The Iron Yuppie

Google's Chat is Live

This so clearly points to the core strategy for Google. Make your data more structured and searchable than ever before. They will come out with a way to categorize and sort every bit of information that you put into a computer so you can search and use that data long into the future. Whether or not it's what links you click on, what you type in mail, blogs or chat, what phone calls you make to whom and so on. I don't think this is a bad thing(tm)... the company is just trying to help users make sense of a world where our data sits in a thousand different places. But you better be ready to buy into this philosophy if you want the full experience. They're not going to do anything malicious with it... but in order to give you what they think you want (total access through computers of everything you're interested in as quickly and as easily as possible) they have to know this level of detail about you. Fascinating stuff!