Netizen

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Google Wave Ripples

Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

Microsoft's Bing - touting itself as a "decision engine" - was supposed to have all the buzz but then Google Wave came along. Is Bing an engineering marvel, or is it just marketing? One has to wonder. But Google Wave has the buzz for engineering, square and simple. The buzz is for being the next big thing.

The launch of Google Wave has been breathtaking. But I think when the developers around the world get to pounce on that Google Wave, the results are going to be equally breathtaking. Right now I don't know what to expect. I guess I will just keep my expectations high and vague.

With Android and Wave, Google has managed to suck the 2009 tech oxygen. When was the last time Google had this much buzz? When Gmail came out? When it went public? I think the current buzz - or, rather, ripples - are at new heights.

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

In The News

Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful CNET News a more contemporary take on communications ....... a group of people can have an actual discussion in e-mail, in real-time if wanted, without getting bogged down in long multi-message discussions--or worse, in threads that end up forking so that different people are discussing different things. ..... Speaking of being overwhelmed, the first time I had two people replying to me in an individual message at the same time, in different places in it, my head almost exploded. It's a lot of raw information coming it at once, and it's very different from the old e-mail or the instant message experience. ........ Wave has no legacy support for old e-mail architectures whatsoever, and isn't bogged down by the old methods--like the practice of delivering messages to users and then severing the links to those messages. ........... Wave addresses look like e-mail addresses, but there's no gateway between Internet e-mail and Wave, so messages send from standard e-mail clients to Wave will bounce. ....... Wave is currently spam-free since it's not linked into the global e-mail system ....... technically a radical departure from e-mail, but for the end users it will still be used for a lot of the same things e-mail is. ..... there's no reason we should we need different applications--an e-mail client (or site), an instant messenger, and a collaborative editor--for variations on the theme of textual communication

Google Wave: Our First Hands-On Impressions ReadWriteWeb Google is indeed on to something ...... real-time email with a big dose of IM built-in, but even this only just describes a small part of what Wave can do. ....... you can pick a specific word or phrase and respond to that, instead of the whole message. ....... the Google widget, which allows you to very easily search Google and add a link to the wave ...... search YouTube and Google Images and embed videos and pictures ....... embed a map that you can extend by setting place markers and drawing lines. .... long waves with a lot of concurrent users can get a bit confusing. ...... as expected, it didn't work in IE but worked perfectly fine in all the other browsers. ..... could revolutionize the way employees in a company communicate ........ once you get into the flow of things, regular email suddenly feels stale and slow. ...... If you want a Wave to look more like a document instead of a conversation, Wave will work just as well as when you just want to use it as a chat room. ...... default messaging system.

Google Wave draws huge Interest I4U

Google Wave the next social media phenomenon and journalistic tool? editorsweblog.org chat and share documents including audio files, videos and photos in real-time. ... Google Wave is the brain-child of Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers who bought us Google Maps. They explain they wanted to "rethink what a single communications platform might look like if we started from scratch." ....start with a clean slate, rather than have today's Internet reality determine what could be possible in the future or even present. ....... project has been ongoing for two years ....... integrate and embed existing communications systems, including Twitter .... a chat function which allows one user to speak to another in one language and have the text appear in another. ....... Google aims to have Wave operating in 40 languages with translations being possible from any pair within the range. ....... an economical and effective new way for professionals to communicate across all sectors ...... lending itself to the way newsrooms around the globe are organised. ........ Wave is what news can be if we invent it today ..... we have a great relationship with many newspapers ... We paid 6 billion dollars to content owners last year." ......... for the first time, a news story will be able to grow and transform itself online as it does in the real world ........ Wave affords them the opportunity to concentrate on content and worry less about the platform
Microsoft May Bing Google as Wave Grabs Market Sci-Tech Today

Microsoft kicks off huge Bing ad push CNET News "When people don't get right search result they thing it's their fault."

