Over the last few years the Internet has become an integral part of the lives of a majority of people in the United States. Important to that sentence is integral: while the Internet became a central engine to business well over a decade ago, for huge groups of people - children and adolescents, retirees, houseparents - it is only through the rise of mainstream social networking that we have truly become what could be termed a full-time computing nation.

With apologies to Apple and Microsoft, Google is the most important company in computing. Their rise over the past decade has been meteoric: from a struggling start-up operating out of a small office in downtown Palo Alto, California to today representing the present and future of computing. To call this ascension improbable is a gross understatement. After all, this is a company Yahoo! declined to purchase for a song, yet today could buy and sell Yahoo! many times over without breaking a sweat. It begs the question: how did it happen?

Tomorrow is the expected announcement of the new Apple “tablet” computer. Predictions for this device are all over the map, ranging from a “true” tablet computer, down to an oversized iPhone, and everything in between. I don’t have any inside information about Apple, but I think I have a pretty good idea what this new device is going to be. And if I’m wrong, Apple may just be releasing their first major lemon in a really long time.

I expect the new Apple device to be a “Kindle killer:” a device that leverages the iPhone OS in a larger and more versatile interface that is optimized for buying, transferring and consuming content. I hardly think it will limit itself to simply books or magazines; I expect this to be a next-generation media consumption device, to beautifully handle video and to incorporate gaming at least inasmuch as the iPhone does currently and quite likely even more.

This is part one of a three-part series that will detail Google’s rise to becoming the dominant company in the computing industry. Part one will review the history of IBM and Microsoft, Google’s predecessors in this position; part two will take a close look at the last decade in computing and particularly at Google’s; and part three will look into the future and help you understand what’s to come for Google and the rest of the industry.

Depending on which gushing analyst you listen to, Google’s release last week of the Nexus One “superphone” is going to change the computing industry. Some are pointing to the phone itself and the fact that Google is now officially a hardware company. Others are pointing to the Google ecommerce store and approach to selling the phone and calling that the true harbinger of future dominance. Wrapped up in much of this excitement is a sense of surprise, as if Google’s doing these things wasn’t something that—at the very least—should be seen as a predictable result of Google’s expanded impact in the industry over the past decade. This very short-sighted breathlessness makes me wonder if the people who are telling us what to think really know what they are talking about.

This week, embattled R&B artist Chris Brown closed his Twitter account after a profanity-laced tirade. This makes Brown just the latest public figure to have an embarrassing meltdown and then abashedly terminate their account on the social networking giant.

At the same time, just last week a university student interviewed me to discuss trends in the relationship between social networking and how people behave. Her concern and focus was on the trend of drunk or high college students using texting and Twitter to lash out against boyfriends, ex’es, teachers and other people who have done them wrong. As I told her, this sort of behaviour has been happening since long before modern communication technology existed. The difference is, shouting “I hate Ellen!” from the balcony of your fraternity house is ephemeral and easily forgotten or denied, while texting or Tweeting it becomes an immediate artifact and only strengthens Ellen’s ability to point you out as the jerk you “really are”. One can only guess how many social networking accounts have been closed in the aftermath of a substance-induced tantrum.