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Wednesday, December 5, 2007

How Google Helps Index & Organize Your Room

This is a thought experiment asking the question: What items in your room at home does Google index? That is, which items around you containing information can be stored with Google already? What’s close-by around you may be information important to you, after all.
I’m not sure what’s in your room, so I’m making up some items. For each item I’m grading Google’s ability to help with this today:

If you have a CD collection near you, you might be storing it in a program like iTunes. Google does not offer a direct music organization tool, downloading album covers and so on based on the record’s signature, as programs like iTunes do when they connect to online database Gracenote (which identifies an album by checking song lengths). There’s Google Music, but it’s not really personalized. You could theoretically organize your music in Google Base or Google Spreadsheets, perhaps, which would make it searchable and shareable. But to be more useful, Google would need to start offering a Google Music library service, sell MP3s and store them for you, and possibly acquire Gracenote.
Score for Google: **...

Then there’s the paper notes next to you or in your trash can. (Well, whatever is in your trash was probably trashed for a reason, but sometimes you might wish to recover something... maybe you bought a DVD and realized it’s broken, and now you want to get hold of your shopping receipt again to get your money back). For throwaway information I collect through the day, like temporary notes of URLs or quotes from the web or minor todos, personally I’m using a text file on my computer, along with a paper next to my computer. This text file serves as extended clip board. However, you could also use Google Notebook for this. Data in that Notebook is stored with Google, and becomes searchable. The Google Docs word processing editor could be used for note-keeping as well (though it launches documents some seconds too slowly to be perfect for very quick note-keeping).
Score for Google: *****

Your book shelf. You might have compiled a collection of books you read or plan to read over the years. Sometimes it’s interesting to go back to a quote you read because you want to cite it, or you may want to cross-check something something you vaguely remember you read. Now, maybe you’ve passed on the book or dropped it in some random place for someone else to pick it up after you read it; but even if you kept it, it may be time-consuming to find the exact book and exact page you’re after. Theoretically, you can use the Google Book Search “My Library” feature to store your book collection. You can then restrict the book search to find only items in your library. However, the problem is that Google Book Search doesn’t always show you the page and quote due to copyright restrictions. For this to really work there would need to be a way to authenticate yourself as book owner, e.g. via Google synchronizing your library with an API of your Amazon orders, to then be granted full access.
Score for Google: **...

Similar to your books, you might have a comic book collection, or a magazine collection. There may also be a video game or software collection.
Let’s take the comic book collection for instance. Google Book Search contains some comics, but these media are even less suited for that service. You can now use either a specialized software you find – for instance, for comic books, there’s a program at ComicBase.com, and I also allow some management of comics via my CoverBrowser.com – or you can edit your library in Google Spreadsheets. There’s even less available from Google when it comes to other collections like video games, magazines, and so on.
What one would need to manage specialized collections like these would be a good solid general purpose database about “everything.” I would need to be able to poll “artist of comic Eightball #8” or “cover story of magazine Wired #3/ 1999” or “release date of Halo 3,” retrieving structured data in return. I would even need to be able to get fair use images for my collection, like a cover image of a video game; structured data returned from Google Images, that is. Google Spreadsheets is already connected to Google Q&A allowing you to ask some of these questions, but this doesn’t work too well for every query.
Score for Google: *....

Right on your desk, there may be your home computer or laptop. To index the data on it you can download Google Desktop. This will make the hard disk searchable, often even faster than operating-system native solutions. However, if your computer crashes and you didn’t make any other backups, your data may be lost; the benefit of a web application with external storage (and Google handling the backups for you, as is the case for e.g. Google Docs, Gmail and so on) is lost.
What you would need to manage your computer from everywhere would be a synchronization program – if you store things on your hard disk, anyway. Google to my knowledge doesn’t offer this; Google Gears is related, but serves a different purpose for now, and the rumored Google Drive project is still unreleased to the public.
Score for Google: ***..

On your wall in your room, there may be a paper calendar reminding you of dates, events, birthdays of friends and so on. Well, there’s Google Calendar for that online, and I think it does its job perfectly.
Score for Google: *****

Your room might contain a light switch, a heater, and sun-blinds. In some ways these items contain information or need information – is the light on or off, what temperature does the heater have and what temperature does the room have, is the sun blinding people in the room or is it night, and so on – and some of these items interact. And could interact better, if they had more information about each other. E.g. if the sun-blind could know that it’s sunny outside but that you left the room it could open up, as that won’t disturb you, and the heater could then go down to let the sun heat up the room, as one arbitrary example. Does Google know anything about your house though and does it help organize these things? I don’t think so. (Remotely connected, Google does have a service monitoring their own building’s solar input, though.)
Score for Google: .....

You might also scribble down addresses in a contacts book near you, or on random lose paper notes, or you may have a collection of business cards from conferences and meetings and such scattered around your room. Google does have a contacts manager as part of Gmail; they also have a social network called Orkut. The whole Orkut design doesn’t scream “business” though, its colors seem more suited for casual, fun-oriented networks (how many Google services use a background color other than white? Off the top of my head, I can think of Orkut and Blogger, but not that many others). Tools like Google competitor Facebook are more neutral and serious.
Score for Google: ***..

