Putty

Hrm, "Google":http://www.google.com have justed purchased "MeasureMap":http://www.measuremap.com/ , a tool to track your blog traffic, and it was still in private beta!

What the heck is Google up too? To me they are looking more and more like a company without vision.

Google has bought MeasureMap, which will sit beside their purchase of Urchin which tracks normal web site traffic. Why couldn't they just make some mods to their Urchin softare they now own? Maybe Google bought MeasureMap at a bargain basement private beta price? Google's one liner is something like, "To make information accessible", which is a grand and noble vision but why can't I do this all through Google's search box?

# Alex: "Search for Alex Pooley blog statistics"
# Google: "Password:"
# Alex: "------"
# Google: "You had 2 visitors yesterday"

See what I'm getting at? Google are a fragmented set of cool search services.

Here's the way I see the Internet right now...



It's a Sea Urchin (yes, the irony). The round body is the Internet core: TCP/IP, Ethernet, NIC's, etc... all that well established stuff. The spiny parts represent the functionality that we have been pumping on to the Internet. Notice how they don't connect except at the core? Notice all the room between the spines? That's opportunity. Everyone else is looking beyond the end of the spines, while the easy money is between them!

I am 99% sure that consolidation is the next big major trend, and this is really not Google right now. Not that I really care what Google are doing, but they've made a good point for me by purchasing both web site analysis software, and blog analysis software. These two purchases represent the fragmentation of the world we are in. Each analysis package is a seperate spine on our Sea Urchin. Do you think Google are going to integrate them or leave them as they are? My money is on them leaving them as they are.

Whatever the case, there's opportunity in those gaps.