Rubenerd

It's that all too familiar language that signifies the de facto end of a project: Google is cancelling any further development of Wave, its platform that was supposed to revolutionise email, chat, wikis, collaboration and grilled cheese sandwiches.

I just worry there’s so much hype surrounding Google Wave a lot of people will be dissapointed [sic].

Me on Twitter, 30th September 2009

The defenders, detractors, fence sitters

During its troubled year long run there were plenty of people defending Wave. It was a 21st century SS Great Eastern, a revolutionary new service that was simply too far ahead of its time for people to understand. Saying that Wave was slow and had a terrible interface was akin to saying Gmail was slow and had a terrible interface with email, it was supposed to be just one front-end for an open protocol anyone could write software on. It was Google and automatically cool. Google was going to use its tremendous reach online to get people to use it. The two hour long introductory video wasn't too long, you just weren't patient enough or a developer.

Then there were the detractors. What do I use it for? Who else uses it? It didn't matter that Wave was an open protocol if the only client that currently supported it steered like the SS Great Eastern trapped on a sandbar. It was supposed to combine all the positive elements of email, wikis, chat and collaboration, but it brought out the worst of each instead. There are so many more clever ways to organise things and we want to read these waves in a glorified inbox that has all the shortcomings of email? And why… good heavens why… did they not understand how to design something as basic as a scrollbar?

Then finally there were the people sitting on the fence, or the railing of the pier where there SS Great Eastern had been berthed (Get it? A railgun pun with that picture? Never mind). We weren't sure whether Google's hype machine was really going to deliver, but we liked the idea of something that could make collaborating on documents in real time and more intelligent email. We just didn't know how to use it or what to use it for, and Google certainly made no legitimate attempt to explain it to us. In the end we used it a few times, closed the browser tab, and didn't give it much more thought.

Insert waving goodbye to Google Wave here

To me, the mark of a truly revolutionary new service (or device) is people who have never used it before can pick it up and not only figure out how to use it in a few short moments, but instantly integrate them into their lives such that they didn't know how they lived without it. Google Wave did neither of these things, it was just another in an increasingly long and worrying string of Google service failures. They're starting to look a little like Microsoft.

On another note, I stopped listening to This Week in Google because I didn't share the hosts' unbridled enthusiasm for the service, perhaps now its safe to listen again! Well, maybe after this next episode when they'll be talking about how it failed because nobody was brilliant enough to capture its true awesomeness ;).

As I said to Pownce in 2008: goodbye Google Wave, I hardly used thee.

Some sad news from Jim Kloss at Whole Wheat Radio HQ: Facebook has regressed again.

WWR Player Note: I thought this was coming but now it’s confirmed. Facebook is removing the capability of putting things like the WWR Player on your Profile page. Expect everyone’s WWR Player to disappear from their profile in coming days.

I long since stripped all my data out of Facebook and deleted all my applications when they rubbed me the wrong way for the last time, but I did keep the WWR player in the hopes it would generate some buzz.

Thanks for adding the Whole Wheat Radio Player Ruben. We both made compromises. I wrote the unbelievably contorted code to add a simple link to Facebook profiles and you logged onto FB. ;-) —Jim

Sorry it didn't work out :(.

SBS News is reporting that some US billionaires have pledged at least 50% of their wealth to charity through a campaign started by Warren Buffett.

A noble cause, but those billionaires could have made an infinitely more positive impact by running ethical and sustainable business that perhaps would have made less money, than robbing us and giving some of it back later. CEOs could (if they wanted to) use their influence to affect the world in positive ways; when they retire their money is no better than anyone else's.

This could be my late hippy mum speaking through me, but isn't it about time we stop valuing a company based on its profits and more on its impact?

As usual, Om Malik puts it better than anyone else.

Google, thanks to two brilliant engineer-founders, has become a great company seemingly able to solve the world’s most complicated engineering problems. That ability made it turn search into the great money machine that it is. It knows how to tweak machines and make them do unfathomable things. But what it can’t do is internalize empathy. It doesn’t know feelings. It doesn’t comprehend that relationships are more than a mere algorithm. You can see this in its many offerings; they’re efficient, but devoid of emotion, and emotions are what drive interaction. A smile begets a smile, a frown a frown and a conversation a conversation. That’s true in the real world, and it’s true on the web.

No point struggling against what you’re good at

Google is great at trawling through large amounts of data, capitalising on it, and moving on. This is why their search engine usually finds what we're looking for and Gmail is a usable online email service. Unfortunately, this engineer oriented corporate culture doesn't lend itself to creating more organic sites such as social networks and wikis (remember Knol?).

Not all problems can be solved with cold algorithms and a bank of computers.

I think one can draw a parallel to Android as well. The Apple iOS may be overtly restrictive, but was clearly the result of people fed up with the previous phone status quo and wanted to create something people would want to use. Android was developed to get more people using Google's banks of computers.

