I love Google. Just love ’em.

This post is just one big, long, nerdy love letter to Google.

When Google introduced their search engine, it revolutionized the internet. I have to say, I wasn’t very prescient, when they launched it. “Big deal,” I thought, “it’s just a search engine.” But it was a big deal; a search engine that actually made an effort to return relevant results, and was quick? At the time, that was revolutionary. Finding information on the internet became not easier, but possible. (The most common example that people use is a search for something like “breast cancer”—if you’d done a search like that, before Google came along, you’d get a million porn sites before you’d ever get to a relevant search result. And the search would take literally minutes to return, instead of coming back instantly, like Google does.) All search engines have gotten better, since Google was released, but they’ve been playing catch-up ever since. They may, some day, become as good as Google, but at the moment, that’s all they’re striving for.

If that’s all they’d done, create a great search engine, Google would have done a great service to the internet. But they didn’t stop there; you can do a lot of custom searches, too. For example:

• You can look up definitions of words or terms, using the define: keyword. e.g. you can look up a definition of the word “prescient” by searching for define:prescient.
• You can do math, by simply entering the equations. e.g. you can add 25 and 26 by simply searching for 25+26. (Okay, maybe that’s not a real revolutionary equation; maybe (25+26)/3 is a bit more complex, or the square root of that, using sqrt((25+26)/3).)
• You can convert weights and measures, using the convert keyword. e.g. you can convert 80 miles to kilometres, and find out that it’s 128.74752 kilometers.
• You can convert currency. e.g. you can do a search for 5 canadian dollars in USD (at the time I wrote this, it worked out to 4.9995 U.S. dollars)
• You can look up the weather using the weather keyword. e.g. you can do a search for weather toronto, on
• In addition to all of these special searches, Google will also try to be clever about many other types of search results.

And that’s just the regular Google search engine. But then they blew me away by creating a special site just for searching for images. And then, to make it even smarter, they combined image search results into the default search engine; search for a famous person, for example, and the first thing Google will show is image results. (I was going to put up a screenshot of a search for Lucy Liu, as an example, but one of the photos shown was kind of… racy.) And then they did the same thing for video. (e.g. you could do a search for videos on the internet with Lucy Liu.) I don’t think this took off that much, but still, it’s nice to have.

But the next product they released that really blew me away was Google Maps. At first, I didn’t realize how revolutionary it was—I was already a regular user of MapQuest, at the time, which I thought was great—except for the fact that you could link to a map, using a URL. (Other sites didn’t realize how useful that would be.) But then someone pointed out to me that you could actually click the maps, with your mouse, and drag them around. I couldn’t believe it. Being someone who worked with internet technologies for a living, including HTML and JavaScript, it never would have even occurred to me that you’d be able to do that. (It took people who didn’t know the technology to try it, and show me what you could do.) That was a defining moment, for me, when I realized just how smart the people at Google were. And since that time, they’ve continued to add improvement upon improvement to the map site: you can search for businesses or places that are close to your search destination; you can use the satellite view, to actually see satellite images of the area; you can use the terrain view, if you’re really interested in the geography of the area; you can actually overlay weather information, on top of the map; when you do trips, and Google picks out a route for you, you can actually drag the route line around, if you don’t quite like the way Google decided to do the trip for you; they have an API, that you can use to add your own places to the map (such as the map that the city of Guelph put on their website, for restaurants). Almost every time I use Google Maps, they’ve got a new feature, and it’s always a useful feature, and always easy to use.

They then came out with their video service, Google Video, which I thought was very cool, but in this instance, someone actually did a better job than Google: YouTube. So, of course, Google bought YouTube. (If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.) And, to their credit, Google doesn’t seem to have messed with YouTube, since they bought it; they saw that it was working, and they didn’t tinker with it.

And I’ve mentioned before the Google Books search engine. (Including a link to my own book.)

And then there is Google Docs. A search engine for documents on the internet? Oh no! A web-based tool for creating documents! Text documents, or spreadsheets, or even presentations. Not only can you create these documents, you can even collaborate on them—you can have two people working on the same document, at the same time. Plus, you can upload Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations. (You can also upload OpenOffice documents or spreadsheets, although not OpenOffice presentation, at the time I wrote this.) At the time I wrote this, you couldn’t yet save these documents to your computer as Word docs or Excel spreadsheets—at least, not that I could see—but I’m sure that’s coming, too. Then again, they’re much more interested in online collaboration, as illustrated in the video Google created to explain why it’s such a cool tool.

I’ve also heard—although I haven’t really used it—that the Gmail service is pretty cool, too. It may not be as pretty as the new versions of Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, but it’s apparently very good at filtering out spam, and very easy to use.

So everything Google does seems to be very cool, very useful, and very open. If you want to use Google’s services from your website, in many cases you can with a simple link. And, if you’re a developer, you can do even more using their APIs. (Such as the city of Guelph did, in the example I mentioned above, or such as BibleMap.org did.)

In terms of technologies, Google has been careful to use very open and simple technologies—most of their pages are just good ol’ fashioned HTML—but they were also one of the first companies to really make good use of AJAX. People didn’t realize what a powerful technology that could be, until they started to see things that Google was doing with it, like in the maps site or in Gmail. It’s such a simple idea, and yet so powerful, that you can use Gmail and the browser can get additional data from the server, without having to reload the whole page.

I’ve heard, from numerous people, that Google only hires the best and the brightest. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be tempted to apply for a job with them, and move to the States, because almost everything they do is brilliant. As a former geek, and current nerd, it’s the type of thing I’d love to be involved with.

Wave (Again)

I read another article today about the demise of Google Wave. In some ways, I think the author missed the point of Wave—but, at the same time, neither did the author deny that. In fact, it was part of the point of the post: What was Google Wave? What was it supposed to be for?

The author didn’t seem to get what Google Wave was, and believes that Google might have overhyped it; personally, I believe that a lot of the hype was justified—Wave was meant to replace email, and IM, and maybe even documents—but I definitely agree that Google’s message on Wave was muddy, at best. Their press seemed to be saying, “Google Wave is great! It’s amazing! It’s revolutionary! It does… well… some stuff. And it does it really, really well! And you should use it! And if you do… then maybe you’ll figure out what it is that Wave does.” It’s hard to get people excited about something when they don’t know what it is.

The author of this article said something similar:

Not only did Google fail to define Wave, it also promoted it clumsily. I’ve written before about Google’s strange habit of releasing lots of products with overlapping features—Wave, for instance, shared traits with Google Talk, Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Buzz. Wave seems to have lost out in this internal fight for users’ attention. It was Buzz, not Wave, that won a prized place inside Gmail, where it could instantly win lots of attention. Wave, meanwhile, was actively separated from Gmail—if someone wrote you in Wave, you wouldn’t get any notice in Gmail. Google eventually added e-mail notification for Waves, but by that time the ship had sailed. Wave had already been defined as an online ghetto—no one was there, so why should anyone join?

I definitely agree with this. Especially about the integration issues between Gmail, Wave, and Buzz. From the outside looking in, it seems that Buzz might have won some political wars within Google that Wave lost; it probably would have been a bad idea to integrate both Wave and Buzz into Gmail at the same time, but putting Buzz inside Gmail got it a lot of immediate exposure—even though I believe Buzz still isn’t getting used as much as Google would like—whereas Wave, as the author says, has become an online ghetto.

