Don’t forget about us.

A core component in the Singularity-conversation is the topic of the evolving humanization of computers. But how come we don’t speak much of the reciprocal mechanization of man? It’s a two-way street, but most of us don’t consider this in the big picture. Our natural processes are constantly influenced (for better and worse) by the machines in our lives.

I suppose we’re victims of our own subjectivity and don’t quite consider it, or maybe we’re in a collective subconscious state of denial. Whatever the reason, it’s happening, and we ought to start paying more attention because we just might lost the very thing that makes us human, the je ne sais quoi that computers don’t have but we’re trying to provide them with.

They learn from us.

In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil discusses the future course of humanity, particularly relating to the development of artificial intelligence and its impact on human consciousness. The book predicts that machines with human-like intelligence will surface and be readily available, revolutionizing most aspects of life, and that eventually humanity and its machinery will become one and the same.

As we journey toward the realization of his prophesy (*crosses fingers*), we will continue to encounter the progressive humanization of technology all around us. Today, this idea is fairly well known due to the exponential progress rippling through our world. More and more, we are redesigning our technology to merge into our lives as opposed to the inferior method of attaching to our lives. The merge-factor provides a more physical (sometime human-like) vibe.

Example: Instead of scanning headlines from site to site while scrolling your mousewheel (think: attached), throw them away along with your newspaper and pick up an iPad and flip away with the more natural behavior (think: merged).  This is pseudo-empathetic technology that feels more like Mom than it does Microsoft. The iPad promises a more physically intuitive interface that sympathizes with our workflows and playflows.

And the idea of intuition is key, as it’s a core differentiated human capability. Consider that your word processor has never corrected you by articulating “ummmm… I think you really meant to say it this way.”  Aside from spelling and grammar correction, MS Word can’t do that (yet), because it’s stuck with the intuitive abilities of a plastic bag. However, progress is indeed happening.

Example: New, intuitive features in Gmail Labs. Google presents us with some cool tricks, such as the “forgotten attachment reminder” that knows if you meant to include a file with your message. Also, there’s the clever “do you also want to send this to these people”, the feature that learns your patterns of group addressing so no body gets left out. Wonderful examples of progress in this space surface all the time, you just need to learn how to recognize them. Keep watch.

We learn from them. (Sometimes not in a positive way.)

So the code is getting smarter, more human-like, more intuitive. Intuition and intelligent choice-making are key elements of humanized computers. Intuition is understanding intention, and that’s something people do very well compared to machines today. Intention is often removed from our overt behavior, and is something interpretive, fueled by creativity, pattern recognition and emotion. Computers can’t really see something if it’s not in front of them, if it’s not overt or somehow defined. To date, most technological intuition is merely faked. It’s nothing but a sham, incapable of trusting it’s gut and relying on immense computation procedures (think of Chess applications that use brute force calculation instead of creative approaches).

But here’s the thing. As machines learn from us, we learn from them. The relationship is remarkable, and we best not lose the plot, because we’ll need the things that differentiate us as humans to get to the Singularity. We must not lose ourselves to the seduction of passive, predictable calculating behaviors of Turing machines.

Are our intuitive abilities degrading with each Google search? Are we sacrificing the capabilities of deductive logic reasoning with each query or Excel calculation? I think we are, to a certain extent (although not quite with the drama of recent headlines: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”).

What about the sense of exploration? The hunger to discover wanes in some way with every “recommended” book, song or blog post. Sure, we’re still discovering, but we’re not being psychologically gratified the way we used to be when we figuratively hunted for our dinner. This must have an effect on the thread or our psychological evolution. For example, I used to enjoy the magic of discovering a new album. It was like winning the lottery. Today, Pandora, Last FM and the like have contributed to the demise of such experiences. Instead of feeling the awesome sensation linked to the victorious discovery of something great, I find myself more often disappointed with the less-than-accurate suggestions of the recommendation engines of the web.

The fundamental approach that we take to problem solving today must be taking it’s toll on our thinking patterns as well. We used to think differently. Maybe not more (we’ve never enjoyed more access to more information), but definitely differently. We are being rewired to operate in ways that are aligned to the mechanical behaviors that we increasingly depend on to get us through the day.