Microsoft Launches Its “Google Killer” Bing Search Engine Jutia Group Bing will represent Microsoft’s third attempt at developing a go-to search engine in the last 10 years. ....... Bing Travel, which will predict airfare and hotel rates based on the time of year, ensuring users get better results. Microsoft gained this technology from its $115 million acquisition of travel Web site Farecast last year. ....... the campaign will pose a key question: Do current search engines really solve your problems? ....... Google will bring its Android operating system to “netbook” laptops in an attempt to take on Microsoft’s firmly entrenched Windows.

Bing Search Bars are now everywhere! LiveSide

Could Google Wave Tip Microsoft's SharePoint Cash Cow? ChannelWeb a coming "arms race" of innovation in the enterprise collaboration space. ....... e-mail, instant messaging, document sharing, blogging and wikis in a single application ....... Google's real target isn't to challenge Microsoft SharePoint, but rather to push the envelope in the social networking space. .... Facebook is the more likely target

A Complete Guide to Google Wave BusinessWeek
Google Wave: A Complete Guide Mashable

Google's Wave Could Be an Internet Tsunami Motley Fool In 1993, I had no idea what an email address was. Two years later, I couldn't live without it. ...... now, Google wants to overthrow the whole email hegemony and replace it with something entirely new ...... Say hello to Google Wave -- the email killer. ...... Developed by a team of 50 engineers in Sydney ...... organic conversations between two or more people ....... "collaboration and communication" on a grand scale. ...... a completely new way of looking at online communications. ...... Open standards lead to open development and worldwide innovation, which is both cheaper for Google and better for the technology itself. .......... Wave promotes richer communications with more video sharing and higher bandwidth footprints. ....... a win for the networking guys, for Google and its ubiquitous ad platforms, and for upstarts with a great idea that doesn't quite fit in the Facebook or Twitter paradigms. One invention, plenty of winners. ........ what "email", "instant messaging", "SMS", and "Twitter" were, back in the day before Wave mashed it all up into a single service. ....... a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (BHAG)

Google Wave to be released later this year Examiner.com
Google's New Wave Reuters a grand messaging service ..... actual launch date is months away, which leads one to wonder if they bumped up the announcement to steal some of Microsoft's thunder.

Google Wave bye bye to Bing iTWire

Does Bing Ding Google? PC Magazine

Google Wave & Microsoft Bing Cnet Asia I was quite happy with snail mail until email came along. ...... When I discovered the convenience of threaded conversations, I went to heaven and have been there ever since. ....... Is there another level to the heaven I'm on? A sky lounge? I can't say until I try Google Wave for myself. ....... after a sneak preview of Microsoft's new Bing, I'm itching to get off my butt and make a permanent move to www.bing.com. ....... Other than turning in the link to Streamyx's main homepage and thousands of other sites hurling abuse at TMNet

Google won't run all the Wave servers CNET News Google has said it will "federate" Wave. That means it will make it possible for anyone to operate their own Wave server and have it communicate with other Wave servers. This is just how e-mail works today: Anyone can run an e-mail server that can send messages to and receive messages from any other e-mail system. ...... Wave will be based on (and extend on) the existing messaging standard, XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). ..... Google destroys entrenched markets.

Google Wave: Five Things You Must Know PC Magazine the evolution of Gmail, Docs, and maybe even Blogger ...... great for collaborative work in a corporate environment.. Google Wave is real-time: real-time search of Waves, real-time linking, real-time remote control object manipulation (say I embed a map in a wave, and then manipulate it remotely while you're looking at it), real-time translation. (Yes, on a character-by-character basis. Imagine a Google Doc translating your words into Spanish as you type.) ........ the air has just been let out of Twitter's sails. ........ Google is constantly improving its response time to get close to real-time results, but that real-time is an absolute that will be approached, but never actually met. ....... as more and more people generate and consume content while on the go ... the browser is indeed the OS of the future ..... waves can be embedded in Web sites

Google Wave: A new kind of mega-application Computerworld combines the myriad trends we've seen the last couple years on the Web into one application. ....... Tivo for Web content. .... some speculate whether it will cannibalize core web services (even some of Google's, like Google Docs or Picasa) ...... Wave's greatest asset could be that all this information can become more useful from ties to Google's core product: search. ..... companies desperately need a technology like Wave to help their employees collaborate in a more streamlined way. .... most enterprises remain years away from switching to this type of information stream, due to their current technology infrastructures ....... Today, employees must sort through messy "reply-all" e-mails to engage with content as a group. If you're working with a document in SharePoint, you must "check it in" and "check it out," making it hard for multiple people to contribute in real-time.