Google Talk

I regularly praise Google products on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that they’re perfect. I’ve been trying for a few days now to get Google Talk working, but it just… won’t. (I have a friend who has got a new job where he can’t use MSN Messenger anymore, but can use Google Talk. I thought I’d give it a shot, so we could keep in touch. Well, other than email, I mean.)

My problem is that I already have a Google account, but not a Gmail account. I use my regular email account as a sign-in name, and use that for the Google services I use (Blogger and Google Docs, mostly). So can you use Google Talk if you don’t have a Gmail account? Google says yes; according to this page:

If you’d like to sign up for Google Talk for an existing Google Account:

1. Sign in with your Google Account email address and password at https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?service=talk.
2. Enter your desired Talk username and click check availability! If your chosen name isn’t available, you can select from the suggested alternatives, or enter another username and try again.
3. Optionally, enter your first and/or last name in the appropriate fields. If you enter a name, it will show up on your friends’ Talk contact lists instead of your username.
4. Click Continue.

Sounds good—except that it doesn’t work. When I click the link, I don’t get prompted to enter a username, and I don’t get an option to enter a first name or last name. I just get… well, not much of anything, really. I get a page called “My Account” where I can’t really do anything.

So if I’m going to keep in touch with my friend, I guess he’ll have to try and configure MSN Messenger to work through his proxy. (Eric, have you tried using Pidgin? It can connect to MSN Messenger—even through HTTP—and Google Talk, and probably any other chat services you use.)

Google Docs. Yes, again.

I found some articles on Google Docs, that you might find interesting.

• Why Google Apps is a Serious Threat to Microsoft Office—written by a self-proclaimed “skeptical, later early adopter” and not a guy like me, who wants to try things out as soon as they’re available
• Writing a Book in Google Docs—not that I plan on doing this, but it was an interesting perspective
• Adding Page Numbers to Google Documents—an interesting “how to”
• Using Word with Google Docs—a good practical article on going back and forth between Google Docs and Microsoft Word
• Google Docs Offline Access—a post which reaffirms that Google will be introducing Google Gears support for Google Docs. It’s not just a pipe dream.

Chromium OS

Back in September of 2008, I wrote that I’d downloaded Google Chrome, to give it a try. I didn’t really get why Google had created a new web browser—especially since Firefox already exists; why not just make changes to that?—but I figured I’d try it out anyway. And then I never wrote about it again, but since then Chrome has become my default browser. I use it all the time, only using Internet Explorer when I have to for work, and occasionally using Firefox, but not that often. Why? Two main reasons:

1. It’s cleaner and sleeker looking than IE or Firefox. Take a look at the screenshots below to see what I mean; Chrome takes up a lot less real estate than the other browsers, leaving more room for the browser window itself.
2. It’s noticeably faster, especially when it comes to JavaScript. And this was Google’s main purpose in starting an open source browser; obviously all of Google’s sites depend heavily on JavaScript to function, so they spent a lot of time on optimizing the JavaScript engine, to make those sites run faster. Gmail is faster in Chrome than Firefox or IE; Wave is much, much faster, but Wave is a special case, because it’s very much a web-based application, even moreso than Gmail.
   
   Even preparing the screenshots below was noticeably faster in Chrome than Firefox or IE. (In fact, IE was terrible for this test; opening each new tab took seconds even before I’d loaded anything, plus a few seconds more to load the actual web page.)

So for reasons of speed and aesthetics, I have been using Google Chrome as my default browser pretty much ever since I first mentioned it, in that initial post. Because all of Google’s applications are web-based, and heavily dependent on JavaScript, they had a vested interest in making available a browser which would render those sites quickly, and provide a good experience to the user while on those sites.

But can we take that a bit further? Why yes, we can—what about netbooks? Those laptop-like things that are cheaper and more stripped down than full-blown laptops, and are only meant for those who want to surf the net? Is there any way we can improve those? Google decided that yes, these can be improved, and they came up with a new open-source operating system, called Chrome OS. (As mentioned, it’s open source; the open source project is called Chromium OS, while the final, Google-branded version that you would see on a laptop, would be Chrome OS. Just like the open source version of the browser is Chromium, while the Google-branded version is called Chrome.) As the name implies, the operating system basically is a browser.

I’ll let Google explain:


What are the benefits of this? The main benefit is speed. When you boot up a netbook running Chrome OS, you’re up and running in seconds. When I say “up and running,” I mean literally just a few seconds between the time you press the power button on your device, and the time that you’re surfing the internet. And I can verify these claims; I downloaded a version of Chromium OS that runs on a USB drive, just to try it out. As I was expecting, it’s incredibly slow overall; the OS wasn’t meant to run on a USB drive like that, and neither was it intended to run on a “regular” laptop, it was intended to run on a netbook, with a solid-state drive, and a very specific set of hardware. And yet, even with the horrible overall performance, when I pop in that USB drive and and press the power button on my laptop, it’s less than 30 seconds before I’m logged on and surfing the net. If I’m getting ready for work in the morning, and want to quickly log on to check my email or something, I can boot up from that USB drive, check my email, and shut down, all in the amount of time it would have taken to see the Windows splash screen if I were booting into Windows. In fact, if my desktop computer (which runs Windows Vista) has gone into sleep mode, it would be quicker to boot up cold into Chromium OS on my laptop than it would be to “wake the computer up” and log back in.

Here are some stats from my laptop, on how many seconds it takes for each stage of the bootup process:

Operating System	Splash Screen	Logon Screen	Able to Open Browser	Ready to Surf	Total Time
Windows XP	6	48	105	46	3:25
Ubuntu 9	5	41	8	5	59
Chromium OS	N/A	22	N/A	3	25

Note that these stats are actually skewed a little bit, because I have encryption software on my laptop; when I boot it up, I have to log onto the encryption software first, and then I get my boot loader which lets me choose Windows or Ubuntu. (The USB drive bypasses all of that, and just boots right to Chromium.) I did my Windows and Ubuntu timings from the time when I was at the boot loader, after I’d logged onto the encryption software. So there are two important impacts to this, in terms of these numbers:

1. Since the hard drive is encrypted, Windows is running a bit slower than it otherwise would have. It’s not actually that bad—I’d been expecting it to be slower, when I had to install the software—but based on my memory of how it behaved before the encryption software was installed, I’d estimate that we could probably shave 30–45 seconds off of the total number for Windows XP, if the drive wasn’t encrypted.
2. Contrarily, this means that these numbers don’t include the initial hardware loading time in the Windows and Ubuntu stats, which they should, but do include them for Chromium, which they shouldn’t (since Chrome OS wouldn’t normally have that phase of startup on a real netbook). So the Windows and Ubuntu numbers should be a bit higher, whereas the real numbers would actually be lower for Chrome OS. (See the demo videos, such as the one below, where they show someone booting a netbook cold into Chrome OS; it really is just a few seconds.)

Interestingly, I was surprised to find that Ubuntu actually shuts down a bit quicker than Chromium:

Operating System	Shutdown Time (seconds)
Windows XP	58
Ubuntu 9	11
Chromium OS	16

So how did they get it so fast to boot up? Again, I’ll let Google explain:


Incidentally, if you’re interested in more videos on Chromium, see the Google Chrome Channel on YouTube.

Now, I’m already seeing people around the net who are questioning the need for this OS, but most of the arguments against it show that they don’t understand the intent behind the operating system. Actually, it really means that they aren’t behind the idea of a netbook in the first place; at most, they might like the idea of a cheap, less powerful laptop, but they don’t get the whole netbook concept. Remember, the netbook was never intended to be your primary computer; it’s meant to be a secondary device, for lightweight internet-based stuff, not the only computer you have. If you’re only going to buy one computer, make it a desktop or a laptop and put Windows or Ubuntu or something on it; but if you’re also going to get a secondary device, for browsing or bringing with you to check your email and Facebook from Starbucks, then make it a cheap netbook. If you can get behind that concept, then you can start thinking about whether Chromium OS would be a good operating system for that device; if not, then your arguments against Chromium OS aren’t against the OS itself, but the actual concept of the netbook.

Here are the two most common arguments I’ve seen against Chrome OS, and my rebuttals:

“The whole operating system is browser-based? What if I want an image editing program, or a video editing program, or an IDE? I can’t do everything on the internet—computers have to do things other than just browsing the web!” You’re absolutely right, but netbooks aren’t intended to be the only computers you’ll ever use. If you want to edit photos, or create movies, or write computer code, use your desktop or your laptop for that. That’s not what netbooks are intended for, and it’s not what Chrome OS is intended for. (This argument really boils down to, “if Chrome OS can’t do everything, then it’s useless!” which is just silly.) But if you just want to get on the web, and check your email or check your stocks or catch up on your news or burn a few hours on Facebook or the myriad other things people do online, that’s what a netbook is for. And for the situations where netbooks are useful/intended, Chrome OS is a great operating system for that netbook to use.

“What if I don’t want all of my data on the cloud? What if I want to control my data?” Really, this argument is a variation of the first one; if you’re not the type who has your data on the cloud, then Chrome OS isn’t for you. But are you sure you don’t already have your data on the cloud? Maybe you’re not using Google Docs or Google Wave, but don’t you use Gmail, or Hotmail, or Yahoo mail? Or Facebook? For that matter, I bet even your email acount from your ISP, and even your corporate mail servers, have web-based interfaces that you can access. I have ten email addresses that I can think of off the top of my head, including my work addresses, and they’re all either web-based, or accessible by the web. But set aside the idea of having your “data” on the “cloud,” because it just clouds the issue when you start thinking in terms of information and data. The real question is: How much of your time do you spend browsing the web? You can use a netbook running Chrome OS and never touch a Google site like Gmail or Google Docs or Google Maps; if you’re in a situation where you just want to browse the web, and that’s it, that’s what netbooks are for, and, again, I think Chrome OS is a great operating system to use for that netbook. For anything else, use a real computer, and by all means, don’t use a browser for everything.

So that’s my longer-than-necessary post on Chromium OS. A lot of this post focused on speed, rather than the features of the OS, but that was on purpose, because speed is the main driving force behind Chromium OS. It is, after all, as close as possible to being just the Chromium browser, with as little “operating system” as possible getting between you and the internet.

Google Wave Redux

A number of years ago I wrote about Google Wave, and then a bit later I wrote about Wave’s demise, including an aside to show that even people who were using it [a bit] didn’t quite get it, and then wrote about Wave’s demise again, including a theory that perhaps Wave had simply fallen under the bus of Google’s product roadmap. (My assumption at the time was that it was shunted aside in favour of Buzz, making me all the more bitter when Buzz was also shelved.) It was a tough blow, but I managed to carry on. I’m a trooper. My main disappointment was that a good product was being shunted aside because other competing products had gotten in the way, but those are sometimes the realities we operate under.

But now I’m not so sure.

Shortly after the demise of Wave (at least in retrospect), Google introduced “discussions” to Google Docs, which was an obvious reuse of the Wave technology. This wasn’t a surprise—even when Google shut Wave down they’d indicated that the technology would probably find its way into other Google products—but it seemed like a pretty hollow victory to me. So comments are slightly better in documents; who cares, really? Not exactly revolutionary, more like a minor productivity improvement.

That same year they launched Google+, which was obviously a much bigger launch than just updated commenting functionality in Docs. I had mixed reactions to Google+, based on my previous aspirations for Wave. On the one hand they were introducing another social media product—not directly a “Facebook replacement,” though definitely a Facebook competitor—were they going to let it live and thrive, or just let it drop like they had done (I figured) with Wave? If they did let it thrive, though, maybe some of the Wave concepts and technologies would find new life. But this was before I’d really dipped my toes into the social networking waters, I wasn’t on Facebook (and still am not), so I admit I missed some of the nuances involved in this move.

Earlier this year it was announced that Blogger comments were getting an update, and being integrated with Google+. “Interesting,” I thought. “Tying the social media aspects with the publishing aspects of those Google products together makes a lot of sense.” And would it be too much to assume that some Wave technologies are making their way into that mix? Probably not, I’m betting.

But what really got me thinking was when they announced that Google Talk was going to be phased out in favour of Hangouts. I used Talk a lot, so I was initially trepidatious—humans don’t like change, even humans in the tech industry—but I steeled myself and made the switch pretty much immediately. I knew it was coming regardless of my feelings on the topic, so might as well get used to it, right? And it would probably have new features and all that. What I noticed immediately though was that there was less of a concept of being “online” or “offline.” Definitely no “Busy” status, or “Appear Invisible” so that you could see others and they couldn’t see you. In hangouts you send people messages and if they happen to be on a computer (or their phone) and want to respond instantly, like an IM conversation, then they will, and if they don’t happen to be able to “hang out” at that point then they’ll get to it later.

To old-school instant messaging folks that might seem like a loss of functionality. I’ve seen a few IM clients in my day that would allow that type of thing—I think ICQ had an “offline messages” feature if I recall correctly, and maybe one or two others—but the focus of instant messaging was always on the “instant” part. If you want to send offline messages that’s what email is for; instant messaging is for chatting. I imagine that lots of folks will complain about this, but this is very far from my point, because I actually like the feature. It is, in fact, reminiscent of Wave.

And that’s where this post came from: Some of the Wave concepts are reemerging, but instead of coming in one unified product like Wave they’re coming into being as integrations between various products. Blogger comments and Docs “discussions” and instant messaging and social networking are all getting tied together in interesting ways—and regardless of what happens where, I’m getting updated real-time if I want to be, or have the ability to pick up the conversation(s) at my leisure. Often this is happening on my phone, since I always have it with me, but when I’m at a traditional computer I’m seeing the updates there, too. And really, it doesn’t matter if I get the update on my phone or my computer or on Google Glass (if that becomes a thing) or on whatever comes after Google Glass (if Glass ends up just being a precursor to something); regardless of the medium the message is the same, and I have the same ability to continue the conversation.

One concept that I loved about Wave is still missing, which is that the distinction between an IM conversation and an email conversation and a document is forced upon us by the technologies, whereas Wave promised to make those distinctions irrelevant. I still feel that way, but what I missed in Wave was the social networking aspect; more and more of our communications in the modern world happen over social networking rather than over email or IM. So although I still feel that the distinctions between documents and chats and messages and emails and comments may someday go away, it’s probably too early to tell what the final outcome will look like. In the meantime, this ability to tie them together is a good step in the direction of getting us there, and I’ll continue to use a blog for longer, more permanent messages (like this one), and something like Google+ for shorter but still permanent messages, and something like Hangouts for more ephemeral conversations.

This is a very Google-centric mindset because I’m not on Facebook, but those who are on Facebook will have similar decisions to make with their communications, and many, many people will have much more complex decisions because they’re using both Google and Facebook technologies so even after they’ve made their decisions they’ll have to make further decisions about whether and where to cross-post. And none of this even takes into account Twitter—a huge omission, I fully admit.

And every time I have to make a decision as to which product to use for a particular message and it’s a hard decision to make, I’ll smile inwardly, knowing that we’re getting closer to our goal.

Google Wave

It’s been a while since I wrote a fawning post about how great Google technologies are, so it’s time I remedy that, and write a new fawning post about how great Google technologies are. Enter Google Wave. I started reading about it yesterday, and I think—I’m not sure, but I think—that I’m going to be blown away by this technology.

In a nutshell, Wave is a mashup of email, collaborative document writing (a la wikis), and instant messaging. In some ways this is simply incremental change to existing technology, but I think it’s one of those new ways of looking at things that has the potential to be a paradigm shift. To see what I mean, let’s take a very abbreviated look at the history of documents, email, and instant messaging:

1. In the olden days, before computers were invented, people used to write documents using a pen, or with a typewriter, or using similar technologies. If they wanted to send a copy of that document to someone else, they would bring it to them, or send it by mail. That person, when they’d received the mail, could read the document, and mark it up using a pen or pencil, and mail it back to the original person. S/He could read those changes, and, if s/he so wished, write/print/type up another version of the document, incorporating any of the changes that s/he wanted to incorporate. If the people needed more immediate feedback than mail could provide, they could use a technology called the telephone to talk to each other, over great distances, for immediate feedback.
2. Computers brought electronic versions of these technologies. Word processors and spreadsheet programs and presentation software replaced paper documents (or, at the very least, made it easier to create them—people still had a habit of printing them out, from time to time). Electronic mail, or email, replaced mail. We developed something called instant messaging for immediate communication, for those times when email was too slow, so that we can have a real-time conversation.
3. These technologies changed how we communicate; instant messaging is largely replacing phone calls, even as it incorporates phone-like features (like voice chat) and improves on them (like video chat). Email is largely replacing physical mail, and the contempt we have for the speed of physical mail is apparent in its new moniker, “snail mail.” Email also changed the way that we correspond with each other; when you send an email, you can send it to multiple people, and when one replies to an email, the reply usually incorporates a copy of the original email, so that a conversation can be maintained. Email introduced the concept of reply all, which means that everyone can be included in the email conversation, and provide their input (if necessary). Emails can also be forwarded to others, even if they weren’t originally included, or, when replying to an email, you can simply add new people to the reply, if you think they should know about the conversation that’s happening.
4. These technologies also changed the way that we wrote documents; with the ability to do everything electronically, we now had the ability to email a document to someone else, as an attachment, for them to read electronically, and then send a reply email back, with their comments on the document. Electronic documents made it much easier to incorporate changes, rather than having to write or type out another version of the document by hand.
5. Soon the people making word processors and spreadsheets and presentation software started incorporating features into their products that made it even easier to do this. Things like track changes and the ability to add comments made it very easy to see what changes others were suggesting, and software got very good at merging different versions of documents together, even tracking who had made what changes.
6. Looking for a way to keep our documents together in one place, people began creating document repositories. More than just a glorified file folder, these repositories included features like having multiple versions of a document, and workflow capabilities, and the ability to lock a document while editing it, so that nobody else can, until you’re done and you “check in” your changes.
7. Even with these advances in editing, some people felt it wasn’t enough, and the wiki was born. A wiki was a web site that anyone could edit, and in some ways strove to replace the document. The obvious example is Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that anyone can contribute to, but wikis have also been used for things like documentation for software projects. (Rather than having a series of documents that must be kept up to date, the documentation for the project is a [potentially] always up to date web site, that can easily be searched and updated.)
8. Despite the advent of the wiki, the vast majority of people were still creating documents, and emailing them back and forth as attachments, and using their track changes features to make changes. (Or they were simply replying to the original email, and saying things like, “You spelled a word wrong on page 4, paragraph 6. The diagram on page 9 is incorrect.”) Then Google came along with Google Docs, and gave us technology to put a document online, and let multiple people edit it at once, collaboratively. Google Docs turned documents into mini wikis. Now, instead of emailing a document as an attachment, for the person to edit and send back, forcing you to incorporate the changes, you would simply email (or IM) a link to the document, and the person would edit the document itself.

And this is about where we stand today. Wikis still exist, but aside from Wikipedia, they aren’t that prevalent. Despite the fact that I and others like me think Google Docs are cool, most of us (including myself) are still using applications like Microsoft Office to create our documents, and most of us are still using email to add these documents as attachments, to send to others. Interestingly even when we have a document repository—like Sharepoint, for example—we’re often still sending the documents as attachments; we could just send a link to the document in the repository, but in many cases someone doesn’t have access to the repository, and the document author usually isn’t the repository maintainer, so it’s much quicker to just email a copy of the document than to go through the red tape of getting the person granted access to the section of the repository that they need, to read the document. Email is, by far, the most prevalent means of communication, but instant messaging has also become an indispensable tool, both for work and personal use.

But still, even with the advances in technology we’re down to email (a replacement of snail mail, with some obvious improvements), instant messaging (a replacement of the telephone, with some obvious improvements), and electronic forms of documents (with some obvious improvements in how they’re created, but still, at the end of the day, are very much centred around the end product: the document.) Wikis are on the fringes, as a potential replacement for documents, but they haven’t gained traction as such.

So all of this to say, what is Google Wave? As mentioned, in some ways, it’s incremental technology, combining documents, email, and instant messaging into one technology. That was my first thought, when watching the hour and twenty minute long video where it was introduced. (Just in case that link expires, here’s the direct link to the YouTube video.) You can create a document, and multiple people can collaborate on it—just like Google Docs, you might say. You can receive notifications in your “inbox” when there are changes—just like in email, you might say (with a bit of an improvement). If people are online at the same time, you can see the changes they’re making as they make them, and you can send each other messages—just like instant messaging, you might say. Just like email, you can send someone a message, but when they respond to that message, they’re not limited to the usual message/response format we’re used to for email.

But here’s where the paradigm shift came in for me: email, documents, and instant messaging are all electronic versions of things we already used to do; with Google Wave, we have a potential replacement for email, documents, and instant messaging, creating a new paradigm that’s based on what computers can do, instead of simply trying to do the same old things we always did, with incremental improvements. (See this post on the Google Blog for an expansion on this.) With Google Wave, the line between an email and a document and an instant messaging conversation becomes blurred; what, really, is the difference between an email and a document? For the most part, just the length, and the means by which one can share it.

