Journal: Google Wave–Good, Bad, & Ugly

Methods & Process, Technologies, Tools
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The Bad
The Good Part I

Watch the Video (1.3 Hours)

Good on Background, Hop in and Out for Screen Shots)

Robert Steele's Notes:

Personal collaboration tool, open source, HTML 5 application, Applicaiton Program Interfaces (API) open for all developers.  Product, Platform, Protocol.  Focuses on email, street context, shared content, and browser as “home.”  Gets away from email as digital snail mail, wiki'es exchanges in multimedia form.  Easier to keep track of structure, aware of context (people, places, times).  Characters travel live to allow instream replies to begin composition. 

NOTE:  FORCED APPLAUSE.  Almost pleading for applause on multiple occasions throughout the developer demo.

Can create a Wave on WorkIt.  Can export portions of Wave to create new Waves focusing on specifics with different players.  Notes do not have to be triaged among document, wiki, or message.  Can be opened as a space and edited by others with change tracking.  Planning multiple power tools that allow playback across full history. Can export portions of Wave to create new Waves focusing on specifics with different players.

Planning spreadsheet type functionality.  Non-trivial cool: multiple people can be editing the same document at the same time, virtually synchronous.  Opens up new possibilities including meeting notes created by the group as it goes, and others remotely monitoring meeting asking questions. 

NOTE:  Really sad, tired efforts to get crowd to respond.  When light applause received, repeated and asked for more applause. Tags and Wave links as well as Wave extensions all enabled.  Spell checker flogged as way smart.  Robot APIs watch.  Search from within Wave, photos and links and text easily dragged into Wave.

YES, NO, MAYBE columns of Contacts allow all contacts to answer on any given question, event invitation, etcetera.  Intant playback of complex events (e.g. a chess game).  Wave extension can pull map into any Wave, knows which map based on terms.  On the server side, three examples: forms (e.g. polling) can be created; can integrate Twitter at multiple levels of intrusiveness; can receive and organize bug reports and other “extracts” and then debate and discuss inside a wave rather than inside a database.

Want to support FEDERATION, and make the bulk of our code [NOTE: not all of it] open source.  Finally, embedded translation.  NOTE: Very strong sustained applause at the end [loose $100 bills may havebeen floating down from the rafters.]

Bottom line:  Email wiki with pedestrian search.  No analytics, no connecting dots to dots, dots to people, people to people.  HOWEVER, this is a brilliant effort to make the hand-held the sole source of new data entry such that Google owns all the data created by all humans all the time, and THAT is the ugly part (see below).

The Good Part II
The Good Part II

Sergey Brin talks about Wave (4 minutes 33 seconds)

Highlights, if you don't have time to watch the above, just read Robert's notes and then watch Sergey for a few minutes.

The Bad
The Bad

Google Climbs to New Heights of Arrogance With Wave

GIGAOM Jordan Golson | Thursday, May 28, 2009

Has Google, with its latest project, Google Wave, actually come up with the Next Big Thing in online communication, or is it yet another Googler vanity exercise? Wave is a combination of email, instant messaging and a real-time wiki — plus open architecture and APIs. Or as creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon put it, “what email would be if it were invented today.” . . . . . . . .  Google has a long history of launching or buying projects, only to get bored and abandon them months or years later. With Wave, as with so many Google projects, the company seems to be flinging things against the wall to see what sticks. No real thought has been given to its future beyond, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” . . . . . . .Google, as a company, has failed at monetizing everything except search (and, though it’s based on the same tech, partner web sites through AdSense). Advertising on YouTube has been a failure, and is costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars a year in server costs. The culture at the company is to build first and ask questions later, typical for a company run almost top to bottom by engineers. . . . . . . . The breathtaking arrogance of blowing off potential competition and touting tech buzzwords rather than at least giving a cursory examination as to how one might make money from a product is the Google way.  . . . . . . .

Ugly Duckling
Ugly Duckling: Read The Google Triology

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

FEATURE
Google 2.0 as ‘Calculating Predator’

by Paula J. Hane

Vol. 25 No. 1 — January 2008

If you think of Google as a company that just does web search and advertising, think again. Your future prospects in business could depend on it. That was Google version 1.0. Google version 2.0 is a new type of company, according to search industry expert Stephen Arnold in his new study, Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. Google 2.0 combines hardware and software engineering in a “network-centric application platform

.  . . . . . . .

Arnold stresses that Google has been systematically building and innovating for 8 years, and founder Sergey Brin’s fingerprints—“scale, huge data sets, algorithms, efficiency, speed, massively parallel operation, and cleverness”—persist throughout Google’s patents. Google is a company built on mathematics. The company may be venturing into apparently new areas, but the development work has actually been ongoing for years. Arnold says, “I’m the first guy ever to analyze the patents, the first to track the areas those inventions allow them to go into, the first to put timelines on their work. For example, they started working on telecom in 1999—now, 8 years later, people say ‘[H]ow can they do this?’ But I see it as just one thing.”

A key component in Google’s success has been in solving the problem of scale. Asking how far it can scale is moot, according to Arnold, who explains in the book that Google has a self-replicating database structure that is infinitely scalable. “There’s evidence in the technical literature,” he says. “And, you can verify it in Google Maps: Get the satellite view, hit your right arrow key, and fly around the circumference of the Earth and experience no latency. Scaling is part of their competitive weapon.”

Phi Beta Iota: See rest of story and the chart on Google's planned forays into Banking, Enterprise, Entertainment, Publishing, Retail, and Telecommunications.  Google is a suprnational organism with zero oversight and zero provision ofr civil liberties, intellectual property, and privacy.  Having said that, it is the world's best everything EXCEPT for analytics.  It does not “do” decision-support and that is the missing piece once Microsoft and Google are merged within the same device.

See also:

EVENT: 23 Sep 09 0900-1100 National Press Club Washington, D.C. CHANGE 2010: Responding to Real Time Information, Open Systems and the Obama IT Vision [Google-Microsoft Meld]

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