Web Semantics: Google Wave Jargon Wired News
Is Salesforce Switching appexchange To Google Wave? BNET

Google Wave: Gaming Impact Examiner.com it's going to revolutionize internet communications, and offer both individuals and businesses a number of new methods of connecting ....... I know a number of people I'd love to play with, but chat format games just lack a certain immediacy that Wave offers. ...... The beauty of Wave is that everything occurs in the browser, so you don't need a million complex programs to work congruently to play an interactive game.

The enterprise implications of Google Wave ZDNet egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009. ......... individual companies may be losing the capacity to drive the agenda for the world when it comes to establishing successful new Internet standards and technologies. ...... the ultimate destiny of Wave itself is far from clear ...... so many of the early and current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging, mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after their inception. .......... Google’s tendency to emphasize the consumer world first and the enterprise later ....... highly interactive document creation via the browser. ........ infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. ....... a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about ........ Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven’t changed much since ....... fundamentally social in nature ....... a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that’s a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information ........... an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology. ....... Google is expecting many more front-ends for creating and editing waves, depending on the individual requirements of various entities. Google Wave is their own front-end application for doing so and using HTML 5 in their wave client shows they are planning more for the future than present. ........ organizations will have to deal with business data in the Wave Protocol format in the future. ........ Twitter and existing social networks can play very well with Google Wave, enhancing the experience and allowing broader participation in a wave through other applications. Google Wave won’t (necessarily) replace existing apps like e-mail, IM, blogs, or wikis, and can actually make the latter two stronger through embedding. ........ a wave presupposes a bit more structure and situated use than the more tabula rasa blog or wiki. ...... while participants are busy typing and collaborating, a wave can be receiving support from back-end systems such as HRM, CRM, ERP, and so on to provide data, context, and other just-in-time support. ....... the convergence of our IT systems and Web 2.0 ...... ease-of-development for creating server-side extension ..... the premise of the product is also one of the dominant activities in the business world (enabling teamwork) and combined with the increasing consumerization of the workplace ....... organizations will need to understand how waves will make their organizations even more porous on the Internet ....... Gmail, Gtalk, Blogger to name just three, yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up. ..... clarity of purpose and design, Google Wave has a good shot at helping take Enterprise 2.0 to the next level in many organizations.
Google Wave Bye Bye To Bing Can Microsoft keep pace with Google’s thought leadership? .... It has taken Microsoft a decade to make its way to the battle ground, turning up late to a fight that has already been won, the victor having since turned their attention to loftier pursuits. ....... blogs and wikis and documents all at the one time. ....... the most radical new Internet innovation since the advent of the Web itself ........ e-mail, the most ubiquitous Internet application ........ The next big buzzword isn’t going to be bing. It’s going to be wave. I’ll send you a wave. I’ll wave that file to you. Your parents will wave you photos while on vacation. ..... It must be asked, has the grey matter gone out of Redmond? Love him or hate him you can’t deny Bill Gates was a strong driving force and steered Microsoft to its monolithic stature. His technical successors, Dave Cutler and Ray Ozzie, are far from household names. Cutler is still to prove Azure has cross-platform appeal and is an environment corporations can trust, while Ozzie's Groove is languishing in obscurity. ........ not only has Google already proven it can outpace Microsoft to market, but is showing it can outthink its shrinkwrapped rival.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

NY Internet Week: NYTM Showcase

Image via CrunchBase

http://nytm.org/showcase

I showed up and was there for all three hours. I have missed the past two MeetUps, I missed the one tonight also. Do we have to do Amazon payments? Whatever happened to PayPal and cash? There is something moneylike about cash. I like cash.

This was an amazing, amazing gathering. I managed to show up at every single stall. Bumping into Scott and Mark was a nice way to conclude the evening for me. Right before that I bumped into Faraz.

