As I stood in the airport, waiting for my bags to emerge from the abyss (better known as the baggage claim belt), I just so happened to glance at my phone to see that I had a new e-mail. Upon further reading I learned I was one of the lucky ones chosen to receive a free Logitech branded Google TV device. This, is of course Google’s way of “stimulating” the development of applications and optimization of web sites for the device. Up until I learned of the news I hadn’t given much thought to developing anything for Google TV simply because I wasn’t sure if it was going to catch on or not. I’d hate to see it go the way of Google Wave. I won’t be selfish, though. I won’t take this device and keep it all to myself and contribute nothing to the community. After all, the device IS retailing for $300 and I’ll be getting one for free so, out of sheer appreciation I do plan to give back in some form or fashion.
The first thing I’ll do is simply optimize my current website for Google TV. This may seem like a fairly trivial task, and to a certain extent, it is – technically. Only thing is, I’m no UI designer. I have trouble ascertaining what looks good. And when I do decide something looks good, most times it looks good to me and not necessarily anyone else. I’ll probably go through several iterations of layouts and navigation techniques before I finally settle on a design; and will then probably change that final design two more times. In the end, I’ll most likely deliver a clean cut, fairly ‘plane jane’ layout which will suffice.
As far as applications are concerned, I have no idea. The things you expect to be in Google TV are almost all there out of the box (Netflix, YouTube, Pandora etc) albeit missing some features but it’s a good start. The challenge I’m facing is, besides streaming video and music, what would the average consumer want to do with a truly internet abled television? This is a challenge simply because no one has succeeded in this niche area so, there is no industry leader – no example to follow. This is sort of a good thing because there is no arbitrary box; which opens the door to some truly creative ideas. Think YouTube – remember all of the video streaming sites that came AFTER that? Most of them sort of took YouTube as their model and built from that baseline. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it’s difficult to discriminate yourself that way. With Google TV, as of the time of this writing, there are no established models.
I’ll probably spend a good amount of time trying to figure out the best way to approach this challenge. Perhaps I’m over thinking this a bit. Maybe I should just start with the obvious things such as social network integration and just sort of work my way from there.
Looks like Google is going to discontinue developing Google Wave. You can read about it on the official Google blog here. The reason cited for this course of action is low user adoption. It’s not all that surprising. Looking back at my own experience with Wave, I sort of have mixed feelings about it. When it was first unveiled at Google I/O 2009, like most other geeks I was pretty excited about it. The shiny new product from Google was slated to change the way we communicated on the internet in much the same way e-mail and instant messaging revolutionized communication.
I don’t think that it was the technology itself that failed. I believe it was the way in which Google released it to the public. I think Google made a big mistake by unveiling the product so early in its life cycle. The product was first released to developers – in hopes that the development community would take the technology and run with it. Despite a lot of good work from a lot of good developers things simply didn’t happen the way Google expected it to. There was a lot of excitement among people – even those aren’t very tech-savvy when the product was first launched. The problem was, most people couldn’t use the product because it was pre-alpha in its maturity thus Google – and rightfully so – drastically restricted the number of invites. As time passed, the momentum gained from the initial launched began to dwindle.
Later in the year, Google released a bunch of new invites, opening up the product to tens of thousands more and giving those people a set of invites to distribute amongst their friends and colleagues. This is when I began to get my hands dirty with it. After I sent out numerous invites to friends and co-workers, the stage was set…let the waves begin!!! [Insert cricket noise here]. Unfortunately, I, nor did anyone with whom I associated knew exactly what to do with this thing. Sure it was nice – you could embed videos, maps, play games, but it didn’t quite fit into everyone’s lives. People did not flock to the product, leaving behind their precious IM clients, e-mail inboxes, Twitter and Facebook accounts – well maybe Facebook after the privacy debacle but I digress.
Sure I participated in a few conversations here and there but didn’t get any real value from it. Perhaps it was because there wasn’t enough integration from other vendors. After all, for most people, if you wanted to participate in a wave, you’d have to navigate there, pull up the appropriate conversation and begin typing. And it only really shines when there are other people involved at the same time. This goes against the way people communicate these days. Everything is asynchronous in nature: leave a comment on my wall, I’ll get back to you, mention me in a tweet I’ll respond later, tag me in an embarrassing photo I’ll go justify my behavior via comment (or untag) later. Wave was pushing synchronous communication in an asynchronous world. That’s not to say there wasn’t anything good about wave.
After a while, Google began to push Wave as more of a collaborative tool. This fit in nicely with the synchronous communication that really allowed Wave to shine. As a result, organizations and groups of people were targeted – companies, people looking to collaborate on some type of work such as planning committees etc. And for a while, it looked as though Wave had found its niche. Again, this was not the case. For reasons that will probably be debated for a while, Wave never took off.
Let me just say that although the product known as Google Wave may be ending this does not mean the idea of Wave is going away. Google has opened Pandora’s Box. I’m sure we’ll see similar products in the future that build on and perfect the concepts and ideas upon which Wave was built. In addition, Google has mentioned it will continue to utilize the technology to extend other projects. In whatever form we see this product reincarnated we can be sure that it will help to shape the way in which communicate for a long time.
Spent some time the other day working on a new intro for the ‘Jray’ logo you see embedded all over my domain…you know, the one at the bottom of my blog posts. Anyway it’s still a work and progress but I wanted to share it anyway. I stitched together some epic music, some clips from ‘Gladiator’, ’300′ and ‘The Dark Knight’. Finally I overlayed that audio on top of some pretty simple flash animation and well there you have it! Have a look here and let me know what you think. It can also be viewed in the media section of my site.
Please excuse this self-indulgent blog post as I am plugging a neat JQuery plugin written by yours truly. I love music – but then again, most people do. In addition to being a music lover, my style is somewhat minimalistic. As a minimalistic, music-loving web developer I thought it would be nice to create a minimalistic music player for the web. I wanted to create something which delivered core functionality without too many bells and whistles – something that would get the job done without taking attention away from the content of the web site. One could argue that the tiny bar shaped MP3 player options out there do just this but I honestly think they’re a little boring. I needed something with a little more swag – excuse the pun. I decided to build my own solution. A couple weeks later SWAGG Player was born. It’s built on top of a really nice JavaScript API built by Scott Schiller called SoundManager2. If you’d like more information about Scott and his API you can visit the official site for SoundManager here. You can see Swagg Player in action at the homepage of my site – johnny-ray.com. Installation and configuration instructions are here. As of this writing, the current version is 0.5 with 0.6 days away. Feel free to contact me with any issues or questions. Thanks!
