Awestruck by 2013 Tech!

Google Glass came to us in 2013, and while I'm not overly impressed with Google Glass, I am impressed with Google in general, so let Google Glass be a symbol of the greater Google future! Google seems to be the most impressive tech company of the year behind us. Microsoft seems to be struggling (while still ruling the roost) and I didn't see anything I cared about coming out of the modern day Apple that lingers without Steve Jobs, yet it's Google that impresses. I started really using Google Chrome all the time in lieu of having Internet Explorer as my default this year. The Google Chrome Developer Tools now mean there is no longer a reason to use Firefox and Firebug whatsoever. AngularJS seems the most impressive of the emerging JavaScript frameworks. I suppose a lot of this may be of 2012 or 2011 and not 2013, but it is catching up to me, average Joe, this year. It is sad there is no more Feedburner, but I suppose Google must pick its battles. That scene in the "The Internship" where interns are taking tech support calls of how to use gmail seemed comedic as it was so "disingenuous." Is there really any way to get someone from Google on the phone? I hate how opaque Google is, but if Google wasn't opaque I suppose we'd all know how to game their search engine. We had all of our Google history stolen by Uncle Sam via the Muscular project this year too. It has been a much more interesting year for Google than it has for Microsoft and Apple and that is both something new and something that will likely continue. I wonder if the next CEO of Microsoft will just drop Bing and just admit that Google has won in the search engine space. More of 2013 Tech:

• In the social media space, I fell in love with Vine. I never tried Snapchat, but I did note that the word "selfie" is making the English dictionaries as of this year!
• For the most part I find Marissa Mayer and Yahoo just as overhyped as, say, Danica Patrick and Go Daddy. It seems like a pretty face garners disproportionate attention, but one thing nice I will say about Marissa is that I am impressed that she not only ended working from home at Yahoo, but somewhat made herself the face of that issue nationally thus stirring up a debate. She made the right decision and I'm grateful that we got to talk about it.
• I didn't know who Aaron Swartz was until he took his own life this year, but now that I know, I again want to mention his tragic passing. It is sad. He invented RSS.
• The big news in 2012 America was about our presidential election and the big news in 2014 will likely be, I'm guessing, about a pullout from Afghanistan and our experimentations with legalizing marijuana, but the news in 2013 was actually about tech itself. Edward Snowden and healthcare.gov were the big stories. In Britain they've pushed through a law that goes into effect in the New Year which forces all ISPs to block naughty content unless mature parties explicitly opt-in for it. New Zealand meanwhile has done away with honoring software patents.
• Finally, just yesterday, I learned from Scott Hanselman's online video tutorials for Visual Studio 2013 that there is finally a way to rotate text in HTML via modern CSS tricks. It seems so simple, and yet it has taken us so long to get here. This is really big to me. I'm serious.