What have we become?

Why develop a sense of direction when your car’s GPS system can lead the way? Why hone mathematical estimation skills when your spreadsheet’s got them covered? Is the art of  creative writing hindered by the guidance of Microsoft language tools? Vonnegut’s texts would undoubtedly be underlined green throughout. With Guitar Hero at their fingertips, will the musically-inclined youth realize potential skills and contribute to the creative catalogue, or will they be satisfied with the gratification of 87,000 points and an unlocked song?

The use of computers has clearly altered the human way. And maybe that’s okay. But at what cost?

My favorite example is Chess. In his excellent review of the book “The Chess Master and the Computer”, god-like Garry Kasparov explains:

The heavy use of computer analysis [by professional chess players] has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

Will innovative chess die with the dependency on computer analysis and training? Perhaps.

The message that I want to leave you with is this:  don’t enslave yourself completely to whatever digital tools you’ve got in your life. Keep an eye out for areas/skills in which you particularly rely on technological support. In a simple application of this, don’t be afraid to rely on your own brain to remember a phone number or address, and don’t shy away from performing calculations in your head when performing quick estimations.

Use it, or lose it.

So, Facebook is evolving.

With emphasis on at least 3 core web services – search, chat and the upcoming email – Facebook is getting more serious about functions that Google, among others, are doing well at providing. It makes sense. So here are some quick thoughts on what 400 million users are experiencing on Facebook these days:

A bigger search bar, center stage.

Why it’s good for Facebook:

Keeps users in the site; search is clearly important, if it’s done well people may use it. Facebook controls not all but a lot of social capital on the web. Social search has obvious value for them (and us), but will it be enough? Not quite. Then… wait for it…. Bing! At least it’s trying now. With a lot of help from Microsoft meaningful search results can surface from within the Facebook wall.

Why it’s lame:

Integrated search is not executed well at all. Maybe I just don’t know about the secret and strategic plan to roll out reasonable usability at a snail’s pace? The search results don’t integrate with the Bing-driven web results that remain a click away from the sidebar. Google is always atop my browser, one click or keystroke away (F6 for those who don’t know). Why would I switch? Un. Bloody. Likely. Here’s a free tip for you, Facebook: if you can’t solve the true integration challenge, simply try placing Bing results right next to social results. Make that more visible right off the bat and some of us might actually intend on typing something into your search box rather than doing so accidentally. (But as of course that’s unlikely to happen, because we’ve got F6.)

Slightly more accessible chat.

Why it’s good:

Keeps users in the site; chatter is constant. Lots of people sign into this feature already. Maybe now the rest of us who don’t use it a lot will think of turning it on now and again. You know, because your chat box isn’t only available from the bottom-right anymore (a location also known as “the last place a person in the western world naturally directs their eyes towards”)

What’s missing:

3rd party email service integration, Facebook content integration, voice and video chat. Lots of work to do here, but doable, and potentially very useful. What else is missing? My objectivity. At some point in this post I began addressing Facebook as “you”. Ha.

Upcoming email service.

Why it’s good:

While they won’t likely get my business in this area, if rolled out properly they could get a lot of newcomers rockin’ the …@fbmail.com or ….@fb.com – if they could somehow pry that domain from the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Why you’ll wait for version 2:

Facebook will probably push social context down our throats, ignoring that email experience that do not need to evolve into a frenzy of likes and threaded rambling. After all, Google provides Wave for that. If my email procedures get just 5% less efficient, a huge time-suck will ensue. I can’t risk that. This’ll be a tough one for Facebook to generate conversion from, but new adoption is another story.

Ready? Set? Now race to the middle!

