…There has been a lot written about Google Wave, and plenty of great videos on all its functions, so I’m not going to go over that again.  Instead I’m going to offer a few thoughts on how useful I think it could be and whether it will take off.

Firstly, the issue of whether it will take off as a service.  Well no-one really knows and only time will tell.  It’s only at the beta stage at the moment and its important that any bugs get ironed out to give a better user experience, but I’m sure that will happen.

A few other issues:

• “See as you type” – anyone you are ‘talking’ to can see what you type, as you type it.  This might be an issue for those who aren’t comfortable typing, make a lot of mistakes, or have a learning difficulty which affects their typing.  When using other collaboration tools they would simply read through a message before they sent it, with this any mistakes will be seen as they are typed.  It also means that if you start writing something as a joke, or maybe an angry response, in the heat of a moment, that will be seen straight away and you can’t change your mind.
• Privacy.  Its very easy to add others to a wave, and that may throw up issues of privacy, if certain sensitive topics are being discussed.  However as long as people are careful about what they discuss this shouldn’t be an issue.  As ever its important to maintain tight control over what you allow to be published online – its very difficult to fully remove it afterwards.  Alongside this there is the issue of who owns the content in a wave – which it seems is yet to be defined.

I think as a collaboration tool, compared to others like Windows Live Messenger, it could be quite useful.  Small companies or project teams could find it useful for discussing project ideas etc.  The playback feature and ability for threads to branch off into separate areas and still stay in one wave could be useful for this.  However it’s easy to see that big waves with lots of contributors could get difficult to follow and keep up with – although this is the same with large conversations on conventional IM services.

All in all, a potentially useful tool.  It remains to be seen whether the different features take off – but once it’s out of Beta and gets a bigger user base it could start to take off.

I’m now well into the swing of my 3rd year lectures, which cover a wide range of subjects within CS, including Parallel Scientific Computing, Natural Language Processing, Visualization, ‘Big Problems’ and Distributed Systems.  It’s the Distributed Systems angle that I’m thinking about now, having read this post on TC about Twitter.  This guy’s idea is that Twitter should take a new direction and become a service rather than just a site.  He uses that analogy of email and MS Exchange, which apparently makes $2 Billion+ in revenue for Microsoft.  So organisations would be able to license the Twitter technology on their own hosting/servers and have more control over it and, crucially, be responsible themselves for its up-time.

I’ve thought through this, and I think it could work quite well for Twitter, if they could make it work.  I’ve always had reservations about Twitters long term potential.  They have had problems with downtime, there is a lot of spam throughout the network and a lot of people just don’t ‘get it’.  So while a number of companies have some  great success stories (Dell recently announced they had generated several million $s of profit through the site) this could all be based on some of the hype that currently surrounds Twitter, and may well not be sustainable.  Plus, they’re vulnerable to another site/service becoming the ‘latest thing’ (or doing what they do better), a bit like MySpace and Facebook. Don’t get me wrong though, Twitter may still turn out to be very successful (a number of investors will be hoping so, having made investments reportedly valuing the business at $1 Billion) but I think they have work to do and they really need to move forward, sort out the bugs/downtime etc and become more than just ‘a site’.  Decentralisation, as described in the post, may well be part of this, assuming businesses are happy to pay – we’ll just have to wait and see.

Basically Apple control every application that can be installed on the iPhone, through their App Store.  Google released an application that makes Google Voice available on the iPhone and submitted it to the App Store.  Apple have now rejected it (allegedly because it replicates core iPhone technology; because it may cut into their market perhaps?) and Google have complained to the FCC.

Apple and Google have both filed their responses to the FCC and this is where it starts getting more messy.  Apple have claimed they did not reject the application, but just haven’t got round to approving it.  Google have claimed the opposite, that the application has been rejected, and they have proof.  And it seems likely that Google are right, as the company behind another similar product have published proof that their application was also rejected.

So it remains to be seen what will happen.  I’m also not sure that Apple’s control over which applications can be installed on an iPhone is a good thing.  I don’t think that Microsoft would get away with controlling what we install on our computers so why should Apple be able to control what we install on our phones?  And if it turns out they have lied to the FCC, there may be more trouble brewing.

Having read through their launch info, it doesn’t sound like a revolutionary new product but could be useful for individuals who use a number of devices with WiFi on the move or for businesses who have multiple staff working away from the office together.

Essentially its like a regular mobile broadband modem, except rather than it just connecting to a laptop through usb/pc card slot, it also has built in WiFi, so multiple devices can connect to it without wires.  So if you are a small business with a couple of members of staff working remotely, this could allow them to share one mobile broadband connection, rather than having one each, and so there’s an instant cost saving (although you would need to think about data usage and speeds if they’re heavy users).

So like I say, nothing groundbreaking, but quite neat!

AB

EDIT:

Looks like there’s something similar available from T-Mobile.

reCAPTCHA is a company with a very neat product.  Their product bases around the verification tests you see on various websites, which in themselves have been around for some time.

However what’s clever about these guys is what they use for the words you have to verify.  Previous products have just used random words, their main purpose being to just verify that your a person and not a robot.  What reCAPTCHA do is take big OCR tasks (such as digitizing the archives of the New York Times) and picks out words that the OCR software struggles with (it actually picks out any words that two seperate OCR programs disagree over) and then feeds the words into its huge network for human identification. They can then use the human users to help the software out in establishing what the word actually is.  (For more info on their scoring system, see the wikipedia entry).

What I like about their idea is that it fuses together a technology which has been around for a while and uses it to solve another problem, in an innovative way.  A number of technologies exist where the theory works well and testing is effective on a small test data set, however when it is rolled out to actually be used there are always likely to be problems, this is a great way of filling this gap.  And with almost 11 billion words going through the system a year (30 million/day, with sites like Facebook and Twitter already as subscribers, and Google now to be added) thats a decent contribution to solving the problem.  So Google clearly have their Books project in mind with this Acquisition.

What isn’t yet cleat is whether this tool can be used to improve OCR tools for the future.  At present, it seems to be used just to help out on specific words when the software is not sure.  However if artificial intelligence is used in the OCR, through ideas like Markov Models, then potentially this information could be used to make the tool more accurate going forward.  This could be a very interesting future development.  (Of course as computers get better at reading this kind of text without human help, the spam tools will need to work harder!!)

Aside from the technology aspect, this is another acquisition in the web market (and Google are rumoured to be discussing another – around to $500+ million mark) and further suggestion that things may be picking up in terms of M&A and finance in the tech industry, but I’ll leave that for another day.

AB

]]> http://www.andrew-biggs.com/?feed=rss2&p=19 3 http://www.andrew-biggs.com/?p=12 http://www.andrew-biggs.com/?p=12#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:57:25 +0000 admin http://www.andrew-biggs.com/?p=12 Well I have finally completed the set up of my new blog. I intend to use the blog to share my views on a wide range of subjects and I hope you find it interesting to read. I am always interested to hear any feedback, so do let me know.

I’m not going to limit what I write about at all but a couple of key areas I intend to look at include;

• IT for SME’s,
• Issue affecting students,
• Starting up a business, and my business interests,

As well as general issues in the IT industry, current affairs etc.

Hope you enjoy reading.

AB