A curious guy, named Tony Ruscoe, was digging though one of Google’s many latent registered domains and found some interesting stuff. On the Sandbox subdomain (recently serving Checkout), Google is running experimental services. Although existing user names don’t permit log-in, Ruscoe says he was able to create a new account on Sandbox and add new services, currently unavailable to regular users.
In the experimental bin sandbox.google.com, added 14 services to his “sandbox” account. Some of these are already disclosed, so only the surprises are listed here: Google Events, Google Guess, Google Online Assessment, Google Real Estate Search, Mobile Marketplace, New Service (AKA Workplace), and New Services.
Highlights: * Google Guess, as Ruscoe writes, “How many guesses do we get? This really could be anything!” * Google Online Assessment, he speculates is an internal tool–again, pretty vague. * Google Real Estate Search. * New Services has “code names like cf, gmt and voice.”
* Mobile Marketplace: Maybe number 13 in John Battelle’s Predictions 2006 post will come true. Maybe Google will finally plug mobile “into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user” and maybe they’ll also be the ones to create “a major mobile innovation – the kind that makes us all say – Jeez that was obvious.” But we’ll see…
* New Service (AKA Workplace): Maybe this is the big one people have been waiting for; the one that will really kill Microsoft Office. At least, if it’s at all related to IBM Workplace it could be. I don’t know an awful lot about this, so if anyone else feels more qualified to talk about it, please go ahead. All I know is that it’s got something to do with OpenOffice.org – so that’s why it could be the killer…