There’s a saying in India which essentially means that “An idle brain is the house of devil“. Sitting idle at home is something that I truly dislike. So, to fight the boredom, I have been trying to find interesting stuff on the net. Following a thread of links, and a barrage of garbage, I have finally settled on to trying to create a Google Gadget or Orkut Plugin or a WordPress theme to consume most of my day.

Now, while doing all this ‘research’ I was amazed, yet again, to see that Google corp. is still launching so many products. New products, and yeah, they are already updating products that they already have, like Docs, Gmail, Picasa and Google Search. Man! they are throwing away goodies right (Lively), left (Gadgets) and center (Android). Man! I wonder how they are able to manage so much, so seamlessly. Yet keeping most of their products interoperable. Its as if they own the net.

Recently, Google has started giving some competition to Wikipedia (which happens to be one of my favourite places on the net) with their own Google Knol – “a unit of knowledge“. One major difference between the two is that Knol is not so open, the authors have to give their true names, get verified and all, unlike Wiki.

A quick look at World’s top 500 most visited sites (courtesy Alexa) points that they own around 20+ of the top 100 of these sites. Sometimes I am scared that they know a lot more about me than my closest friends do. What if some random Google Employee decides to keep a watch on some random internet surfers life. He’ll know what videos you watch, what goes on in your chats and emails about and with whom, you search queries and the sites you finally visit. If Google AdSense is setting a cookie on your PC (which they surely must be doing right now, I never checked though) they’ll also know which sites you have been visiting, even outside of Google searches. And yeah, that evil-maniac will also be able to see your private photos with your loved ones. Scary.. huh! And now, as Google Docs is catching on, and people are starting to migrate to the cloud, they he’ll also have access to your personal documents. {Gulp} “Don’t be Evil“, Google. Please.

Well, here are a few links if you want to -

• Google – Products list (Grossly inadequate)
• Google – Code of Conduct
• Wikipedia – Google Knol
• Wikipedia – List of Google Products