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.
So, I’ve been a little out of commission lately. It’s been one hell of a week. First, I got a virus which rendered my primary desktop completely useless. I still had internet access on my laptop but, I don’t really enjoy doing anything productive on a laptop, yea I’m “that guy”. Anyway, once I got the virus situation resolved hurricane Katrina’s little cousin viciously swept through the DC metro area, completely un-rooted a massive tree in my front yard, knocking it over and of course knocking out the power for a few days. On top of this, I was trying to play catch up on some school work. Now that all of these disasters have been dealt with accordingly I can get back to the swing of things. Just before the tree of might fell in the yard I bought a new domain and threw up another web site. It’s light on content at the moment with just an intro but as time passes I’ll add more. The new site is http://iamjray.com. It’s where I’ll post my “fun” less professional content. So, go there, bookmark it, and check back. Later!
I must admit. When I initially saw the trailer for ‘Inception’ I was skeptical. Upon learning that it was indeed directed by Christopher Nolan I was immediately interested. After all, how does the creator of ‘Batman Begins’ and ‘The Dark Knight’ NOT get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to such things? Weeks pass and the days leading up to the premier of the movie twitter was set ablaze with the #inception trending topic. All of those who were privy to early screenings were singing its praises and telling of its epic stature. After a nice happy hour on a rather hot Friday afternoon I set for the theater to view the movie.
‘Inception’ is a movie about a group of dream thieves who team up to embark on a difficult mission. Think of it as ‘Ocean’s 11’ meets ‘The Matrix’. In the interest of not revealing spoilers, I’ll leave out details. ‘Inception’ is an action packed thrill ride with intellectual concepts that appeal to just about everyone. The movie takes many risks in the concepts explored. With so many movie-goers obsessed with the next big 3D, computer generated flick to open so they can frequent their favorite theater establishment and dawn a pair of those ridiculous looking 3D glasses while stuffing their faces with popcorn so soaked in salt in butter that it will no doubt contribute to the heart attack coming in 20 years – its refreshing to sit in on a movie with so much meticulous thought to detail and execution. Nolan delivers the goods with an almost perfect balance between action, romance, comedy and character development. The action sequences are well thought out in that although the characters are in a dream, it does not go over the top with folks flying and performing unbelievable feats of human activity. Although, if Nolan had gone in that direction, one would not be able to blame him – after all they’re in a dream. However there are rather tasteful executions of dream like sequences that really add value to the movie.
I would argue that this is indeed the best sci-fi flick to hit the big screen since ‘The Matrix’. A buddy of mine told me he believes it’s even better than ‘The Matrix’. I think only time will tell for that one. Remember, ‘The Matrix’ was released back in 1999 so the fact that we still measure the quality of sci-fi flicks to it speaks volumes about it but, I digress. No matter what your taste, there’s something here for just about everyone. If you had doubts, I advise you to set them aside and take a chance on this one – I promise you wont be disappointed. If you’ve already seen it, let me know what you think! If not, what are you doing with your life? Go today!
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.
The new teaser commercial for Motorola’s Droid X has been released – and it’s awesome. Motorola and Verizon have established a great partnership when it comes to Android phones. Just a year ago, Verizon was regarded as behind the curve when it came to smartphones in general. Now, in my opinion, they have the best selection of Android phones of any US carrier. Motorola, during the same time period was on the verge of financial ruin with its last successful product arguably being the Motorola Razr. Today, Motorola is on the road to recovery and is consistently shipping top of the line Android handsets. I was a little disappointed to learn from the MOTODEV blog that the bootloader for the Motorola Droid X will be locked down (encrypted). What does this mean for the average user – absolutely nothing. But if you’re like me (I’m the proud owner of the original droid) then you enjoy flashing custom ROMs onto your device. This will be unlikely to happen on the Droid X because of the locked bootloader. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I wouldn’t hold my breath. I was considering upgrading to the Droid X but this unfortunately is a deal breaker for me. Android represents openness. If I pay a few hundred dollars for a device, I should be able to do whatever I want with it. And don’t give me any BS about user experience. I pay money, you give me device – I’ll manage my own user experience thank you, very much. With all that said, the commercial is still pretty damn awesome!
So Consumer Reports has declared that it cannot recommend the iPhone 4 product until the antenna issues are resolved. What’s Apple’s response to this? They have begun deleting comments pointing to the Consumer Reports article from its forums. I very much enjoy Apple products – I really do. I just don’t care for the company itself. This is in true Apple form though; I can’t really say I’m surprised. All the same, I think Apple could have handled this situation much better. They have a pretty good reputation for delivering great products – and I’ve even heard great things about customer support. No one is perfect. If they would have come out in the beginning, acknowledged the problem and presented reasonable solutions as opposed to never really admitting the existence of the problem and telling people to get a case, we wouldn’t still be talking about it. I guess it all boils down to PR. Remember when Apple was the little guy going up against big, bad Microsoft? When did Apple become “The Man”?
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!
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.
