Be afraid of Google Wave!
People are struggling to understand just what is Google Wave, what does it do, and what problems does it actually solve. Some are coming up with Google Wave Reviews, others with illustrative comparisons, but there’s still confusion nevertheless.
In the pursuit of understanding Google Wave and attempting to explain it to others, the latest effort is Google Wave Cinema. See the videos below.
Meet iMobile Care, a potential life-saver that you can carry around in your pocket.
Launched at the beginning of this month, the app is primarily a reference guide that lets you obtain essential information about medical conditions and situations quickly and easily. The tool allows users to get a visual and textual explanation of how deliver aid and care during emergencies and events such as accidents, bites and stings, choking, injuries, poisoning, burns, and many other critical situations.
But billed as a mere mobile first aid guide even by its own makers, it’s actually much more than that. iMobile Care also boasts a number of location and personalization features that could well make the difference between life or death for yourself in the situations described above.
The app lets you call your local emergency number – which it automatically fetches as soon as you set your country – and access your camera or photo library in just one click. This can prove very useful e.g. in case of a car accident where you can provide much more information about the situation with one image than with a thousand words (and much faster too).
You can also sound an SOS alert from your phone in case of distress, and provide additional information for when you switch it on, all of which you can store in advance to make sure you don’t lose time explaining your situation (provided you’re even capable to do so at that point).
iMobile Care is available for the iPhone ($2.99 – iTunes) and smartphones running Android. Support for Blackberry devices and Windows Mobile-equipped phones will be added in the near future.
Via Tech Crunch
Kudos to the site EasierToUnderstandThanWave.com. Unlike Google Wave, it’s pretty simple, and funny too, in a geeky way at least. The website gives you two options, by showing two pictures, and asks you to vote which is easier, Google Wave or something else.
Thousands of people have voted and so far things that are easier to understand than Google Wave include: Metaphysics, Death, neoclassical economics, Ozzy Osbourne, Combinatorial Game Theory, osmotic pressure, cardiothoracic surgery, the mating habits of the red-sided Garter snake, lipid solubility, radiocarbon dating, self-balancing binary search trees, damped harmonic oscillators, vector calculus, the geopolitical climate of Southeast Asia, and the Swedish chef.
Check it out and let us know which one is your favorite comparison.
You have obviously noticed that as you type something on Google, it will suggest entries, words, phrases for you to type, to search that is. Here are some noteworthy Google Suggestions.These are not made up. Feel free to try them yourself.
It’s not a punchline, it’s an actual Apple iPhone application. It lets you blow up the skirts of Japanese girls.
Of course you can achieve better results by fingering them, the screen showing the girls that is, as the video below illustrates.
This application called Puff! is not just an independent distributed app. Apparently it is also listed in Apple store!
Via TechCrunch
We’re not saying that Google Wave doesn’t bring anything new to the online table, but as the early reviews are pointing out, it probably brings more problems then solutions, not to mention the security and privacy issues, which is something that undoubtedly more people will be talking about as they get a chance to test Google Wave.
The consensus so far seems to be that Google Wave lacks elegance and simplicity of use; unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other applications, Google Wave it’ s way to complicated to be a widely used platform. In addition, besides making it easier to focus on work at hand, Google Wave so far proves to be more distracting that all other web applications combined.
As Steve Rubel of Forbes points out:
The basic conclusion I came to is that, for all of its wonders, Wave is a mess. What Google Wave ignores is what Google watcher Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? calls the power of “elegant organization.”
History was invented to be rewritten. However, we need to learn from it. Every single online advance over the last decade that stuck leveraged “elegant organization.” They were simple, linear and solved common problems.
Info World also pans Google Wave, and among other things it talks about the privacy and security issues related to Google Wave:
We strongly suspect that the challenges will outweigh the rewards, especially in the early days, as Google tries to get the platform off the ground and into the marketplace. This was underscored by a comment left by a developer on our earlier story, “Selling Google Wave to Joe Q. Public.” The reader noted:
“Doing UI for Wave services is clearly not trivial — not least because of privacy/security considerations that make Wave ‘terminals’ into their own Social [Cross-Site Request Forgery] hotspots by blending semi-private and private and public data in active threads …”
Anil Dash looks at whether Google Wave will become a standard communication platform:
While it’s definitely too complex to live up to the “this will replace email!” hype that greeted its launch, it certainly has some cool features. So the big question is whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web, because Google has made an admirable investment in documenting the underlying platform and making it open enough for others to build on and extend. I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.
