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Google plans to dismantle Google Wave!

Future No Responses »
Aug 052010

On the official Google blog a rather discomforting piece of information was released:

We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Now what? Google Wave is the most advanced browser based application for communication and there’s no really comparable alternative available. Wave effectively merged e-mail, instant messenging, wiki, blogging, webforum and online collaboration functionality all in one rather relvolutionary platform. There is no replacement for Google Wave! Still, Wave has some shortfalls:

  • Waves with around 100 blips or even more have a totally uncomfortable amount of lag, so there’s no “real-time” typing anymore. Any software solution with such a scalability deficit can’t have really universal success.
  • The user interface and the available functionality are so complicated that an embedded help system and a useful and exhaustive documentation are needed, but Google Wave provided none of those features. And no, a couple of short documentation videos just don’t do it!
  • There’s no really comfortable way to export waves to regular webpages in real-time or to connect Wave content with usual web content.
  • You have to register for Google Wave seperately in order to be able to use it. Instead, it would have been a much better idea to combine Google Wave with Google Mail, so that you only need a Google Mail account for using it. Embedding Wave into Google Mail would also enable some form of basic downward compatibility of Waves with mails and upward flexibility at the same time.

Also, Google should have launched a clever and massive advertisement campaign for Google Wave. That would really have been justified, because Wave is a really innovative technology. For example, it could have been sold as Web 2.3 communication tool or something like that. In that case, Google Wave might have become popular enough to be used widely. The more people use that software, the more useful it becomes. Using Google Wave with just a few friends is rather disappointing.

Anyway, there’s already a site dedicated to save Google Wave. A continuation of that service would at least serve to demonstrate the possibilities of improving and expanding internet usability.

Posted by RadiVis at 20:03 Tagged with:

March Review

Blogging, Personal Stuff, Weblink Collections 5 Responses »
Mar 312010

There are a couple of blog posts I want to write and present here, but the list somehow just keeps getting longer and longer. Blogging without a real desire or urge to blog doesn’t feel as good as it should. Actually I could just stop blogging completely, but then I’d have no central international website which shows people what runs through my mind. Of course, there are those social networks like Facebook etc., but those are really too unpersonal and mainstream-ish.

Ordering my thoughts, so that they make up a really meaningful text, is not a totally trivial task, but it’s really worth the effort. And there are actually some people who are interested in the stuff, which I write, so I won’t stop blogging that easily. My reason for maintaining a personal blog is that I can write about everything I find interesting freely. This blog format provides a lot of freedom while still allowing feedback and interactivity. Google Wave would be an even better tool, considering previous aspects, but Waves have the disadvantage that they are comparatively private as opposed to real web content like html and php pages.

The tagging and category structure of this blog is messy and needs an overhaul. I rather feel like just deleting all categories, because they can be replaced by tags easily. So, I’ll need to make up a really clever tagging system. Any ideas?

Now, let’s come to some of the most intriguing web content I scanned this month:

  • There’s an astonishingly good story written Eliezer Yudkowsky about humans and two other very different kinds of species, who all have quite incompatible value systems. It’s called Three Worlds Collide. The first reaction of the humans when they meet the first species of “ALIENS!” is pretty remarkable: “What? SHIT!” [...] “Where are they?”
  • In a different first contact situation with the Nuu-chan-nulth the first words had a long lasting impact:

    When James Cook first encountered the villagers at Yuquot in 1778, they directed him to “come around” (Nuu-chah-nulth nuutkaa is “to circle around”) with his ship to the harbour. Cook interpreted this as the native’s name for the inlet – now called Nootka Sound – which came to be applied to the inhabitants of the area.

    (Wikipedia)
    It could get rather embarassing if the names of foreign cultures or aliens always depended on the first words at a first encounter situation…

