Shane Life

*placing hand over heart*

I am a geek.

Now I don’t know if I was born a geek or if I grew gradually into geekdom, but I am 100% geekalicious now. I love computers and technology and I get excited about stupid things like Apple’s latest product release and Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr (although I was somewhat skeptical about the latter…so far Yahoo! hasn’t screwed anything up).

The phrase “Web 2.0″ gets thrown around the blogodome a lot these days. Let’s assume for a sec that you are familiar with what Web 2.0 is (a collection of web sites and web applications designed to cater to consumer needs and wants in a browser environment rather than a desktop-based one), or at least that you are familiar with one or two Web 2.0 applications (WordPress, the CMS that this site is built with, is one, as are the aforementioned Flickr, Yahoo!, and other stalwarts such as Blogger, Google, MySpace, etc.).

About 2 months ago, some news came to the forefront that Google, the “Microsoft of Web 2.0″, was purchasing a company called Writely, Whose Web 2.0 product is a web-based word processor, essentially Microsoft Word for the web.

There was some geekish fanfare (a story was dugg, it probably was SlashDotted), but it was mostly ignored. Now, with the announcement of the beta Google Calendar program, it appears that Google may be going after the evil Redmond, WA giant Microsoft after all. You see, much of the reason that everyone uses Microsoft is that their productivity products (Microsoft Office, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc.) have completely saturated the market and most people are comfortable with them. But people are getting comfortable with the web now and most people feel differently about Google than they do about Microsoft (mostly because it is FREE). Google’s calendar service and mail service are extremely usable and TOTALLY INDEPENDENT of the computer…they exist in cyberspace (oooooo…spooky…).

I really like it. Particularly since I use a bunch of different computers (typing this one on my wife’s Mac Powerbook laptop, work on a dual AMD Windows machine, and my main computer is an iMac G5). As much as I like to write, I think that a product like Writely is going to be wildly popular.

Anyway, I think that once that Google releases Writely into the wild with the full power of the Google brand behind it, it is going to do really well. Seriously…this Web 2.0 thing is really cool.

P.S. Sorry if this is disjointed…I’m a little scatterbrained.