Good idea? We’ll find out in 8 years.

Google has recently announced they have secretly been working on cars that drive themselves. Although Google is the first to admit that this is not a replacement for the driver, but more of another tool to be used… like cruise control. I think this is a fantastic idea, but sadly, even an optimistic view puts the mainstream use of it at least 8 years in the future. Dangit, I wanted to drive and text NOW! Seriously, this is a great idea and I hope it gets implemented into the cars of tomorrow.

Another Google announcement made recently was about Google TV. I have been waiting on information about Google TV for quite some time, and I think I’m still waiting. It appears that Google TV will not help you cut the ties to your cable provider, but give you a more customizable TV experience. As in, you will still need a cable box of some kind to get your regular cable shows, but you can search and play YouTube, have a video chat, download Apps, and many more computer-style things with Google TV. That’s not what I’m looking for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still interested, especially the new hotness of the Logitech Revue with its QWERTY keyboard remote. Sony is coming out with a Sony Internet TV with the Google TV engine built right into the TV itself, but I think the price will put most consumers off, at least until the technology advances a bit more to make production cheaper.
Facebook tried to improve itself again last week by introducing Facebook Groups so you can aim certain messages to only a certain group of friends. But if you have been using the Facebook security settings and have already placed your friends into groups…. then why would you need this new feature? I am not the only one in thinking this was a response to the rumors about Google Me (Google’s Facebook-like social site), but I think Facebook could have done this better. I have not been the recipient of the Groups rollout yet so I cannot say personally if it is a good thing or not, but I haven’t heard good things about it. At least not yet. And who knows when I’ll be able to mess with it… considering I received the “new” Twitter a few days ago.
And to close out this post, I’m gonna tell you about a little secret called PortableApps.com. I hate Internet Explorer, with a passion. It’s too slow for me, so I use Chrome as often as I can. Just like most businesses, my job will not allow me to download software to my work PC, and this is where PortableApps comes into play. You can download all sorts of programs and software to a flash drive and run the program from the flash drive so you never need to download to the hard drive. This is great when I need to use an image editor but don’t want to have to log in to my offices’ common work station, or when I need to open a Zip file and don’t have the right program on the PC. I could go on & on about all the programs they have, but I would get tired of typing, and why are you so lazy that you can’t go look yourself? I don’t know what programs you need. Why are you looking at me like that? Go! Be gone!