Robert Scoble’s review is pretty much summed up in his article title: Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype. He goes on to say:
This service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.
See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave.
That’s really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.
But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people.
It also ignores the productivity gains that we’ve gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
What do I mean by that?
It is noisy, but the noise often happens way down in a wave deep in your inbox.
This is far far worse than email. (New email always shows up at the top of my inbox, where Google Wave can bring me new stuff deep down at the bottom of my inbox).
It’s far far worse than Twitter (where new stuff ALWAYS shows up at top). It’s even far worse than FriendFeed, which my friends always said was too noisy. At least there when you write a comment on an item it pops to the top of the page.
And, worse, when I look at my Google Wave page I see dozens of people all typing to me in real time. I don’t know where to look and keeping up with this real time noise is less like email, which is like tennis (hit one ball at a time) and more like dodging a machine gun of tennis balls. Much more mentally challenging.
See, Google Wave was oversold as something you’d use with the public, or at least with large groups of friends, like you use Twitter, email, or Facebook.
A couple of days ago I registered the domains GoogleWaveSucks.com and IhateGoogleWave.com and set up a website for GoogleWaveSucks.com which was indexed by Google pretty fast. Today I checked and the site has been de-indexed by Google. First thought was how childish of Google, suppressing criticism of its products (Google Wave in this case). See IhateGoogle.com for an example of this bullying, though that particular site is not de-indexed by Google. Apparently they won’t de-index your site if it becomes popular, since that would obviously expose Google for what it actually is.
But then I thought you’d expect things like this when a search engine becomes a defacto monopoly, AND when in addition it owns multiple other internet-based products besides its’ search engine operations. Google obviously has a vested interest to up/down index or even de-index certain sites.
It’s like asking a Mercedes representative to give you an unbiased review of all car brands. Which wouldn’t be so bad unless most people are forced (in one way or another) to go to that same guy for that independent assessment. It then becomes like “democratic elections” in China, where the Communist Party advises you that your best bet is to vote for its favorite Communist Party candidate.
Maybe someday this malarkey will be looked upon and regulated by the powers that be.
In the meantime, if Google won’t index back my website, I will probably consider selling both domains GoogleWaveSucks.com and IhateGoogleWave.com to the highest bidder, just like Google does with our personal data and its ad sales.
Microsoft’s Internet Explore is the most used browser in the world, while Google’s Chrome is only used by a small percentage of internet users. So how does Google compete? It intrudes on Internet Explorer by inserting a plug-in which effectively makes the browser run on Chrome engine…on some sites, and Internet Explorer on others.
And how about the timing of this plug-in release? Just before Google opened up Google Wave to some select users. This is just one illustration of Google Wave trying to force it’s presence into every other internet platform and application. Wait and see what happens when it goes live for every internet user. It seems like not just Microsoft, but all major companies and internet communication platforms will be forced to let Google Wave invade and modify them as it wishes, or else face extinction.
From New York Times:
While it is awaiting a wider release, Google Wave has already gained notoriety for being associated with a clever, if sneaky, attack that Google aimed at Microsoftannounced Google Chrome Frame, a plug-in for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that turns the browser into one that essentially runs Google’s rival Chrome browser inside itself. With Chrome Frame, Internet Explorer appears unchanged to users, but runs Chrome’s engine for displaying Web pages rather than I.E.’s. last week. That’s when Google
Google said it created Chrome Frame because Internet Explorer, especially in the older versions that are still common on millions of PCs, is not suited to running complex Web applications like Google Wave. Google’s plan is that developers of complex apps, including itself, will add a line of code to those programs telling users that they need the Chrome Frame plug-in to run them, thereby making an end run around Internet Explorer. Developers who use the code will not have to dumb down their applications to run on less capable browsers, like older versions of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft did not take kindly to Google’s tactic. The company blasted Chrome Frame as a potential security and privacy problem.