I trialled a Motorola Milestone and the difference in the Little Things were startling. Of course, engineers scoff at such notions because they're intangible, and its for that reason Google is struggling to break out of its rut.

Basically, Google does reactionary well, revolutionary less well. Nothing wrong with that from a business perspective as long as it keeps bringing in the dough, but as Microsoft's repeated failed attempts in the consumer space have shown, overcoming corporate culture is a dang hard thing to do.

I just finished the transition from SegPub to Net Logistics, as you can tell from my terribly sophisticated line-up of icons above!

What colour is whoa?

I had my new account activated in less than an hour after I made my first monthly payment. In less than 30 minutes I had my private/public keys for SSH/SFTP swapped and usable, six years of blog posts restored in a new database, six years of images uploaded through SFTP, WordPress uploaded and installed and all my custom .htaccess crap implemented.

Good heavens, the difference in performance is amazing, its like someone shoved rockets up my blog and bidness card sites' arses. I could have phrased that better.

This heading is also entirely pointless

I get the feeling I'm going to like it here. Thanks for all your help Martin, Tarinder and Alicia A. Automation. They're so cute, they even name their bots. And they operate in Australia and Singapore… just like me. sniffles

If something isn't working, leave a comment here and I'll patch it up. In return, I might start blogging about things that have nothing to do with web hosts again.

Who knows, I might be able to host my assignments reliably this semester so I don't get failed for them!

Various vexillological societies and The Wikipedias are reporting that Malawi has changed its flag to restore the previous Pan-African colour layout, a change the opposition party is none too pleased with. I don't pretend to know or understand the political motivation behind the change, but I like it. It looks brighter, more cheerful :).

When I was growing up I was intensely interested in flags and logos because so many designs could be visually expressed with so few colours and geometric shapes. People used to call me a loser, can you believe it? Don't answer that.

SegPub really outdid themselves this evening; my sites were (and still are) on average taking six minutes to load, and that was only when their domains decided to resolve at all.

I give up SegPub, I'm moving. You don't answer your support tickets, messages I send to your mailing lists are rejected and your service is getting laughably bad. My GeoCities page on dialup was faster.

I'm just glad I don't have any assignments for the next few weeks. SegPub have already cost me one high distinction when a demo site failed to load and I was failed for that part of it. Thanks guys :(

We all suspected as much, but now it's official: the readers of (uh, Zoo Weekly) have dubbed Stephen Conroy the dumbest politician in Australia.

It’s all them portal things

For those not in Australia, the illustrious Stephen Conroy is the senator who wants to implement a nationwide, mandatory internet filter based on a super secret blacklist, regardless of the technological infeasibility, negative social implications and other such quibbling factors of which I've discussed at great length. If he wasn't taught at the Ted Stevens school of understanding the intertubes, he at least received some free coaching one afternoon from the man over some cheap alcoholic beverages.

"There’s a staggering number of Australians being in having their computers infected at the moment, up to 20,000, uh, can regularly be getting infected by these spams, or scams, that come through, the portal (sic)."

Unlike other esteemed survey organisations such as Newspoll, Zoo Weekly is uniquely positioned to gauge the sentiment of the Australian public on the societal impact of technology. Their exposes on how much photoshopping one poor model in a bikini can endure are featured on the front covers of their magazines each week.

Runners up

As a runner up, I thought Richard Dawkins' description of the Orwellian-ly titled Family First party leader Steven Fielding was particularly apt:

Runner up in the Zoo survey was Family First Senator Steve Fielding, who has been described as having the intellect of an earthworm by eminent scientist Richard Dawkins, after saying he thought the earth was less than 10,000 years old.

I dunno, earthworms can navigate with their eyes closed. Still, I do follow him on Twitter.

It's time to start worrying.

Labor has lost its substantial two-party preferred lead against the coalition in just two weeks, the latest Newspoll has found. […] The poll, taken between Friday and Sunday, found Labor and the coalition are split 50-50.

Don't get me wrong I'm not a Labor fan (at least not any more), but the prospect of this guy being our PM is absolutely terrifying. We don't need another anti-intellectial theocracy.

From a tech perspective I'm guessing we're screwed either way, unless enough people vote below the line and oust Stephen Conroy, or enough Labor ministers grow spines to stand up against the filter, or enough Greens are elected to put pressure on Labor to straighten up and fly right, or a decent combination of all three.

To those who auto-post their Tumblr to Twitter: DON’T! Or make it fit in 140 characters. I hate constantly reading truncated … tweets! If this means putting titles on your Tumblr entries like bloggers figured out how to do ten years ago, so be it.

I’ve resorted to filtering out all tweets that include "…", but I worry I’m missing some of your important commentary, such as this.

Your Twitter friend :)
~ Ruben(erd)