Intuition

Googlezon is here. The New York Times has not shut its doors and the Web 2.0 boutiques remain open on O’Reilly Street, but Googlezon is here.  All the real opportunity imagined for charting our own courses on the web has emerged, but lurking in the deep water just offshore are Google and Amazon, the two most powerful and influential players on the commercial web. On the surface, Web development and design is a happening business. Web publishing has exploded. Social networks thrive in these cyber-seas, networks of hobbyists, gamers, co-religionists, scholars, scientists, philosophers and artists coalesce with soft boundaries that allow overlap and cross pollination.

And the glue that holds everyone’s connections together is (or could be, or should be) Google. Beside Google rests the Amazon retail powerhouse, an enterprise that will ultimately crush brick and mortar retailers from the local book store to Wal-Mart. The sentimentalist in me wonders if this is a good thing. The realist acknowledges that it may be neither bad nor good, just different.

A lot of twittering and IM chatter occurs among a small subset of websters.   Huge hives form and reform in gathering places like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.  The Web has altered American and global democracy to an extent not yet ascertained. Online transactions and networked cash machines have all but replaced the teller lines at the bank. But beneath all this, Google helps us find what we seek, track what we’ve found, communicate and create.

Are you concerned about privacy, about putting your history in the hands of a BigCo? So what! AT&T and the US government have already ripped you off in that regard. I have a lot to learn about empowering myself in the Google and Amazon markets, but I have a feeling that my time will be better spent there than trying to get a handle on Facebook APIs.