In these days of increasing violation of privacy by corporations and governments, more and more interest is drawn to methods to protect communication against eavesdropping. In this article in particular I would like to investigate some options to secure your e-mail communications.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned the Web, he envisioned a network of interconnected pages, accessible for humans and machines alike. Since then we have done a good job of building the first, mostly ignoring the latter. The Semantic Web tries to change this, by enabling content creators and distributors to mark-up pages with extra information understandable for machines.
Over the past few years, Google has quietly been introducing more social aspects in their services, but they have mostly remained separate. With Google Buzz, they have started to integrate these. See for example the integration of Google Profiles and Social Search. I expect this integration to eventually turn into “Google Me”.
The acquisition of Metaweb might come as a surprise to some, but the truth of the matter is that Google is coming late to the game. Yahoo! has been using their in-house developed SearchMonkey since early 2008, around the same time when Microsoft acquired Powerset (which incidentally used data from Freebase at the time) and recently Facebook launched their Open Graph Protocol.
Today the internet seems to be buzzing (pun intended) with the rumour Google is building a “Facebook Killer” called “Google Me”. The news broke when Digg founder Kevin Rose tweeted (what else!) about the existence of Google Me. The tweet was pulled soon afterwards, but then former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo “confirmed” the rumour. The …