In a way, as Google gets more serious about the social game and Facebook moves towards the domains of the Mountain View Machine, we’re looking at a race to the middle that will have some very interesting outcomes, and perhaps some friendly ones as well. Clever mashups are already around; check out Threadsy. Some cool integration there. Now if only it was executed by the data sources themselves, in collaboration with each other. Imagine if Google and Facebook innovated together? Unlikely, I know. But the economies of scale could be there for their servers appetites. Lotta pictures on that site. And growing. Okay okay, enough economic rationale. It’s complex and they are fighting for glory. One is focused on implicit results and the other, explicit. And yes, the fight is too good for now. Like most of us, I enjoy watching it. I also find value in multiple services. I enjoy many benefits from several cloud services, and as for the drawbacks, I try to minimize my encounters with them. I like that the industry is busy and competitive because it’ll make result in better products, ones of better value. Mistakes along then way, for sure. But reasonable competition for the masses. I like that they’re trying.

Trying… and killing it out there… here are some recent stats… go to Facebook the source.

More than 400 million active users

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

More than 35 million users update their status each day

More than 60 million status updates posted each day

More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month

More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week

More than 3.5 million events created each month

More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook

More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook

More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day

Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Click the image to be taken to the Youtube Video about Google Voice

Cell phone plans in Canada are so far behind even the United States in terms of value for a consumers’ dollar that it is almost laughable, as the States are well behind Europe and Asia.  Simple things like texting, which costs the providers so little that it is considered basically a freebie to them, cost $10 to add the unlimited option to a cell phone plan.  Not only that, but ‘unlimited’ in this case really means up to 1000 texts sent.  Now that number might be high, according to Nielsen Mobile, the average U.S. teen sends and receives 2899 texts monthly. Given that any text that is sent over the allotted 1000 generally has a small fine (in my case $0.10 per text), it may seem like a small amount, but it can quickly add up for a service that is costing the provider almost nothing.

The same could be said for their data plans, which are also over the top.  Coming in increments of 500mb and 1GB for monthly usage, this can easily be achieved if one is using significant amounts of commonplace things like Google Maps, Flickr, etc.  Once again, the charges for going over the usage border on ‘extreme’ to put it gently.  All of this is what is leading me towards my impending switch to Google Voice for as much as possible.  The benefits that it presents, unlimited local calling, extremely low international rates, exceptional voicemail, unlimited texting, etc., all help it outweigh any negatives that are assocaited with the product.  The only thing left to do now, is to wait for Google to expand the service into Canada.  Currently there are ways around the US only implementation, but it is still very much incomplete.  There were signs that it would be soon that the service allowed for calling from Canada, but, as with any big rollout, the official release date is ‘when it’s ready’.  I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for a nice Christmas present from the Google Santa.

At first glance the numbers themselves may seem small, but keep in mind that these are two sites that have tens of millions of users per day. A tiny change in page rendering speed, can have a pretty significant impact over time, especially when your core business is search.

What can we learn from this?

• Speed matters (the obvious one)
• Costs of delay increase overtime and remain persistent (you’ve lost users)
• What you show a user, is more important then it’s actual size

The last point is interesting. What that essentially means is that, it’s important to consider how a page is rendered, and optimize or use techniques, that let you decrease the perceived loading time.

Performance optimizations are important. They are typically neglected, not budgeted for, or done as an after-thought, which can hurt in the long run. However, it is foolish to assume that a particular site can be fast just by doing a couple of tweaks. On the contrary, optimization is a methodical process, which takes small but several aspects into account, which together can bring faster performance and user experience responsiveness.

Progressive Change.

In a discussion about improvisational jazz, a teacher of mine once expressed, “the only constant thing in life is change,” paraphrasing the greek philosopher Heraclitus. That phrase remains meaningful to me fifteen years later, complementing my general fascination with progress.

I deeply enjoy progress. That may sound very vague, but it’s true. I enjoy learning and gaining new skills, whether it’s a new instrument or a programming language. I love progressive music (Tool, Yes, Dream Theater, etc.) and I pay for Progressive car insurance (just kidding – I’m with Belair Direct). I enjoy working towards Checkmate as much as I enjoy working through a Rubik’s Cube. I get excited by Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould and Bill Hicks’ rambling of “how we’re going to get to Mars.” I just love progress.

There is nobody more excited by progressive change as Ray Kurzweil. Like many others, when I first read Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in 2006, I felt a real exhilaration as if I had just cracked open the coolest fortune cookie of all time. Unite my consciousness with a supercomputer so I can exist throughout all eternity?? Sure, sign me up!

For those who are unfamiliar with Kurzweil’s Singularity, I strongly recommend delving into it. It’s worth checking out. Info on Ray can be found here, his book here, the upcoming movie here, and the supporting organization here. You may also be interested in TED videos here and here.

Exponential Growth.

Kurzweil observes that change is abound, and moving quickly in a particular direction. Vast and diverse occurrences of exponential growth transcend technological paradigms, perpetually driving us forward. Just in case you’re skeptical of such claims, here’s an excerpt from the book’s Wikipedia article, citing just some of the exponentially growing technologies:

• Dynamic RAM size (smallest feature sizes decreasing exponentially)
• Dynamic RAM price performance (improving exponentially)
• Average Transistor price (decreasing exponentially)
• Transistor Manufacturing costs (decreasing exponentially)
• Microprocessor clock speeds (increasing exponentially)
• Microprocessor costs (decreasing exponentially)
• Transistors per microprocessor (increasing exponentially)
• Processor performance (increasing exponentially)
• DNA sequencing costs per base pair (decreasing exponentially)
• Random Access Memory bits per dollar (increasing exponentially)
• Magnetic data storage bits per dollar (increasing exponentially)
• Wireless Internet and phone services price performance (increasing exponentially)
• Number of Internet hosts (increasing exponentially)
• Bytes of Internet traffic (increasing exponentially)
• Internet backbone bandwidth (increasing in a very terraced, quasi-exponential manner)
• Mechanical device sizes (decreasing exponentially)
• Number of scientific citations for nanotechnology research (increasing exponentially)
• Number of U.S. nanotech patents (increasing exponentially)

Growth, growth, growth. Now add a little more growth for good measure. Pun intended.

Our data pools are growing rapidly as well. I remember the excitement years ago when I upgraded my 386 laptop with 80 megabytes of disk space. Well, last night I caught myself cursing at my home computer for its pathetic 2.4 terabytes of space. (Note to self: buy more space.) Things have changed, clearly. We have oceans of digital assets at our fingertips and we constantly apply a myriad of operations upon them.

What really interests me, however, is not the fact that we have more of anything (or everything), but the idea that we can potentially do more with what we have. As any good statistician will tell you: more data is not better data. But more data when intelligently analyzed, probed, manipulated and mastered can be extraordinary data.

This brings me to the promise of the Petabyte Age. The petabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes:

1 PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 or 10¹⁵ bytes.

Translation: A lot of data. That’s about 250 trillion MP3 downloads from iTunes, 1.5 billion DivX Movies, or 100 billion 20 megapixel superfine photographs.

One year ago, Chris Anderson – the editor of Wired Magazine who is often (understandably) mistaken for the curator of the beloved TED conference – wrote an article called “The End of Theory” in his widely cherished magazine. He wrote of emerging opportunities and trends that will result from immense data compilations and subsequent manipulations. Here is a short excerpt from the article, where Anderson explains some fundamentals of this upcoming “Petabyte Age”:

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Google operates with a particular philosophy that it applies to virtually all of its activities: spare humans from the burden of tasks that machines are simply better equipped to accomplish. For example, it does not make sense for humans to maintain a dictionary for Google’s seemingly flawless “did you mean _____?” corrective search feature. Google uses pattern recognition to identify (with remarkable accuracy) typographical errors and likely intentions of users. Data knows best. Numbers don’t lie. This is a great example of how data – and intelligent manipulation of data – can drive useful solutions.

Lest we forget, questions precede answers.

Depending on data for answers makes an awful lot of sense when [a] there’s enough of it and [b] we’re equipped to extract meaning from it. Anderson suggests that we should also depend on data to derive the questions. This intrigues me deeply. As a business strategist, technologist and experience designer, I have tremendous respect for the process of asking the right questions. Idris is an exemplary role model of this practice. He often reminds me to not only leave the assumed answers at the door, but the questions as well. While fundamental, it is often overlooked and deserves to be emphasized.

Rather than trying to figure out how to sell more product, let’s re-examine if this product is really what people want. More interestingly, is it what people need? Rather than innovating upon an existing service, let’s make sure that the goals provide meaning and utility.

Pehaps the data-driven insights of the Petabyte Age will teach us that we are moving in the wrong direction on several fronts that we assume to be natural, safe and promising. Perhaps data-driven questions will produce answers that will provide real and lasting enlightenment.

Get ready for the revolution with an open mind.

There are a lot of ideas in this post (hence “Part I”). The topics mentioned are broad and complex, and there’s no way I can do justice to them through a series of blog posts. The links and notions presented here provide a decent starting point for those interested in pursuing these topics further. There’s no right way to end this post but to express the intrinsic purpose behind its composition.

My goal is to stimulate mere awareness and support for any enthusiasm surrounding these important ideas. As a champion of progress and someone who longs to witness the materialization of the petabyte-promised innovations of the future, I feel a duty to tickle the collective interest and generate some excitement for the opportunities on the not-so-distant horizon.

You can be sure that future posts will be more focused on specific implications of the Petabyte Age, tackling a broad spectrum of fields that include education, healthcare, art, consumerism and culture.

For now, enjoy some of the links provided above and keep an open mind for the progressive future that awaits us all.

As always, thanks for reading.

AMR

Continue here…

Anything Is Possible: Embracing the Petabyte Age, Part II

]]> http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2009/06/23/the-only-constant-thing-in-life-is-change-embracing-the-petabyte-age-part-i/feed/ 1 http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2009/06/03/riding-the-google-wave/ http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2009/06/03/riding-the-google-wave/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:05:18 +0000 Adam Rubin http://ideacouture.com/blog/?p=947

Twitter exploded with tinyurls and retweets, as every geek with a pulse forwarded and OMG’ed the 80 minute preview (embedded below). The excitement was profound and immediate. I made some time to watch the video so I could meaningfully participate in the discussion, and lo and behold, I was excited too.

You see, a little while ago, Google set out to answer a few tough questions, as it explained on its blog:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

These are great questions. The summary answer is Wave.

There are 5 core themes that specifically interest me at this stage:

1. Redesigning the nature of our digital interactions
2. Open source solutions
3. Opportunities with the API
4. Opportunities with pattern recognition
5. Integrative features

1. Redesigning the nature of our digital interactions

When Gmail first came on the scene with its threaded conversation system, everyone who tried it immediately knew that it just felt right. It was a vast improvement on the original Outlook-style stack of messages that most of us were forced to adopt. Over the years, Gmail has lured millions of users from other email services due to its speed, generosity, intuitive interface and supporting features. It was a step in the right direction; still email, just an vastly improved experience.

Gmail gave us greater context and control in our digital conversations. Facebook helped us orientate and network smoothly within our evolving social spheres. And, Twitter nurtured our desires to broadcast while helping us tap into the hive mind of the techno savvy et al. It appears that Google Wave is taking several steps further down the path, disrupting our current conceptions of what our digital interactions ought to be.

Wave is emphasizing several critical virtues: personalization, real-time interactions, open access to data, and integration of multiple forms of media from multiple sources. These virtues are central to the new emerging standard of meaningful online interactivity. Due to its robust and flexible style of communication, I can easily see Wave attracting many early adopters in academia, creative industries and other collaboration-intensive environments. It will likely spread naturally from there.

2. Open source solutions

The virtues of open source ought to be well understood – if you’re unclear, do your homework and come back.

I’m glad to see that Google continues to develop strong experience  in the realm of open source . Currently, there are over 260 open source projects (including the Chrome browser and Android operating system) listed in Google Code (the company’s haven for code-hungry developers). Its blog on open source activities may only be read by techies, but the fruits of the philosophy are enjoyed by all. As an open project, Google is hoping that Wave will become a reflection of our best ideas and aspirations.

I am not going to write more on this topic at the moment – postponing further discussion for a dedicated post sometime in the future. