Archive for May, 2009

Google Wave: Vision of Web 3.0?

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Google is constantly upgrading and improving itself looking at the future of web with their kinds. In their endeavour of doing so, the latest innovation they showed us on Google Developers’ conference at San Fransisco, is Google Wave. According to them,

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

In other words, its a communication tool that consolidates features from e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, multimedia management, document sharing and wiki. It is indeed, though I shouldn’t sound as a G-fanboy, one of the most ambitious andjust-at-the-edge projects Google has put his hands on, ever. I will try to justify my assumptions below. Let’s get to know the Wave first.

 

Tell me What exactly Google Wave does

Okay let’s be straight without taking too many confusing technical terms . In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. How cool is that?

google_wave_inbox

Who made it possible?

Now you have known the technology. Let’s get to know the faces. It is developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon out of Google’s Sydney, Australia.

Features


Layout

Wave features a left-hand sidebar Navigation and a list of your contacts, fromGoogle Contacts, below that. But the main part of the screen is your Wave inbox.It looks almost like a Google inbox but the main difference is, you are updated of any new content shared with you and not just messages.

Adding a Friend

Its fairly easy. You can do it by going over to your contact box and dragging their picture into the wave. Now the interesting feature is, upon joining if he wants to understand what’s really happening in this wave, there is a playback button. Click on it and it will rewind all the stuff that you needed to know in last few days that happened inside that wave community.

Read and Reply

As you want to read a new wave, just click on it and on the right pane it will open up in full. Remember Opera feed reader? Its almost like that. If you have read and want to reply, there is a simple way to do so just as have in Gmail too, right under the friend’s message.

What’s new is you can reply to any specific part of your friend’s message just by typing below that portion. Its almost like a single piece of paper you and your friend are sharing.

Instant Messaging

We knew Google wouldn’t leave the success of Twitter unattended. If you were thinking where is my Google way of RTI (real time interaction) service. Here it is.

If two of the people involved in the wave are online at the same time, you can talk to each other in real time. Just type in, enter and the person will be able to see it.

What if you don’t want to show your snippets until you complete it? Just click on theDRAFT mode and it will be public only when you want it to. Just like blogging.

What if you want to have a private conversation with someone and don’t want the whole wave to know about it. Its there too.

Wiki

Real time editing of any document or information or any content for that matter has a problem of being re-edited by more than one people at the same time, making it a mess. Google Wave has worked upon that and though there is a wiki included for collaborative information sharing and editing on any topic, you won’t miss out on edit updates flashing on your screen in a nice UI and you can playback anytime if you need to.

Sharing Pictures, Games, Google Maps and beyond

google_wave_inbox_chess

If you share pictures in a wave thread with several other people, from the moment after you drag the photos into the wave on your end, your friends can see the thumbnails of them on their screen. With Google gears installed, this will be a damn cool job where you can just drag and drop a photo in your wave window and it will get published! HTML 5 is something we all will be trying in future just like Google showcases here.

What else is special? - Web Content Sharing

Right, this question is bound to come to your mind by now because, this looks like a very nice AIO Google app. Where is the revolution that Google expects it to be? Google isn’t just thinking of Wave as another web app that it creates and you use on one site — it wants you to be able to use it across all sites on the web. AsTechcrunch puts it,

Say, for example, you have a blog. As a post, you could share a wave with the public and allow others to see what you and the other people in your wave are doing. And these visitors to your blog could even join in as well right from your blog, and all the information would be placed right into the original wave.

After that, you can try anonymous collaboration or may be in future Google will think of something like Facebook Connect or Google Connect.

Waves can also be published as their own entities on the web. This would make them and their content indexable by Google’s bots.

Google Wave for Developers

Google expects to keep Wave as a developer preview product for at least several more months. For starters, only developers attending I/O will get access to Wave on Thursday. Google will expand access to more developers later.

It’s also important to note that Wave is very much centered around the key fundamentals Google is focusing on with HTML 5: The canvas element, the video element, geolocation, App Cache and Database and Web Workers. You can read more about those on O’Reilly Radar.

Wave API Model

The Google Wave API is an open platform allowing developers to extend the functionality of Google Wave itself, or extend other applications with waves. As a developer, you can think of Google Wave as three pieces:

  • The Google Wave client application, the interface designed for users
  • The Google Wave APIs, which are documented throughout this site
  • The Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying network protocol for wave communication

Wave Entities

wavelets

Let’s look at the common place terms you will encounter while understanding the model above.

  1. A wave is a threaded conversation, consisting of one or more participants
  2. A wavelet is a threaded conversation that is spawned from a wave (including the initial conversation). Wavelets serve as the container for one or more messages, known as blips
  3. A blip is the basic unit of conversation and consists of a single messages which appears on a wavelet. Blips may either be drafts or published
  4. A document is the content attached to a blip. This document consists of XML which can be retrieved, modified or added by the API.

You can Request Sandbox Access and start developing now!

Why is this project risky?