Today, when I want to communicate with someone, I have a few options:

• For a quick conversation with a quick answer, I can open my IM client, see if the person is online, and start a conversation. If I want, I can include multiple people in the conversation (although most IM clients will limit this to around a half dozen people or so).
• For something a bit more detailed, I can write an email, and send it to the person or people I want to communicate with. They can read the email, or, if required or desired, they can respond to it, and add their thoughts or make corrections on my original thoughts.
• For something that I want to make more permanent and/or official, I can write a document, and email it as an attachment or put it in a document repository. Others can read the document, and, if required or desired, they can send an email back to me, with their thoughts or corrections. If they have permission, maybe they can edit the document itself, in the document repository, and their changes will become part of the document.

Three different ways of communicating my ideas, depending on the nature of those ideas. With Google Wave, all three of these would be something called a wave. I want to communicate something to a person or people, so I create my initial communication, it shows up in their inbox, and they can communicate back in the manner that they see fit; changes to the content, comments off to the side of the content, private messages to some people who are part of the wave but not to others… whatever makes sense. If the conversation becomes detailed/important enough, it will be shared and seen by more and more people, just like a document might in today’s world. If not, it might be a simple short communication between two people, just like an IM conversation might in today’s world.

We currently have three levels of “permanence” for our communications, from the throwaway IM conversations to the slightly more permanent emails—which are still locked in our inboxes, to be seen only by us and people we forward the emails to—to documents, which become artefacts and semi-permanent records of our thoughts or findings on a subject. Waves make these distinctions obsolete, and the only distinction in the wave world is how many people the information is shared with. (One question in my mind, however, is whether waves will have the immediacy of instant messaging; I can easily see that we might no longer need a distinction between email and documents, but when I get an IM, in today’s world, it’s something immediate, that I respond to immediately; will that still be the case, if it’s just one more wave hitting my inbox? I’m not sure.

Email has been around since the beginning of the internet, and, as mentioned, is the most prevalent form of communication on the internet. With Google Wave, we may have a serious contender for a new form of communication, with the potential to replace email. We may also have a new way of doing wiki-like things that will be more popular than wikis ever became.

It should also be mentioned that Google is doing this all open source, and creating generic protocols that can be used; this isn’t just a closed system, where you’d have to sign up with Google to get access. You can create a corporate “wave server,” similar to how we have corporate email servers today. And, just like email today, you’d have the ability to add people to your waves that aren’t on your corporate wave server (just like you can send emails to anyone on the internet), but also not give them access to waves that they shouldn’t have access to.

Unfortunately, Google Wave isn’t yet completely open to the public; you can just sign up, and they’ll let you know when you can join. So I’m going to sign up, and play with it when they let me in. Of course, it won’t really do me any good until I know someone else who uses it.

Software serna Loves: MSN Messenger and Google Talk (and Pidgin/meebo.com)

You might be surprised to see Microsoft software on my list; I’m a bit surprised too. But I have to admit: I really like MSN Messenger. I’ve also been using Google Talk, a bit, and like it too. (Except that they still have a bizarre problem where you can’t use it without using a Gmail account.)

Part of this isn’t anything specific to MSN Messenger or Google Talk, though; part of this is just a fascination with chat software in general. They don’t call it “instant messaging” for nothing—there is a part of me that still gets a sense of childlike wonder that I can type something into my chat client, hit Enter, and have those words show up instantly in someone else’s chat client. In fact, I remember when I first started using MSN Messenger, and all of the people around me at work always had their sound on, so when I’d log in first thing in the morning I could hear all of their chat clients pinging to indicate that I’d just come online, again, virtually instantly. I work with people in various offices here in Toronto, people in Montreal, people in Québec City, and people in India; if we didn’t have chat software—primarily MSN Messenger—I can’t imagine being as productive as I am.

Now, this is normally where I’d start talking about the features I like about a particular piece of software, but honestly, when it comes to instant messaging, I don’t need or want a lot of features. Really, there are just two things I care about: it should be easy to chat, and it should be easy to send/receive files. (And even sending/receiving files is more of a convenience than anything; if I have to, I can send an IM to tell the person to check their email.)

It’s nice to be able to create a display picture, but not essential. It’s nice to be able to set a status message, but not essential. (Although we sometimes use the status messages in MSN for work; if I scan down my contact list, I’ll usually see a number of people with statuses that say things like “working from home this morning” or that type of thing.) It’s fun to be able to use emoticons—and even custom emoticons—but again, not essential. MSN Messenger has emoticons and custom emoticons, and when I use that I use a lot of emoticons in my chatting, but Google Talk doesn’t have emoticons, and I don’t miss it at all. (Maybe that’s because I’m an old-school chatter; it took years for my MSN Messenger buddies to get me to even turn on my emoticons, let alone start using them heavily.)

One feature I’m surprised I don’t use is the ability to do video chatting. This is a great feature, in theory, but I’ve never actually used it. Both MSN and Google can now do video chat—even the web-based version of Google chatting can do video conferencing (I’m not sure about the web-based versio of MSN). Maybe if I ever get a laptop for work that has a webcam built in I’ll start using it, but something tells me that even then, I probably won’t.

In terms of interface, I think I like Google Talk better than MSN Messenger because it’s cleaner and simpler (and doesn’t have advertising!), but both get the job done in much the same way:

• If you want to chat with someone, simply double-click their name in your contact list, and up pops a chat window.
• Chatting is simply a matter of typing your message, and hitting Enter to send the message to the other person or people. This bears mentioning because one of the first chat clients I ever used was called ICQ, and you used Ctrl+Enter instead of Enter, which wasn’t quite as satisfying. Based on my previous post on IrfanView, it’s no surprise that I like the simplicity of just hitting Enter to send the message. (Ctrl+Enter makes it seem more like an email than an IM message. You shouldn’t have to put that much thought into an IM message; just type as fast as you can—without worrying about spelling—hit Enter, and be done with it.)
• Along the same lines, when you’re done with a chat, simply hit Esc to dismiss the chat window, and it will disappear.
• If you want to send a file to someone, simply drag it to the chat window. If someone sends you a file, it will show up as a link that you can click to either accept or ignore, and when you accept the file will begin downloading to your computer.
• Although they have different ways of doing it, both MSN Messenger and Google Talk will notify you when you get a new email to your Hotmail or Gmail account (respectively). That being said, MSN Messenger seems to integrate much better with Internet Explorer than any other browser (surprise surprise), while Google Talk doesn’t care what your default browser is.

In terms of differences between the two:

• In MSN Messenger, you can add multiple people to your chat conversation; I don’t think you can currently do that in Google Talk.
• Google Talk has a nice “windowshade” feature, where you can click the titlebar of your chat window, and the window will “roll up” into the titlebar so that that’s all that’s showing. (Clicking it again will “unroll” the window so you can see it again. When you have the chat window rolled up like that, you can still see the last message the other person has sent to you, so you can do this to free up some real estate on your screen, but still easily continue the conversation when necessary.

