Ahh the Onion...couldnt have said it better myself.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_device_desirable_old_device
Thats it for today.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Google Wave is Google's "vista"
Here I am alone in Google wave. There are some buttons I can press, lots of familiar interface elements, but no contacts, no one to "wave to".
So, I'm alone. Perhaps I can create something and store it for later, just in case at some point someone joins my "wave" ? What exactly is a "wave" ? Dont really know so far, but it seems to be what I would call a conversation. You can apparently attach files, applications, pictures, sounds (usually measured in waves), and the like, so it basically looks like chat, message boards, comments, and blog posts all mooshed together in a kind of baby blue / mostly white interface.
What I had hoped was I could at least communicate with twitter, facebook, or people I know on youtube (all 5 of them), but it seems to have no interop, so their aim is to effectively redo social networking from scratch?
There are some interesting elements.
Scrollbars - Instead of having the up and down scroll buttons on the top and bottom of the scroll pane, they attach them to the bar itself. This seems practical in a way because then you can move your mouse slightly less far to get to the up and down buttons, which is probably what the mac tried to do . However, the bar doesnt resize to indicate the relative scroll amount, and covers the apparent indicator which is behind it (you can see it occasionally) so interesting try, but really its kind of pointless to change something that wasnt really broken unless you can offer a true improvement.
From what I can tell by reading the greyed out, currently unavailable menu choices, it appears that the "waves" could be somewhat of an improvement on conversations - if they were embeddable inside familiar contexts. If you could have a "wave" or a "chat" or a "thread" as a choice when you were on facebook, or someone's blog, or in a chat room on ning.com, then I think this would potentially be groundbreaking. If its supposed to happen in a vaccuum, then its entirely useless.
They are offering an api, so for their sake, a flash SDK, a ning/opensocial widget, a facebook widget, and stuff will hopefully come along soon to let people see the potential of this, but so far, just going to the wave preview was about as interesting as hanging out in an empty chatroom.
You can't get everything right, and the ability to be innovative seems inversely proportionate to the amount of money and resources one has. Microsoft has proven this for many years by only being able to copy Google's search with Bing, 10 years after Google got it working and started on a shoestring. Since search though, Google hasnt really broken any new ground, and they've instead tried to copy word processing programs, bought other peoples ideas and then squished them (youtube), and is basically starting to look a lot like Microsoft.
We'll see what happens. But from what I read on the blogs here and here, its looking more and more like Google wave is Microsoft Vista, only no one has to buy it.
So, I'm alone. Perhaps I can create something and store it for later, just in case at some point someone joins my "wave" ? What exactly is a "wave" ? Dont really know so far, but it seems to be what I would call a conversation. You can apparently attach files, applications, pictures, sounds (usually measured in waves), and the like, so it basically looks like chat, message boards, comments, and blog posts all mooshed together in a kind of baby blue / mostly white interface.
What I had hoped was I could at least communicate with twitter, facebook, or people I know on youtube (all 5 of them), but it seems to have no interop, so their aim is to effectively redo social networking from scratch?
There are some interesting elements.
Scrollbars - Instead of having the up and down scroll buttons on the top and bottom of the scroll pane, they attach them to the bar itself. This seems practical in a way because then you can move your mouse slightly less far to get to the up and down buttons, which is probably what the mac tried to do . However, the bar doesnt resize to indicate the relative scroll amount, and covers the apparent indicator which is behind it (you can see it occasionally) so interesting try, but really its kind of pointless to change something that wasnt really broken unless you can offer a true improvement.
From what I can tell by reading the greyed out, currently unavailable menu choices, it appears that the "waves" could be somewhat of an improvement on conversations - if they were embeddable inside familiar contexts. If you could have a "wave" or a "chat" or a "thread" as a choice when you were on facebook, or someone's blog, or in a chat room on ning.com, then I think this would potentially be groundbreaking. If its supposed to happen in a vaccuum, then its entirely useless.
They are offering an api, so for their sake, a flash SDK, a ning/opensocial widget, a facebook widget, and stuff will hopefully come along soon to let people see the potential of this, but so far, just going to the wave preview was about as interesting as hanging out in an empty chatroom.
You can't get everything right, and the ability to be innovative seems inversely proportionate to the amount of money and resources one has. Microsoft has proven this for many years by only being able to copy Google's search with Bing, 10 years after Google got it working and started on a shoestring. Since search though, Google hasnt really broken any new ground, and they've instead tried to copy word processing programs, bought other peoples ideas and then squished them (youtube), and is basically starting to look a lot like Microsoft.
We'll see what happens. But from what I read on the blogs here and here, its looking more and more like Google wave is Microsoft Vista, only no one has to buy it.
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