Life beyond Google?

Posted by Peter Ford in UncategorizedJan 4th, 2007 | 6 responses

Dave Winer writing about Google:

I stopped believing in Google fairplay when they added a Blog-This feature to their toolbar, and didn’t use open APIs so users could post with any blogging tool, not just Google’s.

Google is becoming an all-embracing, accepted part of our societal furniture. It buys up companies for fun. Only the other week, I went to access my JotSpot account, only to find that it has joined the Google family. I am assured that this is good for me as the consumer. I’m not convinced.

In 2002, I was concerned that using only Microsoft products with my students would not serve them well. I now have the same worry about Google.



6 Responses to “Life beyond Google?”

  1. Alec Couros says:
    January 4, 2007 at 6:13 pm

    I’ve been worried for this quite a while, but it’s so difficult to break free. It will come down to only a few major players in the future (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!) … and there is even some whispering re: MS buying Yahoo! in the near future to acquire their search technology and marketing structure.

    The GoogleZon projection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlezon)becomes a bit more relevant everyday.

  2. Peter Ford says:
    January 5, 2007 at 8:26 am

    Thanks Alec for the pointer to Googlezon – scary but certainly not beyond the realms of possibility. I agree – it is difficult to break free and requires time to explore fresh approaches – something we never seem to have enough of in education.

  3. John Sutton says:
    January 5, 2007 at 11:31 pm

    Hi Peter, I too was miffed about the loss of Jotspot: will be interesting to see how it is resurrected as it has been offline for a few months already. Google’s not all bad, though: I like the fact that you can embed Google calendar into a website http://www.stpatricksrochdale.net/calendar.html

    Although I believe you can now do the same with Pageflakes – not done this yet, though.

  4. Peter Ford says:
    January 6, 2007 at 9:35 am

    Hi John,
    Google does some brilliant stuff. The calendar looks great!

  5. Dan says:
    March 19, 2007 at 1:48 am

    I don’t think that it is a problem that Google is taking control of some of the sites. The only problem is that when they become too powerful that they don’t respect the little guy.

  6. Dan says:
    March 19, 2007 at 1:50 am

    Please send comments to my blog at http://hovey71.learnerblogs.org/
    My comment is the google response found above.

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