I keep hearing people say that they don’t see a common thread in everything that Google is doing. What does a website building application (and hosting) have to do with an online store? And what does email have to do with free wifi? I may be way off base, but the answer is pretty clear to me. It’s all about your information. They want to know where you are surfing, what you are reading in your email, what things you are purchasing. They’d like to know what brand of toilet paper you use, too, but I guess they’ll just have to settle for what they can glean off of your use of their services. So, the more offerings they provide, the more of your information they can harvest. (And, by the way, the cost of all of these “free” offerings” is worth it to Google because they are able to index more of your information about you.) The more of your information they can harvest, the better they are going to be able to target you with pertinent ads. And that’s how they make their money. Google is not a search company. Google is not an ISP. They are an advertising company that sells targeted ads to its customers. And to do that, they need to collect every piece of information about you that you let them. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Sure, if you twist it a little bit, you could make it into a great movie. But I think the risk of real privacy invasion is pretty minimal.
They've already made a movie about this. Its titled "The Net"
Actually, I believe theres a sequel to be released soon.
The obvious needs to be stated here, despite my agreement with your hypothesis:
There's a problem with this plan in that if Google wishes to harvest our hopes and dreams to better advertise to us, one would assume they could make these services easier to use with the existing ones. As it's been said before, why make Google Pages a seperate service instead of integrating it with blogger or allowing it to be posted to something other than crappy.googlepages.com? If they can actually tie these things together without burdening them, then it'll be more enticing to use them instead of feeling like you're using 4 different IM clients at once when you could opt for trillian/gaim/whatevermetachatclientyouchoose.
I catch what you're saying in general and agree with it, but the blogger vs. googlepages argument doesn't seem to really stand up. These seem like two totally different applications targeted at two different needs. But I think you're on to something with a better integration. Maybe they could setup an account on the same basic page and allow for plugins of the page builder and/or the blogging app.
They want you to have lots of data.
See:
http://cinemalog.net/ronen/blog/why-i-keep-ranting-about-google