Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

I’ve been talking with my co-workers for the past few weeks about the future of the web. I’ve been wondering whether the days of personal storage on a personal computer are coming to an end. My more intelligent counterparts have pointed out to me that a “Web OS” is out of the picture. Apparently, Windows, Linux and the like do things like monitor system processes and performance - and I just thought it was supposed to give me a pretty screen and let me play solitaire.

But while a full-fledged operating system might not be in the cards, I’m beginning to seriously think the majority of programs we run on our machines will be offloaded to the Internet in the near future. The net is now a place with nearly unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, and both are becoming cheaper every single day. Downloading video longer than 30 seconds was a pipe dream just a few years ago - now ITunes lets you download entire episodes of LOST in minutes (I think I saw Jon and Heather in the last episode.)

Web 2.0 has seen a mass proliferation of online application development, of which I’ve seen only a sliver. The mistakes of five years ago seem to have been learned, as the new path to success is with small teams working with no budgets to create wicked-cool applications that anybody can use, modify and share. As a result, applications are being built, extended upon and retooled (by their users!) faster than anyone can keep up.

And now, the behemoth that is Google appears to be positioning itself for a giant leap. A few weeks back they announced that they were partnering with Sun Microsystems to create an online version of OpenOffice. Surprisingly, not too much was written about it. Now, they’ve quietly released a very early version of something called Google Base, what appears to be an online version of one’s file system. It’s more than a database, allowing you to “host all kinds of content” for free. You upload stuff and it becomes searchable - not just by you, but by anyone. It apparently ties into Google Local and Froogle somehow, and popular items are indexed not just by the database, but by Google itself.

So, we’ve got a place to store your documents online where you can quickly search for them and can access them anywhere with an Internet connection. Soon, we have an online version of OpenOffice, potentially one that will be able to access, edit and save versions of your documents on Google Base. Hmm….

I’m curious to see what kind of content people put online - certainly not anything they’d keep private…what are the opportunities for a business in using Google Base? Maybe putting white papers online that are searchable, tagged by topics of expertise? PowerPoint presentations showcasing your company’s unique benefits? I wonder if the playing field for SEO just got leveled a bit (at least for a few weeks,) and I wonder how this will yet again change the way we search for things online.

I wonder if Google will take over the world.