I was very much in my element by the end. Talking to so many people drove up my energy level substantially.

Afterwards I walked over to 41st and 9th. Half way there I got myself a free Red Bull from a Red Bull advertising car driven around by two young models. Red Bull gives you wings, they say.

At the event I met two potential angel investors, and many interesting people, collected many business cards. I might have built a few contacts. Mostly it is about sharing in the energy of fellow entrepreneurs. Otherwise I am not into the dot com space with my startup like almost everyone in the hall was.

I made a point to tell the Zemanta guy how much I appreciated their service. Zemanta has taken my blogging to a whole new level.

Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?

Social is central to Facebook. A different kind of social is central to Twitter. But if Google Wave is going to be a mere appendage to the larger Google offerings, social is going to be peripheral. But Google is not trying to enmesh Google Wave to the rest of its offerings. If anything I get the impression Google is working hard to release the pigeon. Fly, pigeon, fly.

Google Wave wants to be fundamental to the web experience like Google Search has been fundamental to the web experience. The word wave is going to become like the word tweet, like the word stream. I like the water metaphors. Water is my favorite substance. Water best represents the inherent formlessness of a nimble mind.

So is a stand alone Google Wave capable of challenging Facebook and Twitter? I am not worried about the stand alone part. Google could not have kept Android in-house like Microsoft has kept Windows in-house. Google Wave is a creature of the wild west. It can not be kept in-house. But releasing the pigeon is also the best possible business decision for Google the company. A vibrant Google Wave will expand the Google space. A vibrant Android is going to vastly expand the Google space. A larger cloud, a more happening cloud just gives more and more room to Google ads. And that is where the money is for Google. Giving away is great business practice. Giving away is tens of billions in new dollars.

So does Google Wave stand to challenge Facebook and Twitter, the two services that seemed to have stolen the buzz from Google these past few years? The short answer is Google Wave is the next big thing.

Stream 2.0: The Next Big Thing?
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream

Just like Twitter stole the buzz from Facebook, Google Wave is going to steal the buzz from Twitter. Twitter will still be around like Facebook is still around and growing, but the sexy glow is going to shift over to Google Wave.

The question again pops up: so, what's the next big thing after Wave? The next big thing after Wave might no longer be in that 2D space occupied by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wave. (Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures) Wave attempts something that is very close to face to face communication. Maybe the next, next big thing is face time itself. Maybe the next, next, next big thing is not in the technological realm, but in the human realm.

Or maybe I am a little premature in my declaration. If the next thing after the stream was the wave, maybe the next thing after the wave will be the tsunami. (Of Waves And Tsunamis) Tsunami might be a technological development. We might realize when a million or 10 million - or a hundred million Chinese - create waves, we end up with a tsunami, and that tsunami can not be intelligently handled by the current wave technology, it needs a whole new set of tools and massive, new capabilities. The sum is not the whole of the parts. The sum is a whole new reality. A cell is made up of atoms, but a cell is a new level of reality.

A Web 3.0 Manifesto

Twitter has been more interesting to me than Facebook for months now. I was up at 1500 friends at Facebook and Facebook went ahead and deleted my account. I created a new one. I have less than 600 friends now with about 70 friend requests I have not approved.

My number one urge at Facebook was I wanted to say hello to people I had not met, but wanted to say hello to. I wanted to meet new people. But I kept hitting glass walls and ceilings.

At Twitter meeting new people is all the rage. That is why I like Twitter so much.

You create a wave by inviting people, so you start out by limiting yourself to people you already know. But person A knows person B knows person C knows person D, but person A does not know C and D. So a wave can be created with a group of people who don't all know each other. And ultimately a wave can be published like a blog post. At that point anyone can participate, not necessarily in the same wave, but there are comments sections, you can link to a wave, you can quote from it.

Twitter was an answer to a major gripe I had with Facebook. Why can't I meet new people? Wave might be an answer to my other Facebook gripe. Why can't I deepen my relationship with my existing friends? A wave lets you deepen your understanding of people around you. Conversations and collaborations like never before become possible.

Of course the wave is social. So if the wave is social and if it is the next big thing after Facebook and Twitter, does it stand to challenge Facebook and Twitter?

