speak about Facebook, please … because it is difficult for me to accept that I am slightly addicted)

70 % of my time I spend it in one of the google applications… how bad this sounds? If google it turns us useless, how useless will I be?:)

Google Doc is my crowdsourcing of graduated school. Imagine that the teacher is the company and the paper is the task to realize and we, the group assigned to do the work, we are the “crowd”. I can’t believe, how I did not discovered it earlier! For advantage or disadvantage, I don’t know, the Internet in certain way is making us less personal. Increasingly we need less the physical contact with other persons, with Google Doc I can be assembled by my other partners of the group without having to go out of my house. We can be editing simultaneously and collaborating in the same document. It looks like a live chat, I write and the others can see it at the moment also. How brilliant and useful is this?

Google Maps! At first I thought, I just get here (DC) so probably that’s why I use it with so many frequency, but 3 months later … I keep on using it as the first day. It is it so easy and useful to be able to put where you go and even to see the street view. I am usually the most awful with maps and directions but Google Map improved my sense of orientation. Although not everything is “peaches and cream”, I think that we are slowly losing privacy. I can’t stop thinking when we sends resume to an employer, there is your house address… any person with your resume on hand can enter to google and have a street view and see exactly where you live, your local community and your surroundings. It is a little scary!

Google Talk … it is inevitable. Google talk opens whenever I turn on the computer and there is always someone on the other side. Once again the Internet is gaining the battle towards our “typical” forms of communication. Why use the phone and speak with someone, if I can write to him and obtain immediate response also? We are losing the ” human touch ” of listening to the voice. But, still useful!

Gmail, what I can say to you with only 9,336,542 unique visits in October. The e-mail is my way of keeping up to date and in contact with the whole world, in a personal and professional way.

We are loosing: personal interaction, privacy and human touch…. But you know what? I still LOVE Google! That’s the worse part, we all know that these Social Webs applications are in someway interfering with our lives, but we still using it. I love google and I’m sure that almost everyone does it too!

At least, I’m not an addict… I would become one probably, but I’m not there yet!

Response #3: Bill of Rights

Do we need OWNERSHIP, CONTROL AND FREEDOM?

Ideally, Yes! We should have ownership of our personal information (profiles, friends, and contacts), we should control how we share the information and we need the freedom to grant persistent access to our personal info. But, we DO actually have this? Nop! All this social sites keep record of every picture and information that you have there. You’re putting your information out there and no matter how protected you think it may be it is in the public domain and anybody with the malice and sufficient knowledge can gain access to it and you as an user should assume that everything you post on any social website is from that moment on public domain.

That’s why we need to build privacy, we need to have the right of choose what information share or not. I think that we have kind of privacy in the way that we can choose on Facebook or MySpace who have access to my information (see Facebook Statement of Rights). But we totally loose all our privacy against the entity or organization, ones I post a picture or information they have recorded. They own it. (See MySpace Privacy Policy)

So we have no other choice than be careful with what we write and where we do it because once it is written, you cannot erase it. There will always be a file of what you do or not on the web. We should get together and fight for the institution of the Bill of Rights.

But, the companies are going to like this? They are going to agree? Hmm, I don’t think so…