Separated at Birth?

While answering comments today, a separated at birth popped into my head for Google Chrome, the HAL 9000.

The Chrome logo is also very reminiscent of eyes the CG Transformers have in last year’s live-action movie. I don’t recall that Skynet had a logo, but I’m sure it would be the type of shiny eye metaphor.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t intentional especially given Google’s troubles with privacy advocates and various governments who have taken issue with the amount of personal information they collect, the methods they use, and what they do with it.

For the record, I’m enjoying Chrome so far and wish I could switch over to using it as my primary browser to give a true road test. Running Chrome on an XP VM is a bit of a bummer though, so fingers crossed for a Mac version soon. That seems more likely than a Linux version.

Online privacy is an illusion. I’m fine with that, and I appreciate when products let me know that to get super cool features, I’ll have to sacrifice some information, e.g. Chrome and now iTunes 8.0, the Genius feature.

Speaking of the Genius feature, Paul was saying we need this type of feature for ideas and questions on Mix/Connect. Spot on, a nice OpenSocial app perhaps? Speaking of OpenSocial, Eddie tells me that Ning will soon launch OpenSocial to user profiles. This will open up integration between Mix and OracleCommunity, which is hosted on Ning and has more than 2,300 members.

The future direction of Mix isn’t officially set right now, but I’m hoping that OpenSocial will make it to Mix in some form or another. Even if it doesn’t anytime soon, exposing a REST API would allow Eddie to build OS apps for OracleCommunity that can bridge the two communities for people who belong to both.

Sorry, no cohesive topic for this post, just a few observations. Find the comments if you have additional thoughts.