Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 [...]]]> The beta of Google Wave has started, and I begged and grovelled for an invite and a friend was gracious enough to send one over. Here are my first thoughts.

Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 and didn’t take off until 2 years later and Twitter is just finding an audience after 3 years in obscurity.

Social Networking in the virtual world is an interesting beast. While Twitter still hasn’t found a model to make decent money, and websites that collate/sort/rate/track tweets are popping up everywhere trying to be the first to make financial gain off of Mr. Dorsey’s brainchild. Facebook went from a simple and usable interface to an ad-centric model where instead of putting your friends at the top put a series of sponsored ads, tailored for you by data mining your profile. How kind. The same can be said about MSN (sic) aka Windows Live Messenger.

Since the Web has grown into a marketer’s wet dream and consumers are demanding everything for free, there seems to be a skew on the supply and demand charts. Because of that it means the newest challenge is balancing ads and ad space alongside product. And this is where Google thrives. Whether we talk about their minimalistic search engine interface (which makes Yahoo’s and MSN’s webpages look like a a 3 year old’s finger painting from the 60′s) to the subtle scrolling ads in Gmail: Google has nailed the balance of making free products while still capitalizing on the lust of web marketers.

So what does all of this have to do with Wave changing the virtual communication landscape? Wave currently is a ad-less, persistent, collaborative, realtime, multimedia, open source communication tool. I am sure the lack of ads will end coincidentally at the same time as the beta program. But the rest of my adjectives are a huge distinction from what is currently available.

At the moment products such as WebEx and Net Meeting dominate in the web conferencing space right now. While desktop sharing is a must in our international business world, what these technologies lack is the collaborative nature of a meeting. These products allow one user to display their screens, “whiteboard” and allow a basic MSNesque like text chat. While Wave lacks the desktop sharing, the ability to, in real time, share links, sites, photos, and a variety of other “gadgets” (polls are quite interesting where people can vote on any question and the tallies are immediately updated). How would this affect taking meeting notes, minutes etc? Every try to take a poll in a group chat room or over a conference call? Think about group projects in a university setting and how much easier it would be to all make decisions from the comfort of your home, in a “secure” (more notes on this later) and 100% traceable, copyable, printable way? No more will you argue over who said they’d print off the report.

Multimedia is a huge plus. How nice is it that you can add a gadget that shows a direct map to your place while you are “chatting” about directions to your place. No more need to lose a link in an accidentally closed MSN window, or having a subject less email with a static screenshot attached.  And the small fact that it uses rich text. Now you can give your thoughts headings and highlight important words. Now when you copy and paste from one medium to another you won’ t get stupid bats flying in your post, or lose the spacing/formatting so you have alphabet soup on your screen. In the end this provides a clearer message to the people you are communicating with.(Did I mention inline spell checking?)

Persistence. This is a huge problem with the web in general. Say goodbye to losing a lengthy Facebook message after accidentally clicking “back” or closing your browser. Wave stores your details in realtime. If you hit the k button, not only does everyone see that you hit that button, but you can immediately close your browser without any “save” keystroke and it persists. Add to that that you can file your sessions, re-open, re-play or continue them at any time and this is the most persistent capability the web offers today. Another key to all of this is that you don’t have random MSN-style .rtf files saved all over your harddrive with cryptic names like “chat with John” or “sweet cyber sex”.

Another feature is the concept of “Public Waves”. This is(*ahem* will be) the ultimate combination of mIRC, Internet forums, Message boards, CraigsList and knowledge bases. Combine the entire global community speaking on any subject in a realtime fashion with the search and storage capabilities of Google. It’ll put Yahoo Questions to shame.

And finally on my “pro’s” list, open source.  Once the hardcore geeks get a hold of this (I’ve already read that the race for the first usable iPhone and Blackberry apps is on) the possibilities are endless. Put on an MSN skin that minimizes the product into a compact chat forum for just you and your friends, build it into a WebEx-like technology to combine realtime knowledge and data share with PowerPoint and desktop presentations. An infinite communication market has just been opened up!

Of course with any great technology comes the bad.  At the moment security is a huge concern. Notwithstanding the recent Google problems with security; Are corporations going to trust their internal data to Google.  I don’t know the answer to this question. But in the open source world, I am sure that someone can develop quite quickly a security model that addresses the concerns that will undoubtedly arise.

The current interface is clunky and unintuitive and forces you (practically) to be in a full screen mode. This isn’t useful for most of us in our multitasking culture. Again, open source to the rescue.

