Google guns for a superheroine

That Google chose to launch the service on April 1st 2004 really set the cat amongst the pigeons. Many commentators swore that offering the unwashed masses a free email service with unprecedentedly huge amounts of storage - in fact 1GB was about 100 times more than your average commercial email service offered at the time - with the added promise of no advertising banners, had to be a cruel joke.

There were even rumours flying that Gmail invites were changing hands on Ebay for up to $100 a pop.
Google's philanthropic kindness didn't stop there, however. The company was soon snapping at the heels of Microsoft's dominance in the workplace by offering a totally free web-based alternative to the software giant's all-powerful Office suite of applications.

Google Docs could do just about everything that Word, Excel and Powerpoint could do, in a cloud-based application, for absolutely nothing. Free. Buckshee. And the magnanimous megacorp would look after all of your data for you. Forever. Whether you wanted it to or not. Oh dear.

Someone once said "With great power comes great responsibility" - it was either Spiderman or Franklin D Roosevelt depending on how old you are - and Google has now amassed such massive power that it is wobbling at the edge of a great abyss. The Internet behemoth now generates so much wealth, employs so many people and touches so many lives that its original principle - to avoid doing evil - seems almost impossible to maintain.

Google's rise and rise is the stuff of fiction, and like all the best movie villains - the ones who were once good kind people but are turned by fate or circumstance to the dark side - Google is at a fork in the road. The money making machine has built such momentum that it will take more strength than any number of well-meaning board members have to keep it on the straight and narrow, the path of righteousness.

There are, however, chinks in its corporate armour. Google announced yesterday that it had uncovered the tracks of some very sophisticated hackers who had broken into its servers and weaselled about in the private data of some well known Chinese anti-government dissidents. The company stopped short of directly accusing the Chinese government, but the implication was crystal clear. Google will no longer kowtow to the demands of the oppressive communist regime by censoring web inquiries in China. And if the Chinese authorities don't like it, Google is prepared to shut up its Beijing shop, take its ball and go home. We can guess how this one's going to play out.

But the yin and yang must be balanced. For every act of political courage or corporate generosity there must, inevitably, be a kick in the teeth for someone.

And so we turn to the tale of another super hero, or heroine, and oppressive actions of a different kind.

It seems there's an online comic book called "I Am Googol". In the story, the leather-clad super heroine has an extraordinary brain that enables her to process more than one googol of data per second - which sounds a bit lame to us as super powers go, but she would be great at splitting the bill in a restaurant. The character's creator, Sylvaine Francis, says she was born when she found the word and its definition "completely at random" one day.

Sylvaine has some rather ambitious plans to turn "I Am Googol" into a movie but, without wishing to rain on her obvious enthusiasm for her creation, a ranking of 1,634th on the Webcomic list and 140 Facebook fans - including, for the purposes of research, your humble author - seem hardly likely to have James Cameron beating a path to her door.