google

I woke up feeling a little prophet-ish this morning. I would bet you money, but it is illegal, so I am just going to say: I know what the next big service thing from Google should will be! Ready? It's a free SMS gateway that allows sending SMS messages through an open API.

Now think about it. Text-messaging ("SMSing") has been hot for a while now. Marketing companies and individuals are already using it big time. Text-messaging is expensive, though. Many little startups, with little, but interesting pilot sites just can not afford it. How is the industry going to innovate, if the innovators can not afford the tools?

There's a lot of data transmitted over text-messages and it could be even more interesting than the data you find in emails. Text-messages typically have less spam. If Google is willing to provide huge mailboxes for free, just for a chance to index e-mail text - they should be dying to get their hands on text-messages. If anything, Google is late to do it.

You say "privacy"? I say - yeah, like Google cares.

So, here it is - you should see something like it in the next 6 months. I give it a year tops.

Google released to open-source its "language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols, data storage, and more": Protocol Buffers.

Google claims it's like XML, but better mostly because: "[Protocol Buffers] are 3 to 10 times smaller, and 20 to 100 times faster".

My feelings about this news are mixed. Like I was just telling Doug you can't argue with Google when it comes to matters of performance and speed, BUT you can feel disgusted at the fact that a giant, like Google, uses its muscle to diminish and harm the crucial standard like XML. XML took so long to get adopted, made so much possible and is still so fragile, that you can't take this matter lightly.

OK, maybe the PB thing is faster and smaller and blah, blah, blah and maybe it's not as cumbersome as CORBA was, so it's not total evil, BUT (I repeat - BUT) let's be honest here - not everybody is Google and I can bet 90% of systems just do not care about the same things Google does. So, XML is fine for most applications.

However, now that Google is pushing one more of its bloated technologies (want another example? Think GWT) - a lot of people will adopt it just because it's a Google thing. And it may harm XML, and it may harm industry.

So, you see - as much as we all love open-source, sometimes when open-source gets intermixed with big, corporate politics - things can go south.

And last but not least, if you want more object-oriented, smaller, faster exchange format, there is JSON! JSON is well adopted and support, so why, God, why do mere mortals like ourselves need Protocol Buffers?

http://sites.google.com/

One word - wow!

P.S. In the last years, Google has launched a number of mind-blowing services, built on top of the products from the companies they had acquired, but in most cases - failed miserably to gain user traction. IMHO, one bright example of this is Google Apps ("Google Office"), but examples are numerous. Will "Sites" be different?

Ok, finally Google is starting to make a move against Wikipedia, with the private launch of Google Knol. The specifics of the system are not yet known, but from what we can read between the lines, the interesting difference betwen Knol and Wikipedia is that in Knol content will be authored by a "group of experts" (that will later be able to share ad-revenue with Google for their efforts?).

If this is true, then clearly Google is responding to the long-standing joke (started in the TV show Office) that Wikipedia is reliable "because anybody can edit it". Google must be proud to "have gotten the message"... of all conservatives who refuse to accept Wikipedia.

Good job, Google! Nice swing from a progressive thinking away and into aligning with stagnating conservativism. So, Google does not believe in the Wisdom of Crowds, anymore? And here we thought the whole point James Surowiecki was making was that crowds are always smarter than a bunch of "experts". Ironic, how we are going back to "experts", is not it?

You, my friends, can make "Knols" (What the heck is this with Google people trying to come up with an alternative English, anyway?) as your "the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.", but I am sticking with Wikipedia. Wiki has been the first entry into a new subject, for me, for a long time now and I am not complaining.

I think Google is just desperately reacting to the unfortunate reality that people now prefer to start research in Wikipedia rather than Google. Desperation is never a good adviros, though and Google seems to be missing the point.

I assess the chances of Knol's success somewhere near that of Google Video and Orkut.

*sigh*

Last week, the major news on the Web was the launch of OpenSocial. Google did an excellent job documenting APIs and publishing quick-start tutorials and videos, as well as signing-up an impressive group of early adopters. All that is left to us, the blogger by-standers, is to review, envy and criticize. That is exactly what we are going to do.

