I had a look at Greplin, a search engine for your life. As its name will tell the Linux users out there, it promises to be an extremely powerful search tool. Unfortunately, its allusion to gremlins is also close to the mark. It is currently in closed-source beta, and both conveniently and disturbingly will quickly index any of the services on its list. This means that within minutes you can give Greplin complete access to all of your key data on Gmail, Gcal, GDocs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I believe cloud computing is very convenient, but I know nothing about the makers of Greplin, or more importantly, where this company will go.
The creator of Greplin, a 19-year-old who grew up in the US, is a graduate of Y Combinator, where he was initially working on an application to turn just about any search into a link to an Amazon product.
If Greplin were a free, open source software that you could run on your own computer in complete privacy and use to index your cloud-based services, I would applaud it as a wonderful innovation. But as it is, all I'm really doing is allowing a dubious stranger to grep my life.
Thanks, but no thanks. I can live with the supposed inconvenience of having to check my appointments in my calendar.
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