Yes.

Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Eminem: The Relapse: Twitter
Facebook's Ad Space Is Different
Facebook Faceoff Firefox
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook

I am not predicting the death of Facebook, I am not predicting the death of Twitter. But the two have just been told they are but niche products. Ultimately all products are but niche products.

Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.
Search billions of documents with the Google Search Appliance 6.0
The Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors
Blog search and beyond
The Day in the Cloud Challenge featuring Google Apps on June 24th
Search engineer stories
Kicking off 2nd annual Google I/O developer gathering
New Logo Look
Netlog integrates with Google Friend Connect
Put the pedal to the metal with a faster Google Chrome

Monday, June 01, 2009

Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?

Search billions of documents with the Google Search Appliance 6.0

Image via CrunchBase

Google has owned Blogger for years now, and only now is has come up with a gadget called search. This is unforgivable for the premier search engine. You could still have done custom search through Google AdSense, but that hassle has been so unnecessary.

Search makes a blog simple. People don't have to read through lists of blog post titles to find out something of relevance and interest. It has been quite a hassle to create contents pages. Suddenly my blogs feel so much more accessible.

Custom search for AdSense simply refused to work with private blogs that can be wonderful online office spaces. That problem persists. Why can't you search a private blog? If you can search a private Gmail account? Google needs to work on this.

Blog search and beyond Google Blog
Search billions of documents with the Google Search Appliance 6.0 One billion sheets of paper could circle the earth at the equator well over five times. Counting to one billion would take about 30 years of your life, even if you never stop to sleep. And if you had to find a single piece of information by sorting through a billion documents it would take you, on average, about 2000 years. ..... the GSA makes searching within your organization as simple as searching on Google.com
Search Box gadget available to all Blogger Buzz
Facebook Your Blog
Blogger in 140 characters or less
iLike: Add a soundtrack to your blog
What's in a logo? Google Book Search Blog
The Day in the Cloud Challenge featuring Google Apps on June 24th Google Blog
New in Labs: Inbox preview Gmail Blog

Friday, May 29, 2009

Of Waves And Tsunamis

Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

The difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that Web 2.0 is social. (Each Snowflake Is Unique) To me the inherent beauty of the web is that it has, it will make big political, social, economic changes possible, big as in huge, humongous huge.

In 1995 Bill Gates talked of "business at the speed of thought," and that was before he "got" the internet. I am talking about political, social and economic change at the speed of imagination. (Barackface: Political Sci-Fi) Could we take democracy to every country on the planet? The non-violent way? Could we end racism? Sexism? Could we end human trafficking? Could we end slavery, bondage? Yes, they still exist. Could we eradicate poverty? Could we make education, health, and credit universally accessible? Could we pour a trillion dollars into microfinance? Could we have a democratic world government? Could we end female infanticide? Could we end female circumcision?

Google Wave could make possible political, social, economic tsunamis. Big things might become possible.

Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb
The First Major Revolution Of The 21st Century Happened In Nepal
April 22 Immigration Court Date

Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build? Google Wave Developer Blog The Google Wave APIs come in two flavors: Embed and Extensions. With Embed, you're able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScript API. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors. With Extensions, you're able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client.
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave. The Official Google Blog

Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?

Walkabout - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Walkabout refers to a rite of passage where male Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkabout

Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

I am going to argue search is still the wave of the future. Google Wave might/will become the new paradigm in communicating, collaborating, publishing even. But the aspect of the web experience that is still the most exciting, and still the most primitive is search itself.

Most of the knowledge I expect to consume in the future will not reside in my mind or in the minds of people I already know. If it did, Google Wave would be the only relevant destination. But we know that not to be true.

Search is like poverty, (Hunger, Vision, Money) it is not any one thing. It is a complex set of things, it is a phenomenon. It is many things, many layers, many dimensions. And Google stands to be challenged. The news is not that Wolfram Alpha is no Google killer. The real news is look how easy it was for Wolfram Alpha to get 100 million queries. (Wolfram Alpha: An Answer Engine, Not A Search Engine)

But just like the next big thing in communication/collaboration came from inside Google itself, it is very possible the next few big things in search will come from inside Google itself. It is very possible. But I am going to bet those next big things are going to come from small startup like teams inside the Google incubator rather than from Google Corporate. We will have to wait and watch.

