OK, so I'm sure hundreds of thousands of other bloggers with more insightful comments than me will be posting about this, but I'll still put in a quick shot. Google Wave http://wave.google.com is creating a major buzz following a recent developer demo. The video makes it look pretty good, with the most significant emphasis on the real-time interaction and open extensibility.
Wave promises to re-define the paradigms of email, instant messaging, wiki and other collaboration models by incorporating them all in a unified protocol. The prototype client-side tools run entirely in the web browser but behave much more like a native desktop application. Conversations can occur in character-by-character real time, eliminating standard "Suzie is typing..." lag times. Documents can be edited collaboratively in real time with color-coded highlights as they are typed. Everything is re-play-able in a timeline so you can see how the work progressed.
I think there's a lot of potential here. Will Wave supersede all these other forms of communication? Hard to tell. There's certainly a lot of inertia to overcome, or at least accommodate. With the open APIs, it should be possible to integrate Wave technology and build interfaces to existing systems like SMTP and Jabber. I'll also be interested to hear more about how the new Wave protocol addresses things like trust relationships and spam prevention.
Regardless of whether it revolutionizes the world or not, I have to give props to the google team for taking a shot at innovating and changing the way we think about communication. It's also very commendable that they're pursuing this project with as much openness as they can, taking the extra step to allow interoperability and even direct competition in a way that still encourages connectedness across the entire system. Keep up the good work, guys.
I just discovered the mapmotive app on facebook ... very cool!
Am I a true trekkie? Probably not, I don't even have the pajamas. :-) But I'll admit to being a long-time fan, from the original TV series through most of the spin-offs and movies. I had a blast at the new Star Trek film last night. It's very well done, intense, clever, campy, with plenty of insider references, but still a fun ride even for the uninitiated. The theater we went too had actually over-shot the number of screens they needed to schedule, so the room was not crowded at all, but that didn't diminish the fun of sharing the experience with others. I was with a group of a half-dozen guys and we all had a good time. Some were long-time fans, others had no frame of reference, and everyone enjoyed the show.
The actors did a great job of portraying the classic characters in their full personality, extrapolated back to their prequel younger selves. The writers deftly avoided any nit-picking quibbles about historical consistency with the other shows and movies by neatly packaging everything in an alternate reality, courtesy of meddling time-travelers. Some might see that as a cop-out, but I found it to be a relief, in that I didn't have to waste energy trying to figure out if everything made sense in context with everything else. The plot wasn't very deep, but it provided enough of a framework to get us from point A to point B with plenty of action along the way.
Definitely a thumbs-up for me.
OK, this blog has sat dormant for too long. Like many, I've been doing a lot more with facebook and twitter lately, and it's great to be able to do more frequent, shorter posts. Still, I need to be doing more substantial writing sometimes too. It's been a wild ride the past several months.
The biggest recent news is that we bought a townhouse, just across town from where we've been the past several years. The market is really in a perfect storm right now for buyers; prices are down, interest rates are down, and as long as you have a decent credit score there are loans to be had.
Plenty more to write about, hopefully I'll get more consistent. Also testing automatic status updates with this post, so it should get linked via pingvine through ping.fm to facebook, twitter, linkedin, identica. We'll see.
