Google waved and people craned their neck to see (day 97)

Google Wave made a splash.  It broke on the beach of cloud tools.   It was a private beach though everyone could see something was going on from the parking lot.  Soon there were paparazzi posting unauthorized pictures, and who you knew became something to be evaluated and mined.   This has happened before.  I remember not having a gmail address.  I remember who did.  I remember how I became in.  How early was I into the wave?  What number was I?  I want to know but much like my Francis Bacon degree of separation (2),  I wonder what such a number really buys me besides social anxiety.  Soon everyone will be in the wave and we'll all be wondering what we're supposed to be doing.

I don't think I've ever opened a tool that confused me as much as Google Wave did at first glance.  It really stumped me.  The feeling was uncanny...like familiar and foreign at the same time and mixed with a unsatisfied anticipation.  I clicked and felt really lonely.  I added some people to my wave.  I said some mundane things like 'what is this for'?  I forgot about it.  I read a report about it.  I came back to it.  There were more people so it felt less crazy to say something less mundane.

I've now figured out that Google Wave is a sort of mix of email,wiki, google docs, and IM.  It's a mix of synchronous and asynchronous.   It may be a replacement for email but the average wave message seems to have more commitment than the average email.  There seems to be more purpose to the wave and more community.  There also seems to be more longevity to the conversations.   So maybe the workflow is that you 'move' email conversations to the wave when they become too complex for email and you need more collaborative authoring.  

The best part is that it's a protocol so it can be reskinned.

A song for this post.

Look it up (day 40)

Search engines are the new clerics.  They interpret our requests and tell us where to look for answers.  When people speak of the hegemony of Google they are speaking of the new religion built upon the necessary faith we must have that the big G is benevolent and has our best interest embedded in its cloud.   Short of writing our own search engine (oh the heresy), we need to park our  search faith somewhere.  And Google might as well be it.  They have cute logos, a simple home page, some cool apps and a geek's equivalent of the Hippocratic oath.  Can anything go wrong?  They damaged their reputation a little when they voluntarily censored results in China.  But overall we are inclined to believe that Google is indeed the right agent to be digitizing the world's information.  There's never been a cuter more ambitious behemoth next store.

There is a good reason to be agnostic though.  We should search with multiple partners for the same reason the movie Memento threw me for an extended loop.  We simply don't know what we don't know.   Reflecting on this long enough is guaranteed to send me into a paranoid tizzy.  So diversification is key.  Friends or concerned parties may tell you what you don't know.

The truth is that I don't worry about G very much.  But I read a few blogs where there is much anxious typing about who owns what information and what may happen if the religion turns into an evil cult.   I think they have good points and I am happy that open source alternatives like OpenStreetMap exist to challenge some of the issues inherent in contributing to an infrastructure in which the public has no real stake.   It's correct to worry about the size of an entity that we ultimately cannot control.   On the other hand, at least G cares about what they do.  They seem to genuinely like the cloud and its possibilities.  I am curious about how long this can be sustained.  Part of me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Will G ever have their equivalent of the Vista launch?  I wonder.   But for now, in G we trust.

A song for this post.