  • I’ve always know it: Life is a game. Now there’s also a pretty fancy book about that idea: Gamer Theory, which can be read online for free.
  • Marvelous multiverse measuring reveals a surprising equivalence between subjective and holographic perspectives on the multiverse.
  • Hybrid fusion: Another promising route to abundant energy.
  • Stem cell therapy for dogs is avaiable already. Awesome! Now people can complain that they are being discriminated for being humans and not dogs when they don’t get the latest therapy enabled by stem cell research.
  • System Dynamics looks really fancy and useful! Just take a look at the twelve leverage points to intervene in a system or Systemantics by Bart Stewart!
  • Playing with proteins for progress: There’s a nice looking game called foldit in which you have to fold proteins in the right way. Unfortunately the software doesn’t want to run on my linux system, so I can’t tell you whether it’s really great and fun. But this game is an example for a phenomenon which I call engaming: Turning real world problems and work into play. I suspect this will become a huge trend in the future.
  • A lack of serotonine doesn’t necessarily lead to depression. A man with virtually no serotonin or dopamine is the living proof for that statement.
  • This is the definite article about depression and it’s upsides. The connections between depression and analytical thinking shown in that article are really enlightening. Although it might hurt a lot, a transient depression can indeed increase the quality of your life. As someone who has made such experiences I know what I’m talking about there. This may just be my personal theory, but people mostly get depressed, because they do something seriously wrong and won’t get out of that crisis unless they change their habits of thinking, acting and reacting.
  • Questions are better than affirmations! Huh? Is this good? :)
  • Do you think busy people are really important? Check out the cult of busy!
  • Ten affirmative and commandments. Could commandments in question form be even more effective?
  • Metaphor Mouse magic: Turn boring to-dos into exciting missions!
  • The idea that we live in a computer simulation created by a posthuman intelligence in whom we live, move, and have our being could be described as AI Theology. I think it would be pretty cool, if that was a subject you could study at some university.
    Robert Geraci examined another possible connection of transhumanism with religion and wrote his book Apocalyptic AI about the belief that we will live as uploads in virtual paradises in the future.
  • Geoengineering with bubbles: A rather cheap way to cool down our planet (and mess up oceanic life even more).

I’m still alive and kicking, our civilization hasn’t collapsed, and there is still hope for a positive future. Consequently this March has been a good month.

We are the lively ascending eternity!

Posted by RadiVis at 18:30 Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Our Ascent Noofactory

Our Ascent No Responses »
Mar 192010

There’s a new Google group for my sci-fi writings in Google Wave: The Our Ascent Noofactory. Everyone who is interested can join freely. If you join, you can access my waves, if you have a working Google Wave account. If you don’t have a Google Wave account, this might be a good reason to get one. In order to get one, you need a Google Mail account first. Then you can ask me to invite you to Wave. Pretty easy.

The primary purpose of the group is to manage the waves containing my sci-fi ideas and story “fragments”. Otherwise I would have to give access to every potentially interested person to every single wave manually. There’s a much better way how you can read my waves and write some feedback, if you like:

  1. Get a Google Mail account.
  2. Get a Google Wave account.
  3. Get a Google Groups account.
  4. Join the Our Ascent Noofactory group.
  5. Log in to Google Wave and add a new contact by using the “+” in the Contacts panel: our-ascent-noofactory@googlegroups.com
  6. You can see a list of the group waves by clicking on the icon of the Our Ascent Noofactory group in you contacts list. A button named “Group waves” should appear. Click on it.
  7. Alternatively you can enter “group:our-ascent-noofactory@googlegroups.com” in your search bar. That will have the same effect.
  8. You can also save this search in your navigation bar by adding it with the “+” button next to “Searches“. There you should enter “group:our-ascent-noofactory@googlegroups.com” in the “Query” field and anything you like in the “Title” field (for example “Our Ascent Noosphere” or “Metafire’s crazy sci-fi stuff”).
  9. After you have saved the search, you can display all group waves at once by clicking at the saved search link in your navigation bar. If you don’t see the link, you have to click on the triangle on the left to the word “Searches“.
  10. Now you can open a group wave by clicking on it in the wave list. Hereby, I encourage you to participate in the feedback and discussion waves. You can read, but not edit the story waves, unless I invite you directly. You may write stuff into the other waves, if you like.
  11. If you think there aren’t enough waves in the group, you can create a new wave, or take an already existing wave, and add it to the group by dragging the Our Ascent Noosphere icon into the participant list of the wave. By default, it will be a wave where all group members have full access and can edit everything. Theoretically, you can change that, but please don’t, unless you really want to annoy me.
  12. Wave lives on participation, so use it and write down stuff that might be of interest to others and discuss!
  13. Perhaps you may think that my sci-fi “universe” is cool and you want to write a story in that “universe” yourself. Please feel encouraged to do so! I’m not copyrighting my characters and the general setting, so you can use them freely. You may ask me for help or advise, if you actually want to write your own “Our Ascent” story. When using my characters and the general setting of my “universe”, please mention that I have created them.

Probably you ask yourself what this “Our Ascent Noofactory” actually means. Our Ascent, or more specifically Our Ascent Dreams, is the name of my general sci-fi “universe”. It has this name, because it generally depicts the process of attaining “higher” states. Sometimes this process is also called progress. The word “Noofactory” comes from the Greek word “nous” for mind, so “Noofactory” means the same as “mindfactory”, but is more stylish and is an allusion to the term Noosphere.

At the moment, I work on my thesis from Monday to Wednesday and do sci-fi related stuff from Thursday to Sunday. This arrangement feels pretty sensible, because I’m rather unable to do both tasks during the same day.

We are the eternally ascending life!

Posted by RadiVis at 19:46 Tagged with: , , ,
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