Finally. I've been sitting on this story for weeks, and I was looking forward to this morning because there is a lot about this deal that is worth talking about, particularly with regard to how this fits into Google's portfolio. Even though I knew about the deal, I have no clue as to the reasoning why Google bought them. All the talk about them being a "map provider" is a bit of nonsense, since Keyhole is a hell of a lot more than a map provider. If they wanted maps they could have gone to the source, since it isn't like Keyhole creates their own map data -- Keyhole is more of a data integrator. Salient points: - Keyhole is fussy Windows-only client software (something that won't change soon), which appears to be a departure from Google's normally web-centric applications. - Keyhole can consume some serious bandwidth, and isn't really something that will scale to average home use (in many different ways) without wholesale re-architecting of the system. - Keyhole has terabytes of very interesting databases, many of which are not public. For example, the US DoD has become fond of using Keyhole to process all sorts of reconnaissance, intelligence, and battle planning data. And more Federal agencies and foreign governments are moving to do the same. I've maintained for some time that Google is very aggressively trying to position themselves as a very deep data-mining operation, and are facilitating that by arranging that as much data as possible flow through their systems. I've stated in the past that they have the potential to be super-evil, if only because of the access they are being granted to vast ranges of data, which many people seem more than happy to grant. From that perspective, I find the above points worrisome. It will be very interesting to see what they do with this. cheers, j. andrew rogers _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]