I clicked on a website yesterday, and never been there before (I’m sure), my facebook PROFILE photo came up, said I was logged in, had a link to “log out” that didn’t work. Asked me to “promote” the page I was looking at. Didn’t want to. Wasn’t sure if I was logged in, but I can tell you this:

Facebook is SELLING YOUR IP ADDRESSES AND YOUR PROFILE PICS, WITH YOUR NAME, TO ANY COMPANY THAT PAYS FOR IT.

Have fun!

It’s beyond privacy invasion (my Facebook prefs are all set to “privacy”). It’s blatant commercialism, invasion of privacy, and FB has accomplished so much, and reached so far into the world’s internet users with their “fun website” playing on our desires to reach old friends and share with all our friends our news, that even the most suspicious (me), still uses it.

But when you load up a webpage, either by accident or redirect, and see your profile photos and full name listed on the page, without you “registering”, then you know the “real game” of FB.

Lucifer rejoices.

About the article and replacement of search and domain names? Not going to happen in the next 10 years.

“user-friendly data mining tools” lol

Yes, eventually users may catch on. But first programmers, who enable the users, have to catch on. The GUI is keeping them all, programmers and users, dumbed down. I see programmers who are seen as “brilliant” in their craft who do not know how to do simple things without the use of some complex program, written by someone else. This puts them in a very weak position compared to someone who can accomplish the same things with a simpler method.

As for unstructed information, I agree this is the reality. I think the key to “unlocking it” for the user is understanding that “files” and so many other things that she takes on faith about the compter, are only abstractions. The “stuff” (text, image, sound, video, etc) is all just numbers. One huge heap of numbers. How could we organise that? We can break this heap into 1. “numbers that are addresses of other numbers” (i.e. where in the heap it is, a marker, so to speak) and 2. “the numbers that these addresses point to” (what the stuff is, and the stuff itself). That’s one way to do it. For most of us, the abstractions to organise this huge heap of numbers are someone else’s abstractions. And, unless we design our own system, we just go along and accept the system someone else has built. It works “good enough”.

Google has faced this issue of organisation from day one. They had to, because of the volume of data they had to store. They developed their own “filesystem” and their own methods of accessing the data. Needless to say, they have quite a bit of experience with this. Their systems have stood the test of time. That experience is valuable. Anyone can collect the same data as Google, and some have (you know who), but do they have the same amount of experience organising it?

If we, the lowly users, were all tasked with individually organising a large volume of information (e.g. a massive quantity of “addresses”), would each person do it precisely the same way? I doubt it.

As these volumes of data, i.e. heaps of numbers, we store continue to increase for each of us personally, the old abstractions like “a file”, “a folder”, etc. may not hold up so well, or “scale” to use the lingo. It may become “too much to handle” for the average user.

Either users begin to get a clue what exactly their data is (a huge heap of numbers) or perhaps they let someone else handle it for them. The simple “tools” have long been available to create personalised, new abstractions: different ways of manipulating the heap of numbers; it’s simply a matter of creative ideas and the effort of implementing them. Who is going to take the time to do that?

Google has been putting in substantial effort, because they have had a real need to do it. Their competitors are only more recently under similar “evolutionary pressures” and thus playing catch up.

When you type in a domain name or you search for or within a “file” or “directory”, you are referencing or searching through *numbers*. The numbers are the reality. Everything else is an abstraction. Numbers, unlike the abstractions, can be very precise.

Without all the fuzziness and ambiguity of using symbols with multiple meanings, if we used numbers instead (Dewey, ISBN, etc.), would registering domains would be unnecessary? Would search be easier?

Delete this post!

After more than ten years of watching the Internet evolve, what seems to have changed the least is the format in which Google returns its search results to the public. Sure, the process of search is much more sophisticated and the results more relevant, but the foundation upon which search is built hasn’t changed much. By way of analogy, if websites were individual lockers that lined the walls of an infinitely long room, then Google’s job has simply been that of indexing the locker contents and offering an educated guess as to which locker holds the content that most closely resembles the items being requested by the party at interest.

Well, it seems that Google is so busy finding new and better ways to index the contents of those lockers that it has altogether failed to notice that in the very same room are tables bearing stacks of so much additional information that it’s spilling onto the floor creating one gigantic heap of documents, files, folders, photos, etc. However, from Google’s vantage point, content that is kept outside the locker is not accessible as content at all, and therein lies the problem.

I’ve addressed this issue by suggested another way search might evolve:

http://www.squidoo.com/UnstructuredInformation

No doubt, the concept needs to be developed, but I think it gets the point across.

“The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science”

Further…

“Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web”

And this my friends is just the tip of the iceberg. It is theorized that Quantum Computers will actually be able to unravel the mysteries of the universe and tell us about the origin of man.
But that won’t be for another 15 years or so.

I expect to see all the Goolge wish list projects disappear as they buckle down for the change. There will be brain leakage outward from Google also.

Change is inevitable with the Internet. It is dynamic and able to change overnight.

Good luck Google.