Google today rolled out a public DNS service that anyone tech savvy can use to make their browsing faster. There's no word yet if the domain name service will be built into other services like the Google Toolbar or Google Chrome as a default setting. Here's my quick take: Google says this is about making the web faster, but I think there's more to it.
"The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable."

This morning I logged into YouTube and I noticed that it now helps me find me find videos and channels from friends who have linked their Google contact information to their social profiles. Meanwhile yesterday Google rolled out its social search program (which so far I like). And recently Google Reader too became a lot more social. So the Gmail address book/contact list is finally showing that it can be a powerful tool for connecting you to your social connections. This is something we saw coming.
I am on a minimalist kick these days as I try to unload some of the more complex stuff I use in favor simple tools that are "good enough." A lot of this involves moving to anything that works with plain text since it works well everywhere and it's inherently portable. There's actually an active crowd of minimalist curators out there and, with their help, I am finding all kinds of cool stuff in this genre.
"However, on the whole, social networks are becoming a key way for people to find content that's meaningful to them. In response, all of the major networks are building out search tools that could, conceivably, threaten Google."
"If you can't get the content removed from the original site, you probably won't be able to completely remove it from Google's search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business."Big footprint = big rewards.