Google Wave is no more.
Like a lot of geeks I eagerly sourced an early invite on Twitter and, once it arrived, signed in with great anticipation. After all, this was from Google and touted as being the end of spam email while also doubling as a tool for fantastically easy collaboration to allow me to leverage my synergies. Or something like that.
Except it wasn’t. The marketeers had over promised and the engineers under delivered. It quickly became apparent that this was no Maps or Docs which both went mainstream with very quick adoption by geeks and non-geeks alike.
It might have been an unfinished Beta release but the UI was bespoke, fiddly and confusing, the interaction almost unusably sluggish and the concept was never really explained concisely. Most people dabbled and then very quickly went back to their disparate email, instant messaging and wikis.
The Internet tubes today were mainly full of comments about two things: Gmail going down and Apple releasing a public beta of Safari 4. Had the Gmail outage coincided with Twitter going belly-up at the same time then I think that productivity levels around the planet would have rocketed. As it was, Twitter stayed up as people whined about Gmail and I bathed in some smugness as I rarely use it because of this exact scenario. Then Apple came along with something to distract the Twitterverse from bemoaning their complete lack of emails: a new version of Safari.
From my early impressions, Safari 4 has taken the best bits of other browsers and added a bit of Apple polish to them. The Awesome Bar from Firefox, Opera’s Speed Dial, Chrome’s Tabs-on-Top, Webkit’s blazing fast JavaScript engine (but with a sensible name) and Developer Tools. Notice the glaring omission from that list? Yes, nothing from Internet Explorer made the grade. Funny that.
CNN almost did.
They were so close with their t-shirts recently but then had to go and spoil things by slapping their logo right on there. Less is more once again. In fact when it comes to branding, anything at all is starting to be considered brash when it comes to Web 2.0.
Google certainly do.
I happened upon a busy white tent Last Friday night in New York city. It was surrounded by some fantastic projections on the neighbouring buildings but there was no clue as to what was going on. That was unless you investigated and had a look inside. Cameras, computers and a couple of dogs quite randomly. Turns out it was a promo for iGoogle – the personalised version of Google. If you’ve been on the Internet for a while now then you may recognise this as the portal concept from the late 1990s and the “My Netscape”.
We’ve all encountered a captcha before (although you may not have known at the time). The “enter this obfuscated text in this form field” device that is supposed to stop automatic creation of user accounts or prevent comment spam postings by web robots.
That’s all well and good (unless you require an accessible version — many do not offer an audio alternative). However I’ve never come across them while simply trying to search Google.
I was trying to search for the keywords “php submit post” to get some references for some code I was writing and having trouble with. Everything was fine after entering the captcha but it seems that this only appears sporadically.
While in Tignes last week I had to break my practice of not touching a computer while on holiday. One of my friends had a work-related Word document he had emailed to him but thanks to the locked down web terminals in the bars, nothing could be saved, opened nor any program run. A combination of a USB flash drive and Google documents provided us with a work around. That only left us to find our way around the infuriating French keyboards!
I’m fairly certain that Google Apps will start to become a cheaper and genuinely viable alternative to the Microsoft Office lock-in in the very near future. It only remains to be seen how many people will trust Google with their documents.