  1. You can answer it very well yourself if you thread all these pieces together. By Google wave, Google is not only trying to get out of reach from its competitors like Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, but also it means, they will be self-destructing (its too strong a word) their years of apps like Google docs, Gmail, Picassa, blogspot etc, individually.
  2. Again, with all these inter-connected social networking sites and services available, and with individually people having enough of what they need, the main question is, what is the need to come under one roof (esp. when its Google)? We have seen previously too that people are conscious of Google’s gradual growth to invincibility and coming up as a no-alternative image. So, the biggest point for Google will be to convince people enough that its not yet another service but THE new face of web. Will the mass take it as a favor or a surrender, that is to be seen.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Cómo será la Web 3.0

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Vint Cerf, uno de los “padres de la internet“, detalló cómo será la red del futuro y qué rol jugarán los tradicionales medios impresos, en una conferencia que brindó en San Pablo.

“La web 3.0 nos llevará a la internet de las cosas, en donde todas las aplicaciones y los objetos van a tener la potencialidad de interactuar unos con otros. La clave será la interconexión total“, disparó el hombre que creo hace más de 30 años los protocolos de comunicación que aún hoy utilizan los sistemas operativos para gestionar el acceso a la red de redes.

La proyección les permite a los actuales consumidores de la red ilusionarse con una internet que les concederá el control pleno de sus objetos a distancia, ya sea a través de dispositivos móviles u otras plataformas que el propio desarrollo de la plataforma se encargará de diseñar con el paso de los años.

Para ello jugarán un rol esencial los sensores, que tendrán la función de monitorear y difundir la información precisa que necesitan los consumidores finales de la red. Por ejemplo, la web 3.0 podría permitir que una persona reciba mensajes de texto en su celular con un reporte de cómo está trabajando el sistema de calefacción que tiene en su hogar. De este modo, este usuario podrá regular qué temperatura desea encontrar en su hogar para cuando deba regresar luego de su jornada laboral.

El grado de conectividad de la internet del futuro será tal, que Cerf imagina posible que alguna persona instale un censor en los corchos de los vinos que tiene en su bodega para conocer en tiempo real si el proceso de refrigeración está funcionando adecuadamente y actuar en consecuencia.

La web 3.0 permitirá también un acceso inmediato a juegos, películas y canciones a través de los clásicos dispositivos de audio y video que actualmente consumen las familias. Así, la idea de alquilar un DVD o ir al cine para ver el último estreno pasará rápidamente a los recuerdos de la evolución y desarrollo de las sociedades modernas.

“Todo va a formar parte de internet“, sintetizó Cerf, quien alertó que aún existen algunos desafíos para explorar y analizar cómo se debe trabajar para que las personas “naden en un mundo de información” y encuentren verdaderamente los contenidos que desean consumir.

Todo estará en la “nube”
El desarrollo de la interconectividad en la red generará un nuevo paradigma en donde la información estará almacenada en servidores profesionales de las grandes compañías, lo que algunos especialistas del sector se han inclinado por denominar la “nube“.

“La necesidad de tener programas instalados en las computadoras personales será algo del pasado. Todo estará en la nube, que ofrecerá posibilidades enormes. Ese es el camino del futuro“, explicó Alexandre Hohagen, director general de Google para América Latina.

Este nuevo concepto de “nube” evade la idea de que los usuarios estén cargo de servidores individuales y deja atrás para siempre el miedo a perder información personal por una falla en el hardware o un descuido personal. Así, el acceso a la red será el nexo entre los usuarios y su propia información.

Esta idea fulmina para siempre los soportes físicos de información y nutre aún más de relevancia los dispositivos móviles, que adquirirán un rol protagónico en las vidas de las personas.

El papel, amenazado por los medios digitales
Según Cerf, también conocido como “evangelizador” de la web, este proceso de desarrollo se transformó en una amenaza de muerte para los periódicos impresos de todo el mundo, quienes se encuentran en un período de mutación a otras formas de difundir la información.

Es que las necesidades de los consumidores y la ecuación empresarial costo-beneficio confluyen para que el avance de los medios digitales de información tenga una perspectiva prácticamente inimaginable.

De hecho, hoy la red entrega un sinfín de posibilidades a los usuarios que nunca podrán ser alcanzadas por los tradicionales medios escritos. Por caso, la red permite que los consumidores de información puedan acceder a contenidos históricos al instante, o interactuar directamente con el difusor de formas que hasta hace muy poco tiempo eran inimaginadas.

Este sorprendente avance de los medios digitales generó también un gran desafío para todos los actores que forman parte de la red: cómo compensar los derechos de autor. Sucede que en la red existe una muy baja proclividad de los usuarios a pagar por acceder a los contenidos, y esto ha llevado a los especialistas a plantear el debate sobre qué deben hacer los países para legislar sobre el acceso a las redes.

Del mismo modo que se plantea este y otros interrogantes sobre la internet del futuro, habrá que preguntarse ahora cómo van a reaccionar los usuarios, las empresas y los gobiernos para estas canillas enormes de información que se abren cada día más. ¿Estarán preparados?

Posted in Web 3.0 | No Comments »