So I spent the last 1 1/2 hour looking at the promises of Google Wave. I have to say that I’m impressed. It is a great way of interacting with people and it tackles a lot of problems that you didn’t really knew you had. And that is part of the rub actually. Most people don’t perceive this as a problem. At least, not in my crowd….
Although it is very interesting technology-wise and the promise of all of this being open source is one that Google should be applauded for I cannot but fear for the acceptance. See, the problem with any kind of such site to achieve an amount of utility is scale. If only a fraction of the communities start using this technology then Google Wave is just yet another technology contender.
Anyway, more footage of the launch event can be seen below:
UPDATE:GigaOM also commented on Google Wave, arriving to much the same conclusion as I did: it depends heavily on the take-up they are able to generate with this.
It seems that the intrepid hackers at xda-developers are at it again. They’ve been working away on portingGoogle Android to run on many different types of HTC kit. At the moment, ports are underway for the HTC Vogue (a Touch for CDMA-based networks), HTC Polaris and HTC Tytn II. As I’m using an HTC Touch ( the one with the measly 64Mb of RAM) I left in the cold for the moment…
Which prompted me to see if I can run Android on my phone as well. I’ll try and chronicle my efforts here.
The every excellent TechDirt blog had a nice writeup about whether or not Wikipedia should make the jump to adding ads in their site. As they state rather nicely:
Part of the genius of Wikipedia’s design is that its editing process self-selects for people who are passionate about designing a great encyclopedia. It has to, because if you don’t find editing Wikipedia enjoyable, there isn’t much else to draw you in. As a result, the senior Wikipedia editors tend to be strongly focused on making Wikipedia the best encyclopedia it can be, and while politics certainly happens, it’s a relatively minor aspect of the site’s operations.
Moving this model to a paid-by-advertising model means that although they receive large amounts of money (due to large numbers of pageview caused by Wikipedia high rankings within Google’s search engine) that would also bring along a number of editors that would become focussed on becoming senior executives in charge of that pile of money.
In Februari, Techdirt had another article on Wikipedia, sizing up Wikipedias chances against Google’s Knol offering. Although Knol is not yet open to the public, they indicate that because of Wikipedia’s permissive licensing a lot of their content may end up on Knol. Knol however can be monetized (via google ads). As it stands, Wikipedia will have a bit of a conundrum: either take the money using their own site, or idly stand by and watch that revenue go to authors who cut and past the content from Google and post it to Knol and reap the profits there. At first, this looks like a tough problem for Wikipedia. I think this is not the case, though. First of all, Wikipedia is in the knowledge dissemination business, not in the money making business. Secondly, they always have the option of changing the license terms under which the content is disseminated in such a way that excludes the content from being incorporated in Google Knol. And last but not least: these are two different problems. It’s money flowing to Wikipedia or money flowing to the authors of the knols. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the future!