There may be a whole lot of miscellaneous items in your room. Your keys, maybe your passport in some drawer, a catalog, a note with an address on it. To find those items quickly if you misplaced them, or to just see a collection of these smaller items in your room to search through or organize (“what brand was the pencil sharpener I bought last year? where are my keys?”), you would need a digital representation of these. Google Maps is clearly not suited yet for indexing anything on the precision level of a single room, and even if the zoom level was better and you had a transparent roof it’s still not real-time.
What you would really need is for each item to emit its location to some centralized service.
There was a recent report in Daily Mail about Google having plans in that direction – think RFID chips – but these things aren’t here yet and we don’t know how reliable that Daily Mail report was (Valleywag said “given the source, we’re not inclined to take this one particularly seriously”. The Daily Mail specifically wrote, “One plan [of Google], which has already tentatively started, entails making literally everything in the world accessible at the click of a button. For now, this means every book, piece of music, film, TV and radio broadcast, official document and photograph. But eventually, far-fetched as it sounds, Google boffins believe it can be extended to people and their personal belongings. The idea is that we, and our treasured possessions, will be fitted with minute microchips which could be linked to the internet, via computers, by a digital radio frequency”).
Score for Google: .....

Added to all miscellaneous items in your room, there may also be plenty of small gadgets needing your attention every once in a while. Most importantly, you need to recharge these items’ batteries whenever they’re getting empty – your cell phone, your second cell phone, your wireless mouse, your wireless keyboard, your laptop, your iPod or other MP3 player, your MP3 recorder, and so on. Google won’t help you organize this information.
Score for Google: .....

If we extend this thought experiment to the kitchen for a moment, there’s also the fridge with a lot of items needing organization and attention. Food that is about to expire, for instance, needs to be cooked. Food that is not available in the fridge but that you want to eat over the weekend needs to be bought. You might be keeping a paper-based shopping list (I also tried to manage this via my smart phone’s todo list, but my phone sucks and needs a Stylus, which means both hands would be occupied while strolling through the supermarket... not optimal!).
You could probably manage these items in Google Calendar, adding e.g. SMS events when the food “times out,” but that would just be too much work – if this information isn’t more self-organized, with items emitting their own data (expiration date, quantity, type and so on), it’s becoming too time-consuming to handle digitally, and we’re back to using our brain for storage.
Score for Google: *....

While we’re leaving your room, we might as well think about the information reaching your doorbell. Maybe when you are away, someone rang the door but nobody opened. This information will be lost, unless you have nosy neighbors who will remind you, or unless the person who rang gets back to you via phone or paper note attached to the door. Google doesn’t seem to offer any service in this area of a “self-organizing house.” Until the day Google Street View becomes real-time and lets you fast-forward archived videos – to look at what happened near your house while you were gone – Google Maps clearly isn’t helping either.
Score for Google: .....

Back to your room, there may also be some photo albums around. From weddings to vacations or random snap shots with friends. These can be scanned (if you’re not using a digital camera to begin with) and organized via Google’s Picasa Web Albums. Caveat: I don’t know if it’s possible yet to hook up digital photo frames to Picasa RSS feeds; this would be needed so that the frames on your wall always display the latest photos of interest.
Score for Google: *****

There’s also ephemeral information passing through your room; your spouse might have said something in your room (while you were present, too, but you might forget 2 months later, and maybe your spouse will blame you for it!), or your kid’s babysitter might have visited the room while you were gone, looking through your drawer.
As Google to my knowledge doesn’t sell audio recoding software with speech-to-text capabilities, or any kind of video supervision system, you are left on your own with this so I’m awarding zero stars. And while the Google Earth team is working with Homeland Security Alabama “to develop tools that take situational awareness to the next level,” one of the planned Homeland Security applications aiming for “detailed views of the interiors of buildings including furniture and live footage,” that seems only remotely relevant for this case, in particular if you’re not working for the US government and/ or live outside of Alabama.
Score for Google: .....

You might pile some snail mail in your room. Some of this may be personal correspondence, other mails may be spam, yet other mails may contain important bank account balances or something. Information contained in these mails isn’t searchable or organized in any automated way. You would need to scan the snail mails, apply optical character recognition, and then there would still be no program by Google to help you mirror these conversations in any meaningful way (organized by thread, contact, priority etc.). Then again, people could have sent you an email in the first place, for which there would be Gmail.
Score for Google: ***..

There may be a drawer for clothes in your room. Organizing clothes may seem trivial, but just the act of finding two matching socks has become legendary. Each clothing item contains information properties like “is ironed,” “is worn,” “has coffee stain,” “has oil stain,” “color,” “type of clothes” and so on. Getting ready for a party, wouldn’t it be nice for you to tell your personal household agent software in the year 2030, “Wash all clothes that contain coffee stains, throw away those with oil stains, and from the other clothes, hand me a white ironed shirt"?
And if you have a washing machine in your basement, that too would need to communicate its status information (“busy/ not busy”) at all times. Some years ago I was living in a house where that was the case: as all students would access the same set of washers, you were able to see the washing machine’s status via an intranet page where you could then make your reservations (though the system was relying on human input for its organization, with no actual knowledge of washing machines). Our system wasn’t Google-powered at all, though, and Google today also doesn’t seem to offer anything like that.
Score for Google: .....

Google’s overall score: **...
Conclusion: In 2007, Google doesn’t help much organizing your room and making its information accessible – you’re basically left on your own.

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