From The Google Blogs

Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build? Google Wave Developer Blog The Google Wave APIs come in two flavors: Embed and Extensions. With Embed, you're able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScript API. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors. With Extensions, you're able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client.
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave. The Official Google Blog
Search engineer stories Four years later, I'm still constantly awed by how challenging search is. We work on improving the entire search process, including formulating queries, evaluating results, reading and understanding information, and digging deeper with this new information. Every day we work on ways, both big and small, for search to be better, faster, and more effortless.

Kicking off 2nd annual Google I/O developer gathering
New Logo Look
Netlog integrates with Google Friend Connect
Put the pedal to the metal with a faster Google Chrome
Faster is better on Google Suggest
Congratulations Eric Yang, winner of the 2008-2009 National Geographic Bee
Announcing the 2009 Doodle 4 Google Winner
Energized about our first Google PowerMeter partners
Find out about the new creative trafficking
Google I/0 2009
A galactic mentor
Step into the spotlight with YouTube Insight
The best and the brightest
Behind the scenes of the Search Options panel
Bike to Work Day 2009
This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern...
Understanding health-related searches
30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo
We have a Knol for Dummies.com winner!
A planetarium in your pocket
More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event
18th International World Wide Web Conference
Energy and the Internet
Announcing the 2009 Anita Borg Scholars and Finalists
Vote for the national Doodle 4 Google winner
A Mom's Day menu
Google Chrome ads on TV
The power of video
Strengthening a worldwide community with Google Friend Connect
The 2008 Founders' Letter By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. ..... the vast majority of our services are available worldwide and free to users because they are supported by ads ..... a child in an Internet cafe in a developing nation can use the same online tools as the wealthiest person in the world. I am proud of the small role Google has played in the democratization of information ..... In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search — nearly one per day. ...... Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that "understands" more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google's systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web — for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much "smarter" in the coming decade. ......... Today you can search from your cell phone by just speaking into it and Google Reader can suggest interesting blogs without any query at all. It is my expectation that in the next decade our searches and results will look very different than they do today. ........ via Google Groups we made available and searchable the most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings ever assembled (800 million messages dating back to 1981). ....... In the future, using enhanced computer vision technology, we hope to be able to understand what's depicted in the image itself. ......... Video is often thought of as an entertainment medium, but it is also a very important source of high-quality information. ....... Yet videos are also great resources for topics such as computer hardware and software (I bought my last RAID based on a video review), scientific experiments, and education such as courses on quantum mechanics. ....... Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube — the equivalent of 86,000 new full length movies every week. ......... (when Venezuelan broadcaster El Observador was shut down by the government, it started broadcasting on YouTube). ....... In the future, vast libraries of movie-theater-quality video (4000+ columns) will be available instantly on any device. ....... Books are one of the greatest sources of information in the world ........ Within a couple of years, Larry was experimenting with digitizing books using a jury-rigged contraption in our office. ........ Today, we are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. ....... millions of in-copyright, out-of-print books available for U.S. readers to search, preview, and buy online ......... increased access to users with disabilities, the creation of a non-profit registry to help others license these books, the creation of a corpus to promote basic research, and free access to full texts at a kiosk in every public library in the United States. ....... While digitizing all the world's books is an ambitious project, digitizing the world is even more challenging. ........ imagery, topography, road, buildings, and annotations. ....... After the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months. ......... the first self-service system known as AdWords launched in 2000 starting with 350 advertisers. ......... While these ads yielded small amounts of money compared to banner ads at the time, as the dot-com bubble burst, this system became our life preserver. ......... has helped democratize access to advertising, by creating an open marketplace where small business and start-ups can compete with well-established, well-funded companies ....... Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated more than $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners. ........ video ads within YouTube and dynamic ads on game websites. ....... match advertisers and publishers using the formats and mediums most appropriate to their goals and audience. .......... designed for power users with high volumes of email. ....... While our initial focus was on internal usage, it soon became clear we had something of value for the whole world. ........ Today some Googlers have more than 25 gigabytes of email going back nearly 10 years that they can search through in seconds. By the time you read this, you should be able to receive emails written in French and read them in English. ........ anywhere there is a working web browser and Internet connection ...... I am writing this letter using Google Docs. There are several other people helping me edit it simultaneously. Moments ago I stepped away and worked on it on a laptop. Without having to hit save or manage any synchronization ............ today I have worked on this document using three different operating systems and two different web browsers, all without any special software or complex logistics. ......... more than 1 million organizations use Google Apps today, including Genentech, the Washington D.C. city government, the University of Arizona, and Gothenburg University in Sweden. ......... Apps can change the way businesses operate and the speed at which they move. ........ with Google Apps Web Forms we innovated by addressing the key problem of distributed data collection, making it incredibly simple to collect survey data from within the enterprise — a critical feature for collecting internal feedback we use extensively when "dogfooding" all of our products. ......... We are working to shift all of our applications to a common infrastructure. ........ In the past couple of years, however, we decided that we wanted to make some substantial architectural changes to how web browsers work. For example, we felt that different tabs should be segregated into separate sandboxes so that one poorly functioning website does not take down the whole browser. We also felt that for us to continue to build great web services we needed much faster Javascript performance than current browsers offered. ............. a multiprocess model and a very fast JavaScript engine we call V8. ...... Chrome is not yet available on Mac and Linux so many of us, myself included, are not able to use it on a regular basis. ........ Today, the phone I carry in my pocket is more powerful than the desktop computer I used in 1998. ......... this year, more Internet-capable smartphones will ship than desktop PCs. In fact, your most "personal" computer, the one that you carry with you in your pocket, is the smartphone. ......... a third of all Google searches in Japan are coming from mobile devices ........ the ambitious goal of creating a new mobile operating system that would allow open interoperation across carriers and manufacturers. ........... To date, more than 1000 apps have been uploaded to the Android Market including Shop Savvy (which reads bar codes and then compares prices), our own Latitude, and Guitar Hero World Tour........... The past decade has seen tremendous changes in computing power amplified by the continued growth of Google's data centers. ..... Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs. ....... translated search where the query gets translated to another language and the results get translated back. .......... Google Flu Trends, a service that uses our logs data (without revealing personally identifiable information) to predict flu incidence weeks ahead of estimates by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). ......... can do even more — going beyond monitoring to inferring potential causes and cures of disease. ....... large data sets such as search logs coupled with powerful data mining can improve the world while safe guarding privacy. ........ Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing. New and amazing computational capabilities will be born that we cannot even imagine today. ..... While about half the people in the world are online today via computers and mobile phones, the Internet will reach billions more in the coming decade. ....... enable individuals, small groups, and small businesses to accomplish tasks that only large corporations could achieve before, whether it is making and releasing a movie, marketing a product, or reporting on a war.......... When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Each Snowflake Is Unique

Hunger, Vision, Money
Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing
Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb

Each snowflake is unique. Each human being is unique. Each sentence that comes out of human mouths is unique. The web is the best technology we have come up with yet to take snapshots of a rather uniquely unfolding humanity.

In my blog post Hunger, Vision, Money I have tried to argue that bringing the rest of the billions online makes tremendous business sense.

In Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb and related posts I have tried to argue the biggest thing that happened in our shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is that the web got populated. And so Web 3.0 can not be about technology. Web 3.0 has to be about the human element of the web.

The web is poorer for every human being not yet online. And so it is not the semantic web that is Web 3.0. (A Web 3.0 Manifesto)

The Home Based » Blog Archive » Each Snowflake is Unique
Curiosities: Is every snowflake unique? (Dec. 17, 2007)
What Makes a Snowflake Unique?
It is truly amazing how God makes each snowflake unique, just like ...[PDF]
Penn State Live - Probing question: Is each snowflake really unique?
Digital Compilations by Cinda: Each Snowflake is Unique Just Like You
Is it true that every snowflake is unique? | Answerbag.com
GeoSnow: Exploring the World of Snowflakes

Pages