Android. Google Earth. Google Maps. Adwords. Adsense. YouTube. Ad Planner. Google News. Google TV. Chrome. Google Docs. Orkut. Picasa. Knol. G-Mail. Google phone (aka non-virtual hardware). Wave. Google 411. Google Images, etc., etc. etc. You get the idea.

Google. First of all, is Google a “them” or an “it”? For conversation sake here, let’s just call them/it Googzilla.

I just finished reading “Googled – The End of the World as We Know It”. Absolutely fascinating. The author, Ken Auletta, gave an interesting inside view of Google that I would say is mostly unbiased, and certainly daunting when you realize how many things Google has its virtual hand in.

The pervading message throughout the book was Google’s ability to abuse their power and knowledge if they ever choose to do the opposite of their corporate mantra, “Don’t be evil”. Yet this message is countered with the consistent theme from founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, also often chimed by Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO), that they just want to help make interactive technology a great, user friendly, reliable, relevant, safe resource.

But here’s the twist – every step Google takes to be more useful is often because they’ve learned more about us. For example, search relevance improves via behavioral targeting because they’re watching us closer. Our continued diminishing privacy makes the web more convenient for us. Not to mention that opting out is a lot more complicated than opting in. The trillion dollar question is – do we really care?

It comes down to this simple dividing line. There are those who trust Google and those who don’t. And, as long as there are more that do, Google will continue to grow and own the online world. Could that change? Sure. If they mess up. If I had to bet, I’d say they probably won’t. But then again, in spite of all their algorithms, PhD’s, and rocket scientists, they’re only human.

What do you think?

I saw my Mac desktop computer with Facebook pulled up. I was in the process of sending a client a virtual piece of birthday cake. It was his birthday the next day, of which I’d been reminded by Facebook, Plaxo and Linked-In via email. Facebook was waiting for me to complete the virtual birthday cake purchase transaction, because a piece of virtual birthday cake now costs money. The $1.99 charge was being billed to me through my AT&T iPhone account, and I was waiting for a text message with a PIN that I had to input into the Facebook page in order to send the virtual piece of birthday cake.

My iPhone was situated on my desk in between my Mac desktop computer and my Mac Book Pro laptop computer. As I was keeping an eye out for the text with the PIN to come through on my iPhone, I was listening to a live podcast (from Germany) via my Mac desktop computer. The podcast was giving me instructions for using the new Google Social Media Search technology that I had just joined as a beta tester by signing up via Twitter that morning. As I was listening to the podcast, I was simultaneously downloading a recent Brandtailers video from my Flip camcorder onto my Mac Book Pro laptop, which I was going to quickly edit and upload to You Tube.

All of the above occurred within a five minute period.

For some of you reading this you’re saying, “No way. I’ll never be like that.” For others reading this you’re saying, “Yeah, so what. I call that Tuesday.” Well, guess what? The “I call that Tuesday” readers win. Because it’s where we will all be very soon. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently gave his predictions for what the Internet will look like in the next five years. This one particular prediction says it all… “Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.”

You can embrace this technology or ignore it, but you can’t stop it. 2010 marks the year of No Going Back. I choose to embrace, participate, and use it for doing good. How about you?

We were there with another fifty-or-so people from agencies our size, all invited by Google to be schmoozed, thanked for our existence, get our business pulses checked, and to be trained on some new “agency tools”. After a nice but fairly basic keynote presentation, we were broken up into small groups for one-on-one time with their specific team experts. Twenty minutes into an update on some new AdWords tools, I had agency leaders in my group saying they really didn’t understand how AdWords worked. Some knew a little, some knew nothing. My agency knew much more. My head swelled.

Then we moved on to Google Analytics. That got really interesting. Turns out the agency leaders that didn’t know much about AdWords knew even less about Analytics.  Or AdSense. Or Google Maps. And they sure didn’t know about Wave or Chrome OS. By lunchtime my head was pretty big. But as I chowed down their five-star free-cafeteria cuisine I remembered my virtual mentors like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, CC Chapman, and a few guys named Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. I quickly slapped myself back to reality. Compared to the people I study and learn from every day, I know nothing.

This trip to Google’s headquarters confirmed for me that it’s all relative. People’s levels of knowledge and understanding about the online world are as broad and varied as the businesses they run. In my world terms like Social Media, the Long Tail, and The Cloud are thrown around every day by the digital gurus I follow, but the vast majority of well-educated Americans don’t know what any of this means. Yet.

For now just knowing that you need to know it is a good start. The day will come (and I say it’s very soon) where the digital world will be the life blood of most businesses. The trick to learning it is not being afraid to ask questions. Yes, it can be intimidating. But yes, it does start to make sense pretty quickly once you get all the puzzle pieces in front of you. I get several people a week asking me, “So what’s this Twitter thing?” At first I think, wow, I can’t believe they’re asking me this. But then I say to myself, “That’s great. They asked. They know that they need to know.” It’s the first step.