I have to admit that I love Google. I call Google Abung in Bukawac which means grandfather or grandmother, the wise one that knows so much. The joke in our family is, “ask Abung ” if you don’t know. I cannot say the same for Facebook, but, I found this argument from John Naughton very interesting, especially the comments and responses that were made about the article itself. I’m glad my friend Kirk shared this article with me. We live in an age where we are depending on technology so much so that it is strange to think such thought that, it may not be forever.

The argument from commenters is that, if these two giants don’t exist, something else will take their place. Who is to know. If I don’t have Abung Google, I won’t really mind driving back to the library again. That’s the truth.

If you are interested to read the rest of the story, click on the link at the end of this post.

By John Naughton
Sunday 3 March 2013. The Guardian

Some years ago, when the Google Books project, which aims to digitise all of the world’s printed books, was getting under way, the two co-founders of Google were having a meeting with the librarian of one of the universities that had signed up for the plan. At one point in the conversation, the Google boys noticed that their collaborator had suddenly gone rather quiet. One of them asked him what was the matter. “Well”, he replied, “I’m wondering what happens to all this stuff when Google no longer exists.” Recounting the conversation to me later, he said: “I’ve never seen two young people looking so stunned: the idea that Google might not exist one day had never crossed their minds.”

And yet, of course, the librarian was right. He had to think about the next 400 years. But the number of commercial companies that are more than a century old is vanishingly small. Entrusting the world’s literary heritage to such transient organisations might not be entirely wise.

Compared with my librarian friend, we have the attention span of newts. We are constantly overawed by the size, wealth and dominance of whatever happens to be the current corporate giant. At the moment, the four leading monsters are Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yet 18 years ago, Apple was weeks away from extinction, Amazon had just launched, Google was still three years away from incorporation and Facebook lay nine years into the future. Read More on link below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/03/google-facebook-nothing-lasts-for-ever