Wave Goodbye

  • 28 Sep
  • 2009
Posted by: Rory

It’s quite unlike me to be behind with the latest Internet craze, really unlike me intact. I used Twitter before it was endorsed on TV by Stephen Fry, I used Facebook well before the new layout, I had GMail in the first 2 days of developer preview, but I just didn’t get into the latest craze at the time I had the opportunity to.

Google Wave, the next evolutionary step for communication

Google Wave, the next evolutionary step for communication

The craze I’m on about is something you might have heard of, “Google Wave”. Now recently, Google hasn’t impressed me due to some issues with products of theirs that involve money, so when I read this blog post last night about whether Google Wave will replace Twitter, I was very skeptical. At the end of it there was a video of the Google IO developer conference.

I tried as hard as I could to hate the bloke running the conference, but I don’t know whether is was the tech he was showing or him, I just couldn’t help but like the whole idea of Wave.

So what does it do? Well, Wave does what Google does best. It takes something that we’re really used to, takes a sideways look at it and proceeds to change it. But it changes it in such a way that makes it new, fun and somehow easier, even though it has a million new features.

Put simply, it makes conversations, plain and simple conversations. It moves away from the conventional method of relay communication that we’re so used to and makes Wave a truely interactive experience, as if you were talking in real life, but with pictures and rich media.

There’s far too much for me to explain what it does in one post (it took Google an hour to explain it), so I’ll leave it to this video to explain:

What I’m really interested in though, is how it’s going to change our lives and is it really a good idea to have one company be able to control a majority of a major communication channel. It’s true that companies like BizStone, who own Twitter own one major communication channel, but if Wave is really set to replace as fundamental and business critical as email, then having one business control all of that communication is a bit scary.

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Chrome OS

  • 10 Jul
  • 2009
Posted by: Rory

Some of the biggest news to hit the technology world in a while just seemed to appear out of nowhere the other day, when Google announced the inevitable: they’re making an operating system. It’d been rumoured for a while, but Google are quite good at keeping secrets, so there was no real evidence that it was going to happen, until they made the announcement on their blog the other day. The name? (Google) Chrome OS.

Google announce their Chrome OS

Google announce their Chrome OS

In the days of the rumours, some even went so far as to make a Linux flavour that worked with a Mac Style Dock and only performed internet based tasks. The name of it was gOS. The website never made it very clear what the “g” in gOS was meant to stand for until just a tiny bit of disclaimer at the bottom of the website popped up, claiming that the “g” stood for “good”, crushing the rumours.

Back to the real Google OS. They’re are a web based company, so basing the operating system on the internet seems like a very smart move, which does beg the question: what if I’m not connected to the internet? Does the entire system buckle?

A few days after the press release, Google also announced a list of hardware partners who were prepared to make devices that would work with Chrome OS. Among those, was the chip maker ARM, British company who are just about the Intel of mobile computing. A lot of chips that go into mobile devices such as the iPhone are ARM chips. So announcing them as a hardware partner could mean one major thing that tackles the problem of always being connected to the web: an always on internet connection using mobile networks. (more…)

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