Enter MapJack. A new site with provides all the voyeristic goodness of Google’s Street View except with much clearer images and superior interface. Although the site currently only has 3 city’s mapped, the clarity and depth of their mapping won me over. They have mapped more of San Fran then Google. Acccording to the site, they map cities “on foot, by car, and by boat.” They say thier mapping doesnt simply stop curbside they also “include walking areas such as Parks, Universities and famous walking streets.” And as everyone who’s traveled knowns, the most interesting sites rarely occur on main street.
That damned Google! No matter how much I try to avoid getting sucked into the Googleplex by their absurdly useful and free services, I cant seem to avoid it. Today I was compelled to give Google two permanent slots in my mobile phonebook. The first for the infinity useful Google SMS, which I use all the time but hadnt given its own place on my phone. The second slot was allocated to the new Goog 411 service, which I havent played with as long or used as much but seems worthy of a spot based solely on the voice commands and being able to connect with the businesses for free. If you havent tried Google SMS or Goog 411 yet give them a shot and you too will soon be sucked into world of convenience and utility.
So I find out today, via voicemail from Craig and Vincent, that Google is buying my universal mail box, Grandcentral, for $45 million. Despite Grandcentral’s oh so very evil habit of promising 212 area codes and not actually having any, the Grandcentral service is one of the most useful free telephony services out there. Now it joins the ranks of Blogger, Writely, Feedburner and several other applications I’ve used on and off that Google has subsequently purchased. Thus proving once and for all, that if I use your product Google will buy it.
Using this same logic, here are 3 other companies likely to be purchased by Google in the next 12 – 18 months. GMail, EditGrid, Onlywire, a service that saves bookmarks to all the social bookmarking sites your a member of, with one click. GeoBeats, an amazing content site featuring video tours of cities around the globe. Splashcast, geek fanboy favorite and uber media tool to the stars (and star wanna-bes).
Amazin’ Phasin’ hipped me to a very interesting video put on YouTube by the folks at the Italian consultancy Casaleggio Associati. The video is a look back at the media landscape from the year 2051. Its interesting for a couple of reasons: 1) its definitely wrong on the details 2) it seems directionally correct 3) its got really cool. Take look at the video and see if it convinces you that the future of big media will be spelled Google.
Beware, if you have even the slightest voyeuristic tendencies the following service/site from Google is going to be addictive. Google Streetview launched back in May and has made the privacy wonks apoplectic. With good reason, theres lots of negative privacy implications to Google Streetview, there’s already been an incident involving a not so secret coffee break and an overzealous HR manager. However, the sheer voyeuristic goodness of Google’s Streetview more then offsets the obvious assault on our privacy. Besides, Google promises to do no evil and they are the only search engine that said no to the US government when it tried to get their search records. Of course, if the folks in Washington werent such Luddites they would know that they could get the same information by simply doing a Google search.
A couple of weeks ago Viacom decided to sue GooTube for copyright infringement. What would they gain by getting all their content removed form the largest online video site? Nothing. Except the illusion of control and an RIAA like pyrrhic victory over Google, the Internet’s most successful media company.
In the meantime whats not available on YouTube is easily found on any of the 50 other online video sharing sites. Even the biggest online social network, Myspace serves up full episodes of Viacom content. Are they next on Viacom’s court appearance invite list? You can go to Myspace right now and watch full episodes of the Daily Show, Colbert report and one of my favorite, South Park.
Today the good folks at TechCrunch mentioned AllSP.com but didnt note that the videos on AllSP.com are largely hosted on Myspace. The embedded episode is from DailyMotion but you can see the same thing in its entirety via myspace at the link below. This episode is particularly hysterical in its subversive use of almost every hot internet property as part of the story.
Update: So now I can access GMAIL which has been down since 9:29am. Unfortunately it looks like there have been no email since, you guessed it, 9:29am. I wonder if they’ll show up later or if they are in the ether.
Today’s outage of Gmail comes just a few weeks after Google announced that they were opening Gmail and other Google apps to the world the venerable Gmail service goes offline for most of the day. I’ve been unable to access Gmail since 10am and have had to watch in envy as my co-worker email emailed and talked freely. Now the server her account was on has gone down as well. Not a good sign.
Update: Co-worker is back up and I’m still down. She helpfully suggested that I reduce the number of messages in my inbox (I’m using 32% of my 2.8GB where she uses less then 5% of hers) and maybe I’d get better service. Thanks as soon as its back up I’ll get right on that!
The good folks at Viacom have sent our friends at GooTube a cease and desist letter, demanding that the service remove 100,000 video clips of the company’s shows. As of this posting Google has desisted from ceasing.
Posted by changesgood 
So I find out today, via voicemail from 
The good folks at Viacom have sent our friends at GooTube a cease and desist letter, demanding that the service remove 100,000 video clips of the company’s shows. As of this posting Google has desisted from ceasing.
Change Is Good 