The tracking issue. Google is renowned, and routinely chastised, for gathering data. And while I still agree that tracking my searches is a help to me, is tracking every personal/professional conversation I have necessary? I haven’t read a lot on this topic yet, I hope to shortly, but I have to assume some level of data mining is occurring.  What will this do to corporate use? It would be a stumbling block I am sure for this technology to take off on that front. For the public market? Well, 300 million people use Facebook and that site is entirely about mining data.

WebEx and Net Meeting are bloated and for no good reason. They require downloads and constant updates and still tend to be prone to errors outside of the IE world. Wave has none of these problems. The slickness of Google has yet again struck.

All in all, I 100% agree with Google’s marketing of this technology that Google Wave is what “e-mail” would have been if it was invented from scratch, and not made to mimic the existing postal system we had world wide.It took almost 3 years for Gmail to open to the general public and now it boasts 150 million users, both corporate and personal. I am very excited for the next 3 years.

The [...]]]> As recommended by a friend and source of always different and enjoyable reading/viewing material, I recently started watching “True Blood”. For those of you that haven’t seen it, I will try not to issue too many spoilers, at least none that a pre-pubescent goth freak couldn’t grasp about 12.5 minutes into the first episode.

The show overall is enjoyable. I can willing suspend my belief that in this world vampires exist and Anna Paquin can read thoughts as a relatively good plot device, between her periodically losing her fake southern drawl that is. But, I do have to admit Mel Gibson did a better job using such a talent to his benefit, I mean banging Helen Hunt & Marissa Tomei in one movie? Good for him…. I digress…

A few things I find interesting:

For a religious small town in New Orleans, these people not only have crazy amounts of sex, the sex itself is more wild and elaborate than most Private releases.  However that isn’t the disturbing part. what disturbs me is that before many of these sexcapades that would make Jenna Haze blush, they make it very clear to each other that they have had plenty of sex ,with plenty of people, and sometimes even state that it was just earlier that day. In fact, when our heroin Anna Paquin finally gives up her cherry, in what can only be described as the best display of breasts on television in 2008,  she feels it necessary to scream it out loud… to a bar full of people… where she works… which the guy she just went on a date with a couple nights before owns…The few days after she discovered two loved one’s murdered bodies… But,hell,  she had great hooters though, eh?

And  then there is Jason, the brother, who I can only picture as an homage to Ellis’ Patrick Bateman, who fucks a girl doggy style behind a bar, while covered in garbage. I am all for adventure, and exhibition… but seriously? I am pretty sure I saw his truck in the background of the shot, it was 20 yard away… trade-offs, man, trade-offs…

Now, for a country that has been fighting the war on drugs so long that the girls they initially were targeting now have more problem with their nipples touching the ground, than with excessive marijuana use,  they certainly are promoting the hell out of “V” (aka Vampire Blood). This apparently is a miracle drug! It saves a person’s life by miraculously healing her and giving her a dog’s smell and a bat’s hearing, then in one episode it acts like Viagra on Ecstasy and pumps up a guys cock in the most fake erection through the pants seen in TV history, and in the very next show it makes fireworks shoot of some guest star girl’s tits. Well, truth be told I see fireworks every time I see tits too, that has less to do with drugs… It also has this magical power of making you fuck up everything in your life. But then again, don’t all drugs? Don’t do drugs kids.

The other thing that is interesting about this town is that everyone seems to have a job (or 2) and they never need to go. I think the phrase “<blank> isn’t coming in today” is uttered once per episode. But, I mean I guess there are more important things to do, like getting arrested for every girl you sleep with dying, but then getting let go after the cliffhanger, or trot around town with a vampire who you have more of a Ross/Rachel relationship with than me and my constant love/hate affair with Tostitos.

Now, what is missing from this review? Oh yeah, the VAMPIRES! For a show that has a premise of vampires, they are really nothing but a subplot and allusion to the black/white race issues of the southern US. It isn’t even an allusion, actually. It is referenced in the damn title sequence!

The references to this are not poetic and are not subtext-ed at all. The characters bringing up segregated bars, a main character comments, after her daughter notes how white a vampire is, “No honey, we’re white”.  The continuous assertion that a “few bad apples are making all vampires look bad” and even the utterance that once you go vampire you never go back (Doesn’t really have the same ring to it, does it?)… Do they really need to spell this out anymore?

In the end, entertaining. Not my favourite show, but I find myself caring a little bit for what happens, and when sitting alone in a hotel it makes for good watching… wait, did you just say there is porn on the Internet? umm… bye…