So similar to my post on IrfanView, what I really like about my chat clients is that they don’t get in my way, and they just let me get on with my chatting. This is especially important at work, where the whole point is that you want to get a quick answer to a quick question, and then move on. Something like this:

sernaferna says:
How big do the log files get before rolling over?

someone else says:
5MB

sernaferna says:
thx!

someone else says:


Then you’re done; hit Esc, the chat window goes away, and you go on about your day. Not only is your answer immediate (unlike email, where you may have to wait a while for the person to respond), but you also don’t have any extraneous emails sitting in your Inbox or your Sent Items. I don’t know about you, but if I were to have this conversation over email, I may or may not delete the emails I got from the other person, but I’m sure I wouldn’t go back and delete the ones I’d sent from my Sent Items—but those are emails that I would never, ever need to go back and find. (And since most people compose their emails in HTML these days—plus have signatures automatically appended to their emails—the size of those emails can get crazy; looking through my Sent Items, I didn’t see a single email that was less than 3KB, whereas the entire fictional conversation above would have been about 65 bytes going across the wire.) Better still, your chat client can tell you if the person is currently online, and if they’re not, you can look for someone else who is, and get your answer from them.

Now, I’ve talked about MSN Messenger and Google Talk, but there’s a special mention I’d like to give, to Pidgin (and, by extension, meebo.com). I won’t go into too much detail on Pidgin, because I’ve already mentioned it on this blog, but it really is nice to be able to combine multiple chat accounts together in one interface, even if that interface is a bit more clunky than either MSN Messenger or Google Talk. And the aforementioned usability is all there for Pidgin, too: double-click a person’s name to chat; Enter to send message; Esc to dismiss the chat window; etc. Pidgin also has a spell check feature, which I always thought I would like in a chat client—I’m fairly anal retentive about my spelling, even in chat—but now that I have it, it turns out I don’t care that much. And although I personally haven’t used meebo.com, I have a colleague who uses it all the time, and says its great.

Google Wave, We Hardly Knew Ye. Literally.

Google has decided to pull the plug on Google Wave, because it hasn’t seen the level of adoption that they would have liked. This is unfortunate, because, as my readers know, I very much buy into the Wave concept. I would prefer to be using Wave over email, prefer to be using it over IM, and in a lot of cases prefer to be using it rather than creating documents. I was also looking forward to using Wave to write my blog posts.

I’d even begun work on creating a Wave gadget, but was hindered by some features that weren’t yet available—such as the ability to dynamically set the width of the gadget—but were being “worked on”. (I now see why they weren’t so quickly developed.) I had some ideas for other gadgets or robots, too; I probably would have ended up implementing all of the plugins I’d written for HTML-Kit as Wave gadgets/robots.

The thing is, despite my excitement about Wave, and my willingness to create a gadget, and the fact that I would prefer to use it, I barely ever do. And I don’t use it for the exact reason that Google is shutting it down: nobody else is using it. Wave is all about communication and collaboration—if you’ve got nobody to communicate with, if you’ve got nobody to collaborate with, then it’s not going to do you any good. The very first adopters of email, back in the day, could only email people with access to the network and email accounts of their own; for everyone else, they had to send actual letters. Same with Wave; I could “wave” with other people on Wave, but for everyone else—which is practically everybody—I have to use email and IM.

I’m not sure if it’s time yet for Google to shut it down; something like this would naturally take a long time to come into its own, and I’m not sure it’s been long enough. (Not that I’m expecting Google to read this blog post, and say, “Hey, serna’s right! We should give Wave a few more years!”) You can’t “get” Wave unless you’re using it, with other people who use it, and since hardly anyone is using it, very few people yet “get” wave or use it for anything useful. It’s not like Google Maps, where you can take one look at it and say, “Hey, that’s useful! Look, you can drag the map around with your mouse, and zoom in and zoom out, and you can search for things nearby your location, and…” It’s something that you’d need to use for a while, and start to realize how it gradually takes over where you used to email, or IM, or write a document, now all you’re using is Wave. Eventually you’d get to a point where there would be a minor level of irritation when you have to communicate with someone who doesn’t use Wave—but the thing is, most of us who buy into Wave have been constantly in that state for a year or two.

Just this past week, I had a conversation with a colleague. My manager had sent an email, and there were some Reply Alls and some replies sent only to me, and then my colleague IM’ed me to talk about it further. And during the conversation she said, “See, we don’t need google wave, we already act as if its all one communication device.” To which I had to respond, “But if we had Wave, we wouldn’t need this side IM conversation. You could respond right within the Wave, but make it private so that only I’d see it.” Really, there would have been no need for the Reply Alls, there would have been no need for the IM conversation—or multiple conversations, if others were discussing it as well—and if anyone had been away from their desk and came back, they wouldn’t have seen an Inbox full of emails, they would have see one, consolidated wave. My colleague is right, we don’t need Google Wave; we already have email and IM. But then again, we don’t need IM, either; we could just send little emails back and forth all the time for our conversations—so why do we use IM? Because it’s easier. And if we had Wave, the set of conversations mentioned in this instance, spread across emails and IMs, also would have been easier, and nobody would have had to fire up MSN Messenger.

My point being that people still don’t get Wave, and how could they if they’re not using it, and why should they use it—or how could they use it—if nobody else is?

I definitely understand Google’s “release early and release often” philosophy, and I can see why they rolled out Wave the way they did—only to a few hundred developers first, then to a preview audience, and only recently opening it up to the world—but unfortunately, because of that strategy, the main use for Wave over the last year has been a lot of navel gazing. A thousand people talking to each other about how great Wave is, and wishing they could get their friends and colleagues to use it so that they could start using it for real communication.

“I love Google” addendum: Google Translate

There was another Google tool that I forgot to mention in my last post, which I just recently discovered: Google Translate. The way that it works is very similar to Babel Fish, which I’ve been using for years. You can paste in a chunk of text, or give it a URL, tell it what language the original text is in and what language you want it translated to, and it will translate it for you.

In both cases, Google Translate and Babel Fish, the results are pretty good. I’ve been told that some translations work better than others; I typically just translate from French to English, and it works pretty well, from what I’ve seen.

But of course, Google wouldn’t introduce a new service unless they could improve on the old one, would they? There is one very cool addition, that Google Translate offers: If you don’t like the way that it translates something, you can offer your own suggestions! Translation is a notoriously difficult thing to automate, so I’m guessing that this will contribute to vast improvements in the translation engine, with time.

When you translate a block of text, there is a little link at the bottom, where you can offer your own suggestions:

And when you translate a URL, Google brings up the website, with its translated text, and if you hover your mouse over any sentence, Google will show a pop-up with the original text, and again, you can offer your own suggestions:


(You’ll see those screenshots better if you click them to go to my Flickr site, and look at the big versions.)

The text in the screenshots above is from a site that talks about prostate conditions, that was only available in French. Not that I’ve had prostate issues on my mind lately or anything…

If serna loves the internet so much, why doesn’t he marry it?

Actually, I’m already married. If I were to marry the internet, it would be polygamy, and I’d have to move to Utah. But I don’t want to live in the States. And, frankly, by the time Andrea gets tired of me, and boots me out of the house, the internet will probably have found some other lucky guy to marry.

I recently wrote two sappy “I love Google” posts (here and here). Well, I was doing some random surfing today, and I came across a whole bunch of cool things to write about. So here I go again. But I promise: These aren’t Google technologies. Well… actually, yeah, some of them are.

