A Second Life.....?

These days the coolest things online are MMORPGs. To those of you unfamiliar with that abbreviation, it means Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Thanks to the booming market for Internet connections (I won't call them broadband connections, cause that'd be a disgrace...) this phenomena has now slowly and steadily started taking over the virtual horizon.

The point of this style of gaming is to provide players with a virtual persona, that lives in a virtual world. These games have not only taken the World Market by storm, they've even become huge business hubs. The games heading this revolution across the globe seem to be Second Life and The World of Warcraft.

These games have provided a new horizon for exploration..... That of our own creativity!! Though this world is just as competitive as the real world, you can easily carve out a niche for yourself here...!! The general level of comfort/need of the netizens with this genre of gaming has intensified over the past few years, thanks to the increase in the commercial viability of these supposed tools for whiling away one's time.

Today they provide us with an alternative lifestyle wherein there are no real restrictions to what we can achieve. They've also managed to create quite a few millionaires out of us common people. If you are artistic or creative in anyway, or even if you have great idea that you'd like to sell.... you can earn money........ loads and loads of money......!! And, by money I don't just mean virtual currency within the game's universe... I mean real hard cash....!! The kind that you can actually hold onto and use to buy your groceries, to pay your bills and to even buy yourself a new house or a new car!!!

But, herein come the problems... is so much of something a good thing?? Why can't man spend more time socialising physicially than virtually?? Will the advent of this era in the virtual world result into the creation of a Matrix like pseudo-world where people will willingly give up their freedom to choose to become a part of an artificial environment?? Do we want to lead that completely doctored life?? That 'perfect' life that a virtual environment like this can provide us with?? Are the strides we are taking in this direction really an improvement??

These are questions of a very personal nature... But, very important nevertheless cause they just might just change our future forever!!

Paranoia...... Or is it???

I've been a bit out of sync with tech news these past few months........ Not, that I was very informed to begin with, but when I heard the rumour that Google had launched the Beta version of Google Wallet in the States....... I started getting some really weird thoughts!!! Thought I'd share them with you guys o'er here......

Today, A major chunk of our net usage seems to land Google's way. I don't really know how many Google services most of my friends use, but I recently realised that I seem to be using quite a big bunch of them. Let's count:

1. This blog of mine is hosted by Google (Blogger being a Google product).
2. My Primary Mail Accounts are Gmail Accounts.
3. I've almost completely become dependent on Orkut for my daily dose of Social Networking.
4. Instead of making use of my Organiser in MS Outlook, I've started using Google Calendars due to its 'portability'.
5. I have begun using the Personalized Search service offered by Google, to try and streamline the results I receive.
6. I use Google's Picasa Web Albums to maintain a few private albums.
7. I've also started using some other Google Tools like their Webmaster tools and Google Analytics.

But, this isn't really the end of it, I'm pretty sure that I use some other Google Services as well, some that have just sort of slipped out of my mind right now. Now, if we were to go through this list all over again from a voyeur's point of view, the following conclusions could very well be drawn:

• Google, thanks to my blog, knows quite a lot of the itty-bitty details of my life.
• Google knows everything about my communication with my friends, colleagues, family etc.
• Google knows most, if not all of my friends, and also knows about my interaction with them.
• Google knows everything about how I manage my time, or at least the little of it that I do try to manage.
• Google knows exactly what I am searching for on the net, the frequency of my search and even my level of satisfaction with the result.
• Google knows what I look like and where I've been.
• Google knows who has been-a-visiting at my blog and what they've found most interesting here.

Now, if we were to compare this small list to the actual services Google has on offer, we could very well come to the conclusion that Google has become the proverbial Big Brother. Say, we were to use in addition to these aforementioned services, a prevalent and rather popular Google service like the Google Toolbar with its advanced features activated, Google would know exactly when and where we've been on the World Wide Web, thanks to its PageRank crawler. Also, had Google launched it's Dodgeball.com Social Networking Service in India, and had we subscribed to that as well, Google could and would very well know exactly when and where we were in the real world as well. And, when you think about the services I haven't even mentioned as yet like Froogle, and the soon to be released service, Wallet, Google would not only know what we were shopping for, it'd would also know exactly how much dough we have left to spare, you can really get the jitters.

Though the implications of these thoughts did seem a little profound when they first saw the light of day in my mind, they do seem a lot less scary now. The reason behind this being that I am too insignificant a person to hold too much value for so large an entity. I'll take your leave now, and hope that some of you do continue this discussion in your comments to this post. I do hope to continue with this thread a little later on though.......

An Interesting Fact.........

Recently, while turning the pages of a technology magazine I came across a few interesting figures........... (More about this a little later along this post.)

I have often noticed how much more appeal and elegance a simplistic all-white page has to offer, but I still preffered to opt for this dull, black page. The reason at the time when I chose this template was the gloomy shadow following me.......... However, a couple of days ago while going through that aforementioned magazine my eyes fell across the following paragraph :

"An all-white page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all-black page uses only 59. If you do some maths, A Black Google Page could save 3,000 megawatt-hours a year - meaning $300,000 (Rs. 1.35 Crore)"

I am really fond of the simplistic Google page and I probably wouldn't change it for anything, specially not for a Black Page! To me, White represents a clarity of thought, it allows me to revel in the zest for a less complicated life. It brings clarity to everything around it, illumines the darker aspects of everything, driving them further away. But, being the pessimist that I am, it's one colour that I try not to don for any occasion, always choosing some other shade to its pure form.

It seems to represent a clash of beliefs in such circumstances, or rather, a clash of principles. But, it does give me another reason in support of my template, doesn't it??? I mean, the fact that I am saving a little of your money for you should make you a little biased in favour of me, shouldn't it??!! I really hope it does.............