Open Letter to Google

Open Letter to Google,

Hey Google, I’m a big fan. I’ve been a loyal Googler since 2002 or so and I use just about every Google product I can fit into my life. (Except Google Video: I thought that is why you bought YouTube…why have 2 sites?) I even have an orkut profile…despite the fact that I don’t live in Brazil or India. Even though Ask has way cooler and universal search results, I never stray from my built-in Google search bars that I have pre-installed in at least a dozen programs and interfaces on my iMac.

I’m not looking to score some cheap swag (although if it is just piling up, around your ioffices, I won’t hurt your feelings by rejecting some) I’m just trying to point out that I’m no average Google passer-by…I’ve been around the block a few times. So I think that my Googlistic advice might hopefully have some weight in the ebb and flow of the blogosphere.

Anyway, I’ve noticed that you are on this big kick of buying up all kinds of companies…it started out slowly with a quick snag here and there of some obscure companies with neto little programs like Blogger, Picasa, Dodgeball and Keyhole. Then you guys got serious and went after some big fish like Feedburner, DoubleClick and YouTube. Now there are rumors that you might be offering $200 million for Plaxo! That is cool and all…I support the massive expansion thing you guys are doing; in fact I someday hope to be able to turn my day-to-day thinking into cloud computing on a remotre Google server.

But I have some suggestions for aquisitions that would really just be awesome. You guys are a giant, and uber company, the big kahuna if you will. So I think you could stop and help out those on the internet who don’t have the resources to just go out and scoop up companies in order to use thier stuff or slap ‘em around a little bit and tell them to fix thier services. If I could, I would. But I can’t. So I need you to do it for me. So here are my suggestions:

Twitter: I love twitter, it is my favorite method of communication on the internet. Too short to be e-mail so you dont get people blathering on forever (except Scoble and iJustine); it is too slow to be an instant messenger so I can ignore people for a little while if I need to; and it is also spam-free so life is good. Except the whole “Server is Down” thing. and while they have cute little pages to tell you they are broken, it still doesn’t cure my heartache. You guys bough Jaiku, but no one uses it because they have all come to twitter…so just buy twitter too, give them a couple desks and a big chunk of server…that is really all they need for the short term! So please, buy twitter. Fix it. Then let us tweet as much as we would like without worrying about Steve jobs single-handeldly crashing the entire system.

Yahoo: I could write a book, but I won’t. All I’m going to say is: anti-trust suits be damned, that crap takes years to get to court anyway (see: Microsoft circa 1998). So just buy Yahoo…put it out of its misery and let it fade away with dignity, rather than selling out to the Microsoft hordes. But leave flickr alone, I love it the way it is.

Facebook: They need search help…a lot of it. And orkut sucks, so you could use the boost. And Facebook Beacon is/was evil…and from what I hear, you guys don’t do evil, so I’m cool with that.

Thank you for reading, and please feel free to contact me if you need any more suggestions or ideas for how to run your multi-billion dollar über company.
Thanks,

Andrew R. Cafourek

P.S. I have to give credit to Tanner for co-conspiring with me the idea to buy twitter…so to be fair, you should also send him some swag.

P.P.S. One last recommendation: You guys bought some awesome statistical rendering software a while back. Gapminder is awesome; it makes the coolest statistics graphs I’ve ever seen…please stop hording it yourself and release it top the world!  I really want to use it…and you guys said “Please stay tuned, and we’ll tell you more as soon as we can“…well I have yet to hear anything.

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