At Mashable.com, Adam Ostrow has listed My Soul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns. Following the purchase of FeedBurner, Ostrow now reckons Google owns his readers: "how many of them there are, where they come from, and how they access my content."
Most of the other things are familiar: Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, Blogger etc. The most interesting one is "My paycheck". If you're a blogger or webmaster, you may well get some or even most of your money from Google AdSense.
The concerns are real, of course, but not so threatening because there are plenty of alternative products that are superior to Google's offerings. Not many people use Google's Orkut social network instead of MySpace or FaceBook, or use Gtalk instead of messaging products from Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL. Lots of people use Flickr to share photos, and there are plenty of alternatives to Blogger.
Of course, this may not matter much. Google can always track people via AdWords, which appear on vast numbers of sites. Also, Google coins cash at a phenomenal rate, so it can always buy out most opposition, if it feels the need. (Because Google is much better at monetizing the Web than anybody else, it can afford to pay more than rival bidders such as Microsoft and Yahoo.)
However, while Google doesn't yet control the whole Web, it's done remarkably well for its first decade. It took Microsoft around 20 years (1975-95) to make a similar impact, and Microsoft benefited from enormous good fortune when IBM, the computer industry's resident monopolist, more or less handed it the IBM PC industry on a plate.
It will be interesting to see what Ostrow posts in another 10 years. Maybe it will be My Soul, and 50 Other Things that Google Owns.
