Saturday, October 21, 2006
Google Predictions Reality Check
In July 2004, I made a couple of guesses concerning Google’s next steps. I almost forgot about this post but Andy Baio had the nice suggestion to write a follow-up to it, and here goes. Admittedly, most of these predictions were obvious!
- Prediction: “Gmessenger - A free and unobtrusive chat client, competing with AIM, MSNM, YIM, et al.”
Reality (August 2005): Yup. It’s called Google Talk/ Google Chat though.
- Prediction: “Google Videos - Search through videos; see thumbnail image previews.”
Reality (January 2005): Yes. Called Google Video, the service started out as just searching through TV transcripts, but it now covers uploaded videos as well. There’s still no crawler aggregating web-wide video content, which surprises me.
- Prediction: “Google Audio - Find music online.”
Reality (December 2005): Hmmm... Google released a Google Music onebox, which displays artist and album information. Close, but not quite what I had in mind.
- Prediction: “Gmail Public - Google’s service stepping out of Beta and going public. August 1st sounds like a good date.”
Reality (August 25, 2005): Gmail now allows everyone in the US to sign-up with a cell phone, without invitation. (I figured out the month but got the year wrong, and it’s still Beta!)
- Prediction: “Google Blogs - A Google blog search, similar to what Technorati is doing. (This is long overdue and relatively easy considering Google’s other achievements.)”
Reality (September 2005): Yup. While called Google Blog Search, this service searches through any kind of RSS though.
- Prediction: “Gphoto - Put up your photo album, with 1 gigabyte of storage free of charge.”
Reality (June, 2006): Yeah, but they called it Picasa Web Albums. And there’s only 250 MB (you have to pay to get into the 6 GB zone).
- Prediction: “Google Image Comparison - Upload an image to see similar images. This might become a Google Images add-on which will stay in beta for two years, like most new Google services.”
Reality: Nope, unfortunately there’s nothing in sight.
- Prediction: “Google Live Connect - If two people happen to search for the same things, they are offered a chat connection with each other.”
Reality: Nothing came true here either.
- Prediction: “Google Instant Answer - This might take some more years – Google answering your questions, fully automated (a la FindForward’s answer feature, but with no major misses).”
Reality (April 2005): Google went ahead and released “Q&A”, an instant answers onebox.
- Prediction: “Google Maps Worldwide - Google extending local search, map features, yellow pages and so on to cover the whole globe.”
Reality: Yeah, they pretty much did that.
- Prediction: “Google Library - Wasn’t there a Project Ocean in which Google scanned a lot of books?”
Reality (November 2005): Google Book Search became reality by now.
- Prediction: “Google IRC Search - Of course there will be privacy discussions again, but the chat network IRC contains too much valuable information to not be monitored.”
Reality: Nope.
- Prediction: “Google understanding image content“
Reality: Nope.
- Prediction: “Google Speech Search - Technology should soon allow to do reasonable full-text search on words occurring in audio files, similar to what Speechbot is doing, but on much larger scale.”
Reality: Nope... still waiting.
For more predictions, of which a lot came true, check Wouter Schut’s December 2005 musings.
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