Google Stole My Idea

On Tuesday, April 17, I outlined one of the final four ideas in my March of Mad Ideas series:

An Online Equivalent to Window Shopping: The idea here is to mimic the mall shopping experience on a website. It’s similar to what Amazon has done, but I envision it quite differently. The website would display a number of “storefronts” that would be miniature versions of commercial websites, perhaps with a featured product displayed. You could customize your window shopping homepage with the stores you frequent the most, and the site would add storefronts based on which other stores you clicked on the most.

Today, I’m reading David Pogue’s review of Google’s new internet browser, coolly called “Chrome,” and I read this: “As your start-up page, Chrome displays pictures of nine mini-Web pages, representing your most frequently visited sites.”

Wait a minute.

Okay, the ideas are a little different, but they show that I’m thinking on the same level of Google, which is way high. Redwood high.

And after testing Chrome, I have to say that the idea works perfectly. On Internet Explorer, Google is my homepage. Used to be ESPN.com, but it takes too long to load. I want my browser to load fast.

But the truth is, rarely do I search on Google as the first thing I do. I check fantasy baseball, ESPN, and a few other sites. Thus, opening a page with big visual buttons for all of my favorite sites is literally the perfect home page. I can’t get over how perfect it is.

And it’ll get better. I may not even be conscious of the sites I visit the most. But I don’t need to be conscious anymore. Google will be conscious for me. (Maybe this is Google’s evil plan. They want to be the collective consciousness of the universe.)

Google Chrome has its faults, but they can be overcome with updates. The top two for me are that if you accidentally click to close Chrome, there’s no warning that you’re about to close all 15 tabs. That’s bad. I do that every day, thinking I’m just closing the tab. The other is that there’s no easy-to-access feed reader. I use feeds quite a bit. I did sign up for Google Reader as a result, and it actually looks fantastic, but I wish new feeds were constantly in my face, not just when I open a Reader tab.

Despite those faults, I think Chrome is worth it. Download it and give it a try—setup takes like 5 minutes since the software will automatically transfer over all of your bookmarks. Watch as your homepage starts populating. I’m literally physically excited about opening up Chrome again, just to see which website icons appear on my homepage.

So Google stole from me. That’s okay. At least they did something about it.

0 thoughts on “Google Stole My Idea”

  1. I’ve been really happy using Firefox as my browser, so I’m not sure how interested I am in Chrome. I don’t need nine choices when I open up my browser.

    Reply

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