Google Expands Its Offerings

3 announcements last week by Google showed the ever increasing reach and scope of the search giant and may be providing insight into the future direction of the company and its services.

On August 22nd Google announced Google Desktop 2, which was more than an update to the system wide searching utility. The biggest noticable change was the addition of the sidebar utility which could be likened to the Dashboard feature in Apple's latest OS release. This sidebar allows you to use Google created and third party plugins to display a variety of things like weather, stock info, photo slide shows and RSS feeds. There's a lot of automated and customizable features to explore. I was able to use an RSS feed from Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing service to have the sidebar display dynamically updated photos on a particular topic. Right now I have photos of storm damage from Hurricane Katrina showing up on my sidebar using a customized FeedBurner feed showing Flickr tag word: "Hurricane". Seems pretty extensible, so developers should have fun with it and users will reap the benefits.

On August 24 the Google Blog reported that Google Talk was realeased into the wild, which will rival IM services like AOL's Instant Messenger and similar offerings by MSN and others. The system uses the open XMPP protocol which means it can be used by other apps such as Apple's iChat, Trillian, Adium and others. It also allows voice calls on the network so users on the system can communicate verbally. One has to ponder whether Google has an eye in the direction of voice over IP solutions. A Gmail account login is needed to be on the system.

Also the same day, Google announced that Gmail is open to the public. No longer do potential Gmail users need to be a friend of a friend of a friend who begged on a message board to be invited. Anyone can now go to gmail.com and signup for their free email account, and presumably ditch AOL in exchange for their ability to use Google Talk.

Three big moves, and with Google snatching up dark fiber, the overall goal of the company to possibly become a wider player in the online communication arena may have just come into a little better focus.

It's Okay to Bid On GEICO

The Google Blog has a post explaining the recent GEICO v. Google court ruling and what it's implications are. Short answer: You can bid on trademarked words as a keyword, but not include them in your ad text.