It’s Monday morning, and like many of you I’m sitting down to my computer for the day. I’ll check my email (office and GMail), see what’s new in the blogosphere (Google Reader), maybe catch up on the world a bit (Google News), and finally start my day of programming. (searching Google to see if anyone’s already written the code I’m working on ;)
You may notice a trend: Google. What would my world be like without Google? It’s an interesting thought experiment.
… except yesterday morning, it was a reality. Details are still sketchy (it may have just been Comcast?) but for an hour Sunday morning, I couldn’t reach a single Google domain. No GMail, no RSS, no search. And, in a creepy side effect I hadn’t anticipated, MANY sites were either slow, broken, or eternally loading as my browser tried in vain to pull the Google Analytics or Adsense code for the page. In short, the Internet was Broken.
It was amazing to watch myself try to remember how to search without Google. Maybe… Yahoo? No, I’ll try Ask.com. Turns out the results are terrible, at least for programming-related searches. A friend called looking for directions to a farmers’ market, and it took me a bit to remember the world beyond Google Maps. Doesn’t… Microsoft do maps? Hmm, who else… If only I could search!!
Twitter was still up, and via TwitScoop.com I could see a big spike in Google-related tweets, but I have yet to see any official word on this. Clearly big companies have downtime (Amazon was down for a few hours recently), but still… It may be time to rethink my utter dependency on “The Google”.
Reading your post, I’m reminded of Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which suggests that, more than a mere issue of dependency, the Net is affecting cognition and our ability to make rich mental connections. An interesting article: see if you can get to the end in one sitting ;-)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
Comment by Robin — 6/17/2008 @ 8:59 am
G-dep. is not any different then any other dependency :)
-aao
studio208.a2o2.com
Comment by Aysen A. Orhon — 6/19/2008 @ 7:41 pm
It’s hard when Google does things so well. I recently got on the Google Aps train, it’s great until it crashes or is totally unavailable.
Comment by Martine — 6/30/2008 @ 12:13 am