things that i want from google

google has a lot of cool applications, but i want more functionality from their apps. here are a few ideas.

google earth - i want to be able to classify information by geographic locations. a similar idea is what i've seen with the mappings for the southern california wild fires. but, i want it much more dynamic. for example, if i "google" migration patterns of humpback whales, i want it to show me based on the research where humpback whales migrate throughout the year and where they are right now. that is cool. this could work for all kinds of things. for example, where is it daylight right now, what countries have AIDs epidemic problems, or where are the Red Cross helping right. all of this, of course, is to add much more context to information. it would definitely help me grasp the scale of some of these problems. it would also be cool to use this in education, for example Science on a Sphere
at the Jhamandas Watumull Planetarium - Bishop Museum

google reader - i want the concept of a "i have to read this later" category. i always read a little of the title and the first few sentences and i know i need to spend more time reading it. often these reader entries are longer than usual or contain other multimedia inserts like a video. being able to "star it for later" seems like a very good feature.

google reader (2) - i want to know what blogs my friends are subscribed to. some how being able to do a grouping of the blogs my friends are reading seems cool to me. it could define the type of information my friends care about. for example, my software friends would have an entirely different set of blogs than my high school friends. but, what would be interesting would be to see if there were cross-sections between my groups. if that was the case, then another group should be formed.

blogger - i like the idea of creating a community of independent bloggers. this page, kinda like google groups would be able to aggregate their blogs in a reader type thing. stats on how often the group writes sounds pretty cool. also, things like tag clouds can help define what topics the bloggers write about.

gmail - gmail should have more features like how apple's mail works. the notes and todos are cool stuff.

picasa - picasa is cool, but it isn't that great at the community aspects. the desktop app is really kind of boring. there aren't very good ways of finding pictures or scrolling through them. zzzzzz

i just had a thought.. a lot of the cool features are happening in apple products. hm... that is interesting. while google is making things really accessible, in my opinion it looks like apple is winning my vote for more usable and useful. wow, and i don't even have a mac. google team up with apple would be the killer app.