FARECHASE & GOOGLE CALENDER

Well today, i checked two new products on offer, also possibly the two most hyped online services(this year) on offer. namely FARECHASE and GOOGLE CALENDER. well the names are pretty self explanatory, the first is a service to compare and buy airtickets and reserve hotels, while the second is your calender.

as always, the most hyped products aren't always the best, and as always google performed decently well. that is to say, that farechase was a big disappointment, while google calender was pretty much worth the hype.

FARECHASE :: well it was pretty sad, the results came from pretty useless sites, and not mostly from the root server of airlines, also the tickets were priced very steeply, even if you are booking two months in advance, and there was a complete ommission of LCC. for example i wanted to book a BOM-DEL flight on 16th july for my sis, and i was expecting a sub 60$ ticket from an LCC and a sub 100$ ticket from a normal airline(economy class), but what i was got was some freaking 182$ & higher. there wasn't any further details abt the fare you are getting, i mean if it is a class A,B,C etc or other stuff.
I mean if this was the performance on del-mum-del sector, one of the buisest in asia, imagine on other sectors.
atleast in india, booking directly from the airline site/makemytrip/indiatimes

/rediff perform way way better, rediff and indiatimes are especially good if you are booking just abt 15days in advance and want a good deal.


GOOGLE CALENDER :: well this was pretty neat service from google, it basically offers you a online calender with almost all the features you would ever need, and even a phone alert, if you have US telecom subscription. It is an absolute boon for ppl who are on the move, and don't carry their own laptops and find the cellphones and PDAs to cumbersome. it isn't something new, yahoo has been offering a pretty decent one fo ages, but as always with google what was nice was the speed and simple layout. the best part is that you can import you calender from outlook, so sync funda works well here.


subiet

Is google trying to be GOD

well here i would like to touch upon another issue. see i have been tracking google for abt 3 years very very keenly, coz acc to me here is one company who can actually beat M$. (i have heard abt atleast a dozen having the potential to do so, and seeing them disappear or being purchased by M$ ) but google is constantly proving me and its supporters right.

but a little keen observation, frequent visit to google labs, and keeping a track on goole, reveals a very frightning picture. i will ilustrate my point

GOOGLE PRODUCTS
1) google search engine => knows exactly what you are searching and looking for

2) gmail.com => captures the market, and make ppl store huge amount of their mails on google servers

3)google base => offers free upload service, makes ppl store a lot of their information on google servers again

4)google earth => with enabling community shared placemarks, knows where you are staying (94% ppl attempt to locate their homes, in the first search on gearth) or where ppl want to go the most in general.

5) google calender => eliminates your desktop calender, this has two implications, you are now even storing your softwares on google servers with your data, secondly they know where you are going.

6) google api's => soon to be launched, will enable ppl to do tasks like wordprocessing, spreadsheet etc online.

see what i am trying to point is that, google wants ppl to completely store their data and software on their servers, knows exactly where you are going, doing, and even knows what you want to know. (God is the word).

see probably google is doing all this, coz of amazing advert potential, coz it can direct just the right adverts to you, knowing what it knows (or attempting to know abt you).

now coming to the danger, even if i ignore that google has something up their sleeves (like first making you dependent on them, and then charging their free services), what abt the risk of data theft, when the whole code winxp can be realeased on net, even data theft from google servers is a possibilty, well the evil just doesn't end there, but i won't further discuss that, but leave it to you to think.

what say???????


subiet