letting things come to me

Since I've become more aware of the Web2.0 revolution, I've noticed more and more web technologies that I'd been thinking about years ago rising to the surface. A key example was an idea I had about online libraries where you list your books, and then other people can browse your library and if appropriate make requests to exchange or borrow books. It would be like an enormous communal, virtual bookshelf, except you'd get to read real books instead of reading off a computer screen (which despite what anyone says is still less comfortable than reading a book! at least to a majority of users...).
Well, now we have Listal, LibraryThing and AllConsuming. I'm not sure who owns them and whether I really want to commit my data to them, but the services are definitely there and doing what I thought such services should do years ago.
Which brings me to my main point. With services like these, I shouldn't have to think about committing my data. My data should reside where I want it to, and I should allow these services access to my data on my terms and conditions.
We need some sort of a platform for maintaining information, and then transforming it and submitting it. Preferably in a relatively extensible and/or standardized way. XML and XSLT style technologies seem to be screaming out to be used in this sort of position.
In addition, we need some sort of voluntary code of conduct whereby we can be reasonably assured that we can reliably dictate the terms under which such services can use our data. Maybe some open source datakeeper software modelled on recent digital rights management advances, so that as well as records companies being able to control our rights on the music we license from them, we can also revoke other organisation's rights on the data they license from us.
Digital rights management isn't necessarily a bad thing, but biased towards the goals of the powerful it is clearly not a good thing.
So the data landscape of the future? Data residing in multiple incarnations on various storage devices across the world, controlled by open source datakeeper software allowing only authorised people to access it, and transform it, using flexible tools. The owners of the data - you and me in addition to the organisations and corporations - empowered by our data's newfound mobility and flexibility.

should we be suspicious of google?

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." - Google's mission statement

I would be a lot more comfortable if it was Google's mission to assist in creating the technologies that will free the world's information. As it is Google has simply asserted that it wishes to become the monopolistic broker for what is fast becoming planet earth's most valuable resource. Attached to the information Google wants to organise and serve to us is, potentially, almost all the value (of any kind) tied up on the planet. This isn't so hard to believe when you see the proliferation of gadgets, and monitoring gadgets, everywhere, and their increasing connectivity to open networks.

I'm an optimist, and I don't think Google can survive much longer behaving in the way it does. Just as I believe Microsoft is a dying monster, serving poorly crafted computing products to the illiterate computing masses out there, I believe Google will eventually go the same way, except I think Google will probably have left a much more valuable legacy in terms of experience, lessons learnt and contribution to the internet and activities undertaken thereon.

What we need is decentralized, open-source search. The days of concentrating this kind of resource in the hands of a single company really has to be over. If we stop kidding ourselves this is clearly the most sensible, and the only possible, way forward. One Google is a single point of failure for one of the most important resources on the internet.

Distributed search composed of hundreds of flavours of search engine scattered all over the planet, even on people's home computers and househouse appliances etc. would be a much stronger system, and would in my opinion have the potential to be a lot more trustworthy than our current centralized solutions.

Check out lucene/nutch. I will soon, it seems to have developed a little in the last few months.

Maybe we'll all be saved.

Google Maps and GMail and all the various Google-Wows are surely amazing, but not as scary as what they all inevitably point to.

So where does that leave all the big internet portals?

In my mind it has to be something along the lines of: decentralize-and-open-your-source or bust. There's no reason why one company can't produce a bulk of the technology and even benefit in a big way financially from it, but I think in this day and age it mustn't do it behind closed doors.

Security and trust demand it, and morality is begging for it.

Roll on the next few years!