Sometimes one may even wonder some of these simple web based stuff are really economically significant. But when we dig deeper we see how much money these cough up, take things like sub-dollar app-stores, search engines even Facebook and such social networks. In old times people saw Google and such companies who seemingly gave things free as the white gods of computer world when Microsoft and such being devils putting huge price tags in their products. But the thing is companies such as Google collect their money in a more subliminal manner. Now information is money, every little bit of it worth much more than one would think. Take that little ‘LIKE’ you put on Facebook pages, do you know there are marketing agencies who pay money to get to know these info? These tiny bits of info you put on online social networks are usually sold to companies [most established companies sell these info without the unique or private info which relates to the specific person as a measure of privacy] who are interested in what people actually like and to identify trends.
Talking of Facebook, it’s one of the fastest grown multi-million online businesses of recent times. So Google being an established internet giant, tried to capture this market with some of their products. But last few swings didn’t made it home, especially with Google Wave & Google Buzz they've fallen behind Facebook, quite badly. So now with Google+ it’s evident that they took a more direct step to attack Facebook on its own grounds of Social Networking. When you look at the details of Google+ (sadly still I didn't get the chance to try it out for real) its more or less looks like another Facebook with video chatting and said to be easier privacy settings for sharing between ‘friend groups’.
This time also Google has chosen the path of ‘exclusivity’ in their launch of Google+ as they did with GMail years back. I still remember how our school friends tried hard to get those GMail ‘invitations’ as at first GMail was given out on invitation basis. But now GMail has come up as a leading email provider competing with then established names such as Yahoo, Hotmail etc. Main reason for this is people’s love for exclusivity. Well yes it’s arguable that most online/computer related businesses use this as they release beta versions to small communities etc before launch. But in product like these this hype created is very useful in the long run.
So we come to the next point of this whole ‘getting into the net’ thing. Through use of Facebook and such service providers such as Netflix, Google, Amazon, eBay etc are personalizing the internet experience. It’s cool right? Even I thought it’s the thing that we want, only till I got to read this article about a book called ‘The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You’ by Eli Pariser. [original article on the book: http://www.economist.com/node/18894910?frsc=dg|a] There he has pointed out about the darker side of this whole personalization issue (other than what I already mentioned above about how companies sell info we put). If we think about it its simple to understand Google and other service providers are using our past searches and info we put to customize results for each of us. Well since internet is an unimaginably deep ‘mess’ of information this customization is somewhat useful to quickly find out what we might actually want. But thing we don’t see is that we wont get ideas/info that will challenge us or has different opinion due to this ‘raw’ customization. Why I say ‘raw’ is this all is done by computer algorithm which may have some kind of Ai (Artificial intelligence) but not the actual ‘i’ (= intelligence) with a humanness. Google CEO has once said “the ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean, and give back exactly what you want.” Yes, exactly what ‘you want’. But as humans we sometimes need opinions that are against our beliefs to make us think & take good decisions, so with this personalization we erase out that component in the info internet gives us. We all heard that ‘Love is Blind’, maybe it’s said because when in love you sometimes neglect the faults/errors in other one. So maybe with personalization of internet we’ll make ‘Internet’s blind’ as well ;)
All this making ‘My Own World Wide Web’ has its own share of problems, maybe we should think a bit more carefully when opting for such personalization. And as the saying I derived from an old Sinhala saying “Google කටෙත් ප්ලස්, මගේ කටෙත් ප්ලස්”, you might end up chewing anything Google (or some other company) feeds you.
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