I’ve previously mentioned an instant messaging client called Pidgin. It’s a single client that can connect you to many different IM services; MSN Messenger (now called Windows Live Messenger), AIM, IRC, etc. (I wanted to write about the name changes to the Pidgin software, but I talked myself out of it, because of irrelevancy. You can read about it on Wikipedia, if you care.) I came across Pidgin because it came installed with Ubuntu, and I’ve found it very useful, even on Windows.

Well, a website called meebo.com has been introduced, which builds on the Pidgin libraries, and provides instant messaging from the web. (I don’t actually know how recent it is; I’m always behind the curve on new internet fads and tools. According to the “about” page, they launched in 2005—although that doesn’t mean they had any users.) Can’t install an instant messaging client on your computer? (Or you’re on someone else’s computer, and need to have a quick IM session, but don’t want to—or don’t have time to—install Pidgin on their computer?) Log onto meebo.com, and away you go. I haven’t actually used it, yet, but I’m sure I will, just to try it out.

I encountered meebo.com when I was reading about gOS. The gOS operating system—which is based on Ubuntu—doesn’t include many applications on the hard disk; instead, it uses Web 2.0 and AJAX for its applications. Where Ubuntu includes OpenOffice.org as an office suite, gOS uses Google Docs; where Ubuntu comes with Pidgin, gOS uses meebo.com; where Ubuntu comes with Evolution, gOS uses Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google News. This means that gOS takes up a lot less hard disk space than Ubuntu, since there’s not only less software installed, there’s also less need of storing documents—they’re all stored on the web.

That being said, there is also promise that applications will be able to use Google Gears technology, to make web applications available offline, so if you installed gOS on a laptop, you’d still be able to do some things without an internet connection. I don’t think this is 100% ready yet; you probably can’t yet edit a spreadsheet on Google Docs without an internet connection. But it’s coming; Google Reader uses Gears, and they’re working on it for Google Docs.

Voice Recognition

I read a nice post on Coding Horror today about voice recognition—and the fact that it’s still not here yet. (And may never come.) I’m not sure what I can add to his post, though, other than just saying “me too” over and over.

Atwood mentions the Google app you can get for your iPhone, and its voice recognition feature. My experience has been slightly different than his—I’ve found that it works remarkably well—but at the same time, I think of it more like a novelty, not a real useful thing. It’s fun to pull it out and speak into it, and have it automatically perform a Google search for me, especially if I want to show it off to others, but when I want to actually search for something… I pull up Safari, and type it into the Google search text box. (If I had my dream phone, I’d just do the search right from the phone’s “desktop” and not even pull up the browser until I found a result I needed!) I use Safari instead of the Google app with its voice recognition for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s faster. Safari loads faster than the Google app on my iPhone, and if I find the result I want, it’s going to end up loading Safari anyway. So it’s much faster to just start with Safari in the first place, and cut out the middle man.
2. Add to that the times when the voice recognition doesn’t work, and you have to do the search over and over, vs. just typing it in and getting it right the first time.

Plus there’s the whole speaking at your phone thing. Aside from the coolness factor, is there actually any benefit to saying your Google search at your phone, instead of typing it in? Any benefit whatsoever?

I was also right there with Atwood when it comes to dictation. He mentions that someone had had the idea of having him and Joel Spolsky use voice recognition software transcribe their podcast, and I was thinking of when I was looking into doing something similar for our church. We were going to start putting our sermons online, and I was thinking that having a textual version of the sermon would be very handy for things like Google searches, so I was playing around with Microsoft Word’s speech recognition. Which, again, is very good. But… not good enough, it turns out. In fact, I was trying to do some tests, using Microsoft Word, and one word that it could just never get right was “verse”. Imagine trying to transcribe a sermon without using the word “verse”! (To get a feel for why this is important, go back through any of the sermons we’ve got online, and see how often the pastor is referring to this or that verse, as he refers to passage after passage.) It’s possible that the speech recognition might have done a good job, and I’d just have to go through and correct it, but I’m with Atwood on this one, too:

Maybe it’s just me, but the friction of the huge error rate inherent in the machine transcript seems far more intimidating than a blank slate human transcription. The humans may not be particularly efficient, but they all add value along the way—collective human judgment can editorially improve the transcript, by removing all the duplication, repetition, and “ums” of a literal, by-the-book transcription.

I actually approached it very optimistically, but in my testing quickly came away with the idea that it wouldn’t work out well in practice. (What we ended up doing is coupling the pastor’s sermon notes with the audio for the sermon. It’s not the best solution—pastors often end up straying from their notes, so the notes won’t always match up with the actual sermon—but I think it’s a good compromise.)

So even though I sometimes find the iPhone’s text input kind of annoying, I’ll still choose it over the Google voice recognition any day. And do—every day.

Google Reader and the internet

I’ve mentioned before [probably] that if you want to follow my blog(s), you should probably get yourself some type of RSS “reader”, so that you can be notified when a new post appears. There’s little point coming back here every day to see what’s new when there’s a 90% chance that there won’t be anything. (There’s a 100% chance that even if there is, it won’t be worth your time, but technology can’t help with that problem. That’s just a matter of making poor choices in the blogs you follow.)

Lately, I’ve been using yet another Google product, as my RSS reader: Google Reader. And it’s pretty cool. When I log in, I get a list of all of the blogs (or other sites that have RSS feeds) that I’m watching, and can see at a glance which ones have new posts/items. I can read the posts right in Reader, or I can click the link to go to the blog’s site itself. If I want to, I can “star” an item, so that I can easily find it later, and I can even “share” items—with or without personal comments—and they’ll show up on a special public page, where people can see the posts that I’ve shared. (Which, itself, has an RSS feed, so people could in turn watch my “shared items” in their RSS reader.) I haven’t actually started using the “sharing” feature, though—except for one post from this blog, just to see what it looks like—so at the time of writing, there isn’t much to see at my shared items page. But still, I can definitely see the potential for that to be very cool. If I used it more often, I’d probably even put an RSS feed to my shared items in the sidebar at the side of this blog.

But here’s the issue, which is partially the reason I don’t use the sharing feature: There aren’t that many blogs that I follow. Most of the time when I go into Google Reader, I have the same experience as anyone who follows my blog: Nothing is there. So you’d think that I’d probably just go in once a day, first thing in the morning, and then leave it until the next day. But that’s not how I operate. Any time I have a couple of free minutes, I’m there, seeing the “no unread items” message.

I read a blog post today by someone who was mentioning the fact that the internet has the ability to waste a lot of his time, but I have the opposite problem: When I get a few free minutes at work, my first impulse is to go to the internet and read something, but when I go, there’s nothing to read! I get off a conference call, and have a few minutes to kill before my next one, so I whip out Google Reader, and find… nothing. (There’s even a handy Trends tool, that gives some cool statistics on the blogs I’m following, but that doesn’t do me much good either, when I’m not reading anything.)

So I foresee a future in which I spent a lot of time looking for blogs that I can put in my Google Reader list. Eventually, when I’ve got dozens and dozens, it will become more likely that there will be something to read any time I go into Google Reader. But that will cause other problems: I’ve noticed that I tend to get new items showing up in Reader in clusters; I may not find posts throughout the day, but if I look first thing in the morning, I’ll find a bunch. (Apparently most blog writers do their writing/posting at night, not throughout the day.) So when I get dozens and dozens of blogs added to Google Reader, I’ll also find dozens and dozens of posts showing up every morning—and probably still nothing (or very little) throughout the day!