There’s little doubt that this latest skirmish between Google and Microsoft could escalate, putting Google’s latest innovative app, Wave, at the center of the dispute.
As both Microsoft and Mozilla are pointing out, this becomes a major security issue for internet users.
From Tech World:
Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla and currently the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, strongly disagreed with Google’s tactic to slip Chrome inside IE.
“The overall effects of Chrome Frame are undesirable,” Baker said in an entry to her personal blog. “I predict positive results will not be enduring and - and to the extent it is adopted - Chrome Frame will end in growing fragmentation and loss of control for most of us, including web developers.”
According to Baker, Chrome Frame’s browser-in-a-browser will confuse users and render some of their familiar tools useless. “Once your browser has fragmented into multiple rendering engines, it’s very hard to manage information across websites. Some information will be manageable from the browser you use and some information from Chrome Frame. This defeats one of the most important ways in which a browser can help people manage their [web] experience.”
But Chrome Frame’s biggest problem, said Baker, is that it cedes control to the site, not the person surfing. And that will just confuse users.
“For many people, Chrome Frame will make the web even more unknowable and confusing,” Baker said. “Image you download Chrome Frame. You go to a website. What rendering engine do you end up using? That depends on the website now, not on you.”
Microsoft took a different tack when it slammed Google for releasing Chrome Frame. The plug-in, claimed Microsoft, not only doubles the risk of attack - users have to worry about vulnerabilities in both IE and Chrome - but also breaks several features in its browser, including the private browsing mode.
Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, weighed in alongside Baker, but also gave Google some advice.
“The user’s understanding of the web’s security model and the behavior of their browser is seriously hindered by delegating the choice of software to the developers of individual sites they visit,” Shaver said. “It is a problem that we have seen repeatedly with other stack plug-ins like Flash, Silverlight and Java, and not one that I think we need to see replayed again under the banner of HTML 5.
“It would be better for the web if developers who want to use the Chrome Frame snippet simply told users that their site worked better in Chrome, and instructed them on how to install it,” Shaver added.
He also panned Chrome Frame for some of the same reasons as Microsoft, but added several features “bricked” by the plug-in to the list, including IE8’s Accelerators and accessibility tools.
Google’s approach to solving the outdated browser problem is the path to madness, Baker concluded.
“Imagine having the Google browser-within-a-browser for some sites, the Facebook browser-within-a-browser for Facebook Connect sites, the Apple variant for iTunes, the mobile-carrier variant for your mobile sites,” said Baker. “Each browser-within-a-browser variant will have its own feature set, its own quirks, and its own security problems. The result is a sort of browser-soup, where … the web is less knowable, less understandable and certainly less manageable.”
The Chrome Frame plug-in works with IE6, IE7 and IE8 on Windows XP and Windows Vista. It’s available from Google’s site as a free download .
Google did not immediately reply to a request for a reaction to Mozilla’s criticisms of Chrome Frame.
There. Someone had to say it
No client-server protocol, just lots of inefficient web-based shite so you will be stuck using google’s interface with google ads for the first few years of its existence.
An instant message, email and document are suddenly all the same thing now but if you’re not happy with google’s Javascript-based word processor you’re fucked.
They had to go and extend XMPP for this supposed replacement for email. You’d think they’d write a protocol from scratch just for the purpose but that must be far too low-level for those Googleheads who spent the last 10 years using nothing but HTTP and programming using abstract methods and toolkits. “As you type” messaging over XMPP would eat up tons more bandwidth than a custom protocol but these days its fashionable to waste as much bandwidth as possible so what gives?
Ever since I saw the first webmail interfaces back in the day I can remember thinking “You have to go to a website to check your email? what kind of a stupid system is that?” but nobody would use an adware infested email client so this suits the free email services. Yea its convenient to check from someone elses computer but most peoples phones have email clients now but they don’t realise it because there is no shiny “email” button with rounded edges on the main screen so they will never know it’s there.