Since it's too early, I, personally have only a few, quick comments. These comments may be totally off, so I insist on the right to change my statement at-will. Nevertheless, the first impression of OpenSocial is highly positive. The API is clear, concise and pragmatic. Pragmatism and (at least an attempt of) parsimony are a necessary feature for such API. It seems like Google is on the right track on that front.

Some of our readership, coming from the Java/J2EE world, may draw parallels between OpenSocial and Java Portlets API (JSR-168). Java Portlets API was created about four years ago, intended to be a plugin infrastructure for Java-based web sites (a plan much less ambitious than that of OpenSocial) and - failed miserably. The main reason why it failed was that it was too restrictive in the areas that do not matter, and too general in the areas they should have described in detail. Areas like user profile management, user actions, user interactions. Basically, JSR-168 was page-centric, rather than user-centric and the demand is for a user-centric integration. Rendering is a job of a container.

OpenSocial has clearly avoided the trap that JSR-168 fell into. They concentrate on the right features: people, activities, persistence. The choice of the platform - Javascript, REST (bye-bye SOAP), Atom, RSS, HTML and CSS makes complete sense. The API is quite modular, reasonably high-level and what seems like flexible-enough to allow for all kinds of applications. We were shown some very different applications in the demos, created by different vendors.

Now that we have praised OpenSocial enough, and probably nobody had any doubt in its huge potential, anyway, let's mention some oddities, we've noticed:

When Google first launched GMail, it fundamentally changed the free, web-based email service arena. The "big" players back then, Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail were only allowing up to 5MB of storage, forcing users to spend more time on cleaning up their inboxes than actually using the e-mail service. Then there came Google with unimaginable mailbox sizes of 1GB for free and aggressively PRed mantra of "so you'll never need to delete another message.".

That was all nice and dandy, but apparently did not quite live up to the promise, since I just got this message today:

Bummer.

I was part of the early cohort of GMail users that got the service through private invitations, so I have been using it for about three years, now. That, granted, is quite a number of emails. However, I do not use my GMail as a hard disk or anything of the kind. I simply follow the mantra of GMail, by almost never bothering to delete any of my e-mails (except spam or things that get in my way). And in return I get this ungrateful message saying that I exceeded blah blah?

Grrrr... Google, shame on you! :)

Microsoft Silverlight, pet-named "Flash killer" by the Web 2.0 community, replicates many of the features of Macromedia Flash technology. Silverlight was first unveiled at the NAB Show, in early 2006, but it is only recently that it has gotten increasing spotlight from the industry. Somewhat intriguing, yet quite telling was that Microsoft featured Silverlight at the recently held Java One 2007, a major, traditionally M$-unfriendly annual conference of Java developers and vendors. Less surprisingly, it was the center point of the Microsoft's own Mix 2007, annual conference of web developers. Even though Silverlight is still left behind by Paris Hilton, it surely bypassed Britney in making headlines, at least - in the geek world. Judging by the enormous marketing blast, it is obvious that when it comes to Silverlight, Microsoft makes no jokes.

Why is Silverlight so important?

The new web, the so-called Web 2.0, is a two-headed phenomena. On one side it is a culture, a web-philosophy with the notions of the power of social unity, global outreach, two-way communication and extreme personalization at its foundation. On another side, it is a breakthrough in user-experience technology - Ajax being the most famous example. Ajax is great for responsive, ergonomic interfaces, the kinds you find in Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, Meebo and every other Web 2.0 site, but it is not the only important technology driving the web revolution. New web is heavy on rich media and until recently Flash was the dominant technology for multimedia delivery on the web. YouTube would not exist without the Flash Streaming technology and Flash Video format. Many audio podcast websites have flash audio players. Fancy image galleries are driven by Flash technology enabling greater interactivity. And the list goes on...

We have all heard about the relaxed corporate atmosphere at Google. Nothing wrong about that. In fact, it's awesome.

However, aparently somebody at Google's external communications (or whatever the department is called there) thought it was a good idea to share a piece of internal "nerdiness" with the public at large. Recently, they have published a teaser on the GMail log-in page:

Clicking on the link, not surprisingly, brings you to a YouTube video posted below. Ugggggggh, no comments :)

BMW gets it. Watch the phenomenal integration of Google Maps and German manufacturer's navigation system.