If anyone foresaw the technologically enabled political tsunami dubbed that Arab spring, it was Jared Cohen, now head of Google's think tank Google Ideas, and previously of the U.S. state department.

In 2004 he witnessed strange crowds of silent young people assembled in the marketplace of the city of Shiraz in southern Iran. They were studiously ignoring one another and intent on their cell phones. Cohen soon found out that they had assembled in an attempt to reinvent the Internet in a place where Internet use was seriously limited by the government. The crowd were using short range Bluetooth connections to communicate with strangers in ways that in other places would involve the Web: searching for a bassist for a band, promoting club nights or selling personal goods. When Cohen asked members of this peer-to-peer human Web if they were worried about being caught, they laughed. No one over thirty understands this is even possible, they said.

That gave Cohen a moment of premonition about the fate of repressive governments in the middle east, he told the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Arizona, yesterday. "These people are using technology to do things they're not allowed to do," he said, "they're self training in activism and one day this will help them organize for something else that is illegal and that they're not allowed to do."

When he told colleagues at the State Department, no one was interested. It must have been very tempting for Cohen to say "I told you so" in 2009 when cell phones and the Internet facilitated protests in Iran after contentious elections, and in 2010 when more extensive, tech-enabled activism rewrote the political map for the whole region.

Bluetooth networking like that seen by Cohen in 2004 was what first disseminated the famous video of protestor Neda Agha-Soltan being shot in Iran, until it reached someone who was able to upload it to YouTube. Events this year in Egypt were aided by the same technology, as well as international rabble rousing via Facebook and Twitter. Moves to restrict technology use--as when Egypt's Mubarak disabled cell phone networks and the Internet--only served to accelerate what was happening, and to draw in people who were previously uninterested but enraged to be denied access to the Web.

Cohen believes that those events provide a preview of how technology will fundamentally shift the balance of power between citizens and governments. "Governments are used to having a fixed number of citizens," he said, "but now people have multiple identities online. For every physical citizen there's a virtual entourage that comes with it, and virtual transnational meddlers as well."

States will retain near absolute power in the physical realm, but lack it in virtual space where citizens rule, says Cohen. "We're in the midst of a noisy transition," he said, "in the future we will have a compromise, we'll see the emergence of a global social contract between the citizens and their system and the states and their system."

The Internet isn't known for generating cohesive, permanent political movements, though, which may cause problems for both governments and citizens. The former will find themselves struggling to judge which online movements are significant enough to merit response, and over reaction could trigger more serious activism. Citizens are at risk of the downside of the freewheeling, non-hierarchical protest the technology enables. "For citizens, revolutions will be easier to start but just as hard to finish," said Cohen, "technology doesn't create democratic leaders and institutions, it means that you can mobilize without a plan."

Google has ideas about what you might want to see online—even when you're not doing a search. It's offering its suggestions through a service called Google Related, which works as an extension for the company's Chrome Web browser or for the Google toolbar. The company explains:

Whenever you're navigating to a new page, Google Related will look for interesting related content and, if available, display it in a bar at the bottom of your page. Google Related can display categories such as videos, news articles, maps, reviews, images, web sites and more. To preview a listed item or see additional items, just use your mouse to hover over different categories in the bar. For example, when you hover over a video link, the video pops up in a preview box and you can play the video directly on the page.

Early observers note that Google Related often directs users to Google products, such as Maps, Places, and News. SearchEngineLand writes:

The potential benefits for the searcher are saving time, effort, and being able to quickly see if they might have missed something from a source (or a Google property) they might have missed or did not know about.

For Google it means that users will spend more time using Google's services. Of course, it would be possible to monetize the actual Google Related toolbar.

While the product brings out useful information a fair bit of the time, Ars Technica laments that it can't be trained (at least not by users):

Links offered from the Related bar are +1-able, but if you click the "View More Articles" link from the story above, you get a get a long list of stories from various outlets that can't be +1'd. This strikes us as a prime opportunity to teach Google Related which sources you trust or would like to see in your related news tab when you visit a news story. Still, true to Google form, Google is collecting statistics on the project, so we may be training it more than we know.

Using Google Related requires letting Google know what pages you're visiting at all times, which is why it only works with omnipresent Google products such as the company's browser. But it doesn't seem to raise new privacy concerns. PC Magazine dived into the associated privacy policy, and concluded:

Data collected via Related is similar to how Google collects search information. "The Related extension operates by sending Google certain information about your machine and web sites at the time you visit them, including the URL of the web site, your machine's IP address, and one or more Google cookies. This data is retained in Google's server logs and maintained according to our general Privacy Policy," Google said.

But users may still find Google's suggestions invasive, suggests E-week:

When Google isn't speeding up searches with its Instant predictive search technology, it finds other ways to cram more search results in front of users' eyes. For example, Google late last year launched Instant Previews to show users a sneak peek of search results they might be interested in learning more about before they click on results. ... Google.com was forged with a Spartan existence, but the company in the past year is finding more ways to crowd the user experience for profit. It will be interesting to see any pushback.

Google is pressing forward with its efforts to speed up the Internet. Early this morning, the company launched Page Speed Service, which is designed to automatically speed up Web pages when they load. The service intervenes between Web servers and users, rewriting a Web page's code to improve its performance and applying other related tricks.

The service improves on previous offerings from Google. Page Speed began as a diagnostic tool and then as software that developers could install and configure for free. With every step, Google has increased the ease and automation of the service. This is in keeping with the strategy the company described to me when we discussed Google's Make the Web Faster Initiative. I sat down with Richard Rabbat, a product manager for the initiative, and Arvind Jain, its technical lead:

The best solutions of all, Rabbat and Jain realized, would spread with as little human intervention as possible. As Rabbat puts it, "Instead of telling people what the problems are, can we just fix it for them automatically?"

In fact, Ram Ramani, an engineering manager for the Bangalore team that worked on Page Speed Service, emphasizes that Google is primarily interested in seeing faster websites, however that's achieved. If people want to steal tricks from Page Speed Service, they're more than welcome to it, Ramani says. The service is there, however, because in reality many developers have trouble maintaining good Web performance as sites grow and change.

Jain says, "Making your site faster should not become a burden to a developer."

According to Joshua Bixby, president of Strangeloop, a Web optimization company, the service is important, but probably insufficient for enterprise customers. He wrote in a blog post:

Page Speed will be a handy resource for smaller sites with little to no complexity, whose owners don't have developer time to pour into hand-tuning their sites, or the money to put into investing in an advanced performance automation solution. It fills an important gap in the market, and while it may not solve every performance pain, it should solve some — hopefully giving small business owners a chance to level the playing field by speeding up their sites enough to remain competitive in an increasingly brutal online marketplace.