As we become more dependent on the internet, the literal fabric of our networked lives, from the websites we depend on, to the emerging wireless infrastructure, to the social tools we use, is getting richer, more meaningful and more tightly woven.
Content, applications and communities are more interconnected than ever, and now a new layer of links is emerging on top of the infrastructure we have taken for granted for most of a decade.
It is an invisible layer, dedicated to remote control, information sharing and collaboration between computers. It goes by an array of obscure names: RSS, SOAP, XML, UDDI, WSDL.
The action has moved away from the first generation of net technologies, such as the web and email, to these new protocols, but this is not change for change's sake. The net is like all the other big human artefacts: it is evolving to support the complexity of our lives and communities. Without these new layers and tools, the net would slowly lose meaning for us.
But, as the usefulness and accessibility of the internet grows, its value to us all is necessarily always at risk: from pointless complexity, from the opacity produced by proprietary dead ends, and from old-fashioned corporate and political shortsightedness.
Google Hacks is a book about this important new layer of the net, and an inoculation against obscurity and complexity. The book is a tool. It reminds me of The Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy resource book subtitled "Access to Tools", and inspired by the legendary Buckminster Fuller.
The catalog, first published in 1968, and edited by the now legendary Stewart Brand, was about understanding the world, having the confidence to take control and making meaningful interventions: hacking real life.
The inside cover of my 1971 edition (will whoever I lent the 1968 edition to please return it!) explains that it "functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting, and where and how to do the getting". Everything on the following 450 tabloid-sized pages is "useful as a tool".
The book's hippy origins are visible everywhere: home made geodesic domes, sauna heaters and books about home education. But the selection of tools is enormous and permissive, taking in the earliest small computers, Fortune Magazine, personal aeroplanes in kit form and really useful penknives you could build a house with.
The philosophy of the catalog is powerful and still relevant, but the field of human experience has expanded to take in the new reality of cyberspace. We need new tools.
Google is the first really good example of the richer networked world we now inhabit. It is so pervasive, useful and flexible that, for many of us, it has become the lens through which we view the whole net.
Google's engineers are obviously very clever, but their cleverest act has probably been to open up the inner workings of the system to anyone on the net via what the techies call an API (applications programming interface).
The API makes it possible for anyone to write programmes that can talk to Google's systems directly and produce customised results. In some cases, these results are rich enough to resemble standalone applications in their own right. In others, they will just look like fancy search results.
Google Hacks is a tool for hacking the new, networked reality. Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest show us how to make good use of the things that we find (like the Wombles), how to find out what we need to know and, most important of all, how to build entirely new artefacts using the raw material provided by Google (the software equivalent of those geodesic domes).
The book covers applications as rich as 3D visualisations of info-space, and as simple as phone number look-ups. There are tools here that are much too daunting for my non-technical mind, but many that even I could set up.
There are exactly 100 hacks: specific, clearly worked examples of ways to take advantage of Google's openness and achieve concrete results. Some projects are useful, some are intriguing and some are just playful.
I hope that Google Hacks, and the forest of clever applications built using it, will inspire the owners of the rest of our networked reality - from AOL to Yahoo - to publish their own APIs (amazon.com already does). The net will be a richer place for it.
