Keene on Tech

The wave. It paints a great image whether you are a surfer (real world, not web) or a football fanatic (you know, when everyone does the wave). The wave essentially forces you to participate, whether in a group or one on one. You wave and hopefully someone waves back. Today Google threw out their Wave at the I/O Conference in hopes of getting some developers waving back. And its unveiling has plenty of people talking about what this means for the evolution of online communication. So what is it?… Wave is basically a new Google service that allows users to combine email, IM, photo sharing and social networking into one seamless framework (and interface) integrating all the ways we mainly communicate online. In doing this, Wave has the potential to make us more efficient (or more distracted perhaps) by keeping all your comings and goings online together in one place. But its much more than this. Its a new way to think about how we communicate by blending together all the disparate communication tools and evolving it into something more. The service has a long way to go before its ready for public prime time (late 2009 release perhaps?). However, now that the APIs are going to be released to the developer public, Google has high hopes of getting feedback and more ideas of how to further develop the service. For a nice summary of Wave and what its all about, see this Cnet story. Incidentally, the folks who have given birth to Wave are the brothers Rasmussen (Lars and Jens) whose claim to fame is the creation of Google Maps, a service that was bought by Google thus bringing the Rasussens into the Google family.

Keene

Google is more than a name, its a verb in the dictionary. It is to internet search the way Xerox was used to refer to photocopying. The term is now part of our everyday vernacular. As ingrained as “googling” is for finding information on the internet, its interesting to think about what children consider when they want to find something on the web. Suprisingly, its not Google, nor Yahoo! or MSN for that matter…actually, its a part of Google, but what they are increasingly using is YouTube. Yep, video search. Show me a video and a thousand words or more can be “seen” in a single search find. The NYTimes covers this interesting phenonmenon in this story. So I ask you to stop and ponder for a moment the search landscape we now currently use. Try to imagine the future 5 or 10 years from now as broadband is more prevalent and even basic computers are more powerful than high end desktops we now have. And then you may see just how visual search matures and becomes the predominant way we find information on the web. Granted, visual search can’t be used for everything, but increasingly, there is enough content, covering enough subjects captured through video that this is now a legitimate search tool. Expect to see it showing up more and more when our current crop of grade school kids hit the universities in a few year’s time and they turn in research papers on E-Ink paper with embedded video. Enter Wibe7.tv. This is a search engine specifically for YouTube and is explained more thoroughly in this ReadWriteWeb post. Expect to see more of visual search (oh bad pun!) in the near future and soon you too may be seeing just what you were looking for.

Keene