Jeffrey Veen done gone to the Googleplex.

Google hired the user experience guru and five of his Adaptive Path coworkers Feb. 16 when it bought the company's blog traffic analyzing tool, MeasureMap, still in its alpha release stage.

Google's acquisition of MeasureMap sparked another round of conjecture about Google's plans. Some believe Google will use MeasureMap to help cut down on click fraud on blogs, while others say Google will use Veen to bolster their user interfaces. Still others say Google is busy building a CRM (customer relationship management) suite.

We e-mailed Jeffrey to get his input, but he had already shuffled behind the Google campus walls. And by walls, I mean fortress of solitude. And by fortress of solitude, I mean "Go away." I tried changing tactics and proffered an interview with Senior VP Marissa Mayer. Google didn't respond, but I did hear a sudden clap of thunder and my photo disappeared from my high school yearbook.

So. Guess that's a "no."

But if I could talk to Jeffrey, here's what I'd ask. And what he'd answer. Maybe.

Hey, I understand you've joined the Google Borg, Jeff. Or should I say, Locutus?

Resistance is futile.

Right. You should see my yearbook. So, did you know that Google is hiring at least 19 user experience researchers, GUI developers and engineers?

Yeah. As a search engine, we've reached near brand ubiquity online. Most of our revenues are from AdSense. Most of our AdSense customers are small businesses and individuals. We need to learn more about those customers, so we can continue to provide effective advertising. One of the best ways to learn about them is through our products. We've released about 16 products in the last two years, and each product not only provides new content for ads, but also new data points for user behavior. As a UX guru, I'm a kid in a candy store. If I were John Mayer, I'd be singing, "Your data is a wonderland."

Wow, Jeff, thanks for putting on your gay music hat for us there. So, you're going to make those products look and work better for the little guys who may not be so Web savvy?

That's right. We're basically building an end-to-end experience for the user. We have the blog creation tool, Blogger. The ads tool, AdSense. And now the analytics tool, MeasureMap. And if you've got a bigger site, we've got Google Analytics. What's more, we're moving more and more into Microsoft's competitive space, and they into ours. They derive 40 percent of their revenue from the small and medium business market. [ed. according to an e-mail from Microsoft. Guess Jeff's reading our inbox. That's Google for you.] We've got a lot of competitive products. E-mail, calendaring, and apparently we're making a Web page development tool code-named Trogdor. The only thing we don't have that they do is CRM tools.

That's an interesting point, Jeff. It's funny that the most popular entry on your blog is "Making a Better Open-Source CMS." That's kinda related to Trogdor. And kinda related to CRM, since they both, uh, start with "C." Anywho, Google doesn't have a professional services team yet, either. Can we expect more deals with companies like BearingPoint to provide value-added search and indexing? There must be a big aftermarket in corporate trend analysis.

Something like that, sure. There's also a lot of data analysis and product creation we can do once we know what types of data are on your hard drive. That's what Google Desktop is for.

Gotcha. Say, is it true that Marissa Mayer is a robot?

Goodbye.

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