Engadget goes hands-on with Google Wave

August 6
2009
in Technology

The good folks at Engadget got a per­sonal tour of Google Wave from the mas­ter­minds behind it — Lars and Jens Rasmussen — and lived to tell the tale. The full arti­cle goes into some juicy details about this new com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool, and con­cludes that while there’s tons of great ideas in there, it’s still not clear how Google Wave will fit in with the rest of var­i­ous face­books, lol­cats and tweets. I think that as rev­o­lu­tion­ary (or not) Google Wave is cur­rently, once it gets into the hands of gen­eral pub­lic and, more impor­tantly, 3rd party devel­op­ers, that’s when we’re going to see some truly rev­o­lu­tion­ary things begin to hap­pen. So I’ll be anx­iously wait­ing for September 30th to roll around.

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Echo — even more “social” comments

August 3
2009
in Technology

TechCrunch is test­ing a new com­ments sys­tem, called Echo. Very inter­est­ing idea — there are two parts to it. For one, when you post a com­ment on an arti­cle, any accounts that you tie to it (face­book, twit­ter, google pro­file, etc.) get that com­ment as well. The more inter­est­ing part, is that com­ments from around the web (from sys­tems sup­ported by Echo) that refer to the orig­i­nal arti­cle, will get posted to the article’s com­ments. That, among other things, of course includes twit­ter, which means this will need some sort of fil­ter­ing sys­tem since a lot of tweets will just have a link to the arti­cle, and a word or two. All this is by the way seen in more or less real time in the com­ments, i.e. they get peri­od­i­cally updated, cre­at­ing sort of a live feed of comments.

Here is the orig­i­nal TC article.

The web seems to be hav­ing an explo­sion of social ser­vices lately — every­where you turn someone’s offer­ing a new way to share your expe­ri­ence, with even more peo­ple, and it’s always more and more “cur­rent”, “live” and “real time”. And with iPhone and other smart­phones becom­ing more and more com­mon, access­ing inter­net on the go is becom­ing a triv­ial thing, and every­one can pretty much post their lives on the web as they hap­pen. I don’t know if it’s such a good thing in the long run, but right now I’m find­ing the whole thing pretty exciting.

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