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.
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 JavaScriptAPI. 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.
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