Chrome

Since I’m always behind the curve when it comes to writing about new stuff, I guess I should mention—a day or two after everyone else has—that Google has introduced a new open-source web browser, which they call Chrome.

Now, you might ask yourself: Why has Google built its own web browser? Isn’t there already an open-source web browser, called Firefox, which by most accounts is pretty darned good? And if you want to do something interesting with the browser, couldn’t you do it by creating a Firefox plugin? (e.g. Ubiquity.) And Google expected that response, and put up a page saying why they did it.

But the thing is… I still don’t get it. I mean, I read the page, but it didn’t really answer the question, in my mind: Why did Google feel that they need their own browser? Why couldn’t they build on something like Firefox? I went through the little demo videos on their features page, and although it seems like a great browser, it also seems like it’s just a series of incremental improvements over Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. Not something revolutionary.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not saying that I think this is a dumb idea. Most of the folks over at Google are a lot smarter than I am, and I’m betting they had a good reason for doing this. And I’m also thinking back to when Firefox first introduced tabbed browsing, and how I didn’t think it was such a big deal, because that was only an “incremental improvement” over having multiple browser windows open. (“You’re just trading multiple buttons in your Taskbar for multiple tabs in your browser,” I thought, “What’s the big deal?”) But now I can’t imagine not having tabs in a browser.

In any event, I’m downloading Chrome, and will give it a try. (I’ve written too many love letters on this blog to other Google products not to give it a try!) I’m prepared to be blown away, but expecting to find “just another browser”, maybe slightly better than Firefox. Time will tell.

Cuil

A new search engine has been launched, named Cuil (pronounced “cool”), which is touting itself as a Google killer. Am I one of the first to write about it? Naw, I doubt it. Maybe one of the first ten thousand. Anyway, they claim to have a bigger index, and, therefore, a better ability to find search results.

I first read about it on Wired, in an article that seemed very positive, but Wired isn’t always that prescient. I thought I’d try it out; I’ve been having trouble writing a plugin for gedit, in Python, that I just can’t quite get working. (I don’t know if it’s because I don’t know Python—which I don’t—or if it’s because I don’t know the gedit/gtk programming model, which is really poorly documented.) I’ve done lots of searches in Google to try and find help on how to debug a plugin, and I’m seeing lots of example plugins and other stuff, but nothing that is helping with my troubleshooting. So I pulled up Cuil, and started searching for things like “help writing a Python plugin for gedit” and similar phrases. Also, for fun, I also searched for “David Hunter”.

What I got was a lot of error messages, and very few search results. In fact, in my gedit-plugin-related searches, I never got any results. In my “David Hunter” searches, I did get a page of results, although I never found myself, and the page seemed to indicate that it was still loading, but never actually finished.

Now, I wasn’t worried about the error messages. It’ll take them a while to get their infrastructure firmed up, and get the kinks worked out. (One might have hoped that they’d have done that before launching, but hey, I’m a forgiving guy.) The thing is, even if the search results were great, even if I’d managed to find everything I was looking for—especially the gedit plugin stuff, since I wasn’t able to find a lot of help through Google—they’d still have an uphill battle trying to unseat Google. Google is more than search. I would go on about it further, but this post from another blog did a better job.

The fact is, Google is pretty darned good, and even if Cuil is better, it is probably only marginally better. If I couldn’t find what I was looking for, regarding my gedit plugin, it’s probably because what I’m looking for doesn’t exist.

Prescience

I have to admit to rarely having been very prescient about new technologies. I understand technology very well, but when it comes to predicting what will take off and what won’t, I’m often off the mark.

Some examples:

• I never thought Facebook would take off the way that it did. I figured it would be very popular for a while, and then everyone would move onto something else, as they did with MySpace and the various other social networking sites that had come before it. But the Facebook API (among other things) proved me wrong, and, despite my predictions, it’s still quite popular.
• I underestimated how popular the iPhone would be, and then overestimated how popular the Palm Pre would be. In a radius of twenty feet from where I’m currently sitting at work there are probably a dozen iPhones, but not a single Pre. (Despite the fact that the Pre keeps winning awards for being so darned great.)
• I was initially right about the Y2K bug, but then gave in to the hype and became as wrong as everyone else. When people first started talking about the Y2K problem, I said, well, it’s no big deal; maybe some reports will be wrong, and say 1900 instead of 2000, but other than that, problems will be extremely rare. If I’d stuck with that, I could have claimed I was prescient, but eventually all of the people who claimed that the sky was going to fall got to me, and I started to think it might actually be a big problem—only to have the clock turn over at 2000, and nothing happened, as I’d originally predicted.
• I’ve written before (I think) about the fact that I never really cared when Google was launched. Big deal, another search engine, who cares; I already have my hierarchical list of sites on Yahoo!, what do I need another search engine for? Here we are today, and Google is so useful that many if not most people use it for their default page when they load their browser.

These are some examples; there are others. And here are two more.

I’ve already written about Google Wave, and how I think it has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting technology, which might, in time, replace email. (And IM. And documents—but now I’m really dreaming.) And I’d like to be right about it—if only so that I could claim I was prescient—but everyone else seems kind of underwhelmed by it. (Someone described it to me recently as “a solution in search of a problem”—I’m not of that opinion, obviously, but I can definitely understand the sentiment.) There’s still time, don’t get me wrong. I haven’t lost hope in it. But I would feel better if others were sharing my enthusiasm, and as of yet, they’re not.

Then, yesterday, Apple launched the iPad, which is a tablet-sized device, kind of like a big iPhone. And I’m seeing a lot of hype about it, but I’m thinking… so what? It’s a tablet. Big deal. It’s an iPhone, but bigger. (Or, if you get the version without 3G, it’s an iPod Touch, but bigger.) There have been tablets before, and none of them have ever taken off, because people don’t seem to want to use their computers like that. In fact, I remember when I first heard about Tablet PC from Microsoft, and, in another case of non-prescience, was very excited, assuming that it would be the next big thing. Here we are a few years later; have you ever met anyone who had a Tablet PC? I haven’t. I just did a Google search for “Microsoft Tablet PC”, and on the first page of results, the only pages on Microsoft’s site were one in Taiwanese, and one from Microsoft Support, so it’s not exactly a feature that Microsoft is pushing hard. So I’m not seeing the big deal about the iPad, but who knows? Maybe Apple will have implemented it in such a way that people really will find it useful. But at this point, I’m thinking that I’d rather be using a netbook than an iPad.

I should mention that some people have similar feelings about “netbooks.” Who would ever want a netbook, they ask; why not use a laptop, if you want a laptop, or your phone, if you want portability? I don’t agree with them on that; I think that netbooks actually are a good idea, for a lot of situations (and am kind of excited about Google Chrome OS). I think there’s a good market for an in between device, that’s more comfortable than a phone, but just for browsing the web and checking email, therefore not requiring the power (or cost) of a real laptop. (I wasn’t prescient or non-prescient about netbooks; by the time I’d even given them any thought, they were already very popular.)

So I’m thinking that Google Wave is going to be revolutionary, but, based on my history of trying to predict the future, am probably wrong. And I’m thinking that the iPad is no big deal, but for the same reasons, am probably wrong.