From Boing Boing:
BoingBoing reader Adam says,
There’s some idle suspicion that Google intends to expand their functionality to include sharing of desktop files. This seems pretty likely given their acquisition of Picasa, which included something called “Hello” – an IM-like application for chatting and sharing pictures. Moreover, if they decide to merge this with orkut, to allow file sharing just with your friends network, then that’s a pretty compelling offering.
HOWEVER… The orkut terms of service are still extremely unfavorable to the end user. This is not too bad when it just applies to your profile and to chats on their message boards. It is REALLY bad when it applies to other forms of personal content that may be shared using the system.
For some reason I found myself thinking late last night about what it means when there are millions of local google HTTP servers running on millions of individual PCs, yearning to be connected. What kind of innovation might spring from such an ecology? Of course uploading your local content – just that which you want to upload, of course – to Google’s index is one possibility. If you could do that, you could pretty much wipe out hosted solutions for micropublishing (ie blogs), for example. Your machine, given advances in broadband and computing power – would become your web server, just as it was in the beginning, when there was so little traffic on the web (before the hosting business took over…). GDS could also lay down the framework for some killer distributed computing hacks, stuff that Google has demonstrated an affinity for in the past (Google Compute is built into the Toolbar).
But thoughts fail me. What comes to mind from you all when you think of a world where all our hard drives can seamlessly be connected to the Mother Index/Platform?