GoogleFasting In Seattle
Local technology super-user and former Seattlest interview subject Chris Pirillo is in the midst of a GoogleFast; that is, he's refusing to use Google for anything (save the ad programs they run on his sites) for a period of one week. No Google search, no Google maps, no Gmail, no Groups, no News, No Google Your Entire Online Life, no Google nothing. And this is a guy who uses the internet for more different activities in a day than Seattlest has since 1998. Pirillo's whole thing is that he uses the internet hard, and, increasingly, using the internet hard means using Google hard. He's trying Yahoo, MSN and his own search tool gada.be as replacements for that which cannot be replaced.
He says Google's capitulations to the Chinese firewall or privacy concerns are not the reasons for the GoogleFast. Those seem like as good a reasons as any to Seattlest, but he says it's not political. Why, then?
I've been growing increasingly concerned over how Google is starting to do more... and the world is just letting it do more without asking questions (because most users trust the brand blindly). Google is everywhere. I want it to be everywhere, but I also don't want it to be everywhere - because that's very scary. I trust that they will continue to "do no evil" (as opposed to "do know evil?") - but perhaps there's such a thing as "too big?" I have to prepare for the worst.
Today is day five and it looks like he's fading. Here he is on day 1, day 1.5, day 2, day 3 and day 4. We'd like to encourage him to go the distance - Do the whole week, Chris. We need to know it's possible. At the end of this experiment we bet he's going to have some things to say about a drop off in productivity, and there will be that, but there won't be any stories of how he was hit by a bus because he couldn't get accurate schedule information for it, or that he drove off a bridge because he couldn't Google Map his route. He'll survive and at the end of it he'll know that there probably isn't a publicly traded company that he couldn't fire from his life, at least for a week, and there's gotta be some value in that.
