Google Operating System

Via Kottke, a great (and long!) article by Rich Skrenta on Google as being the ultimate Internet operating system.

Although the article is by Skrenta, Kottke himself starts the gears ticking for me with this seemingly throwaway sentence:

Mobile devices don’t need big, bloated OSes…they’ll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS.

So now your address book/contacts backs up straight into Orkut, which doubles as your mail whitelist, all your phone created content, such text and media messages and camera phone images, all become searchable. In fact, how about automatically sharing any (specified) pictures you take with an Orkut community (i.e., without manually moblogging them)? I’m pretty sure any company (and especially one with decent search technology) could do a better job at telling you where the nearest ATM or well reviewed restaurants are than any of the systems currently offered by mobile operators. Get Web Alerts and News Alerts to your phone (as a WAP Push message). Froogle takes on whole new abilities and meaning in this context (moreso than what they’ve already done). Voice Search becomes useful when it speaks back to you. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before we get Gibber, an Orkut integrated IM client (desktop and mobile) which records your conversations so you can search them later on. And of course, don’t forget the GMail client for your handset.

Not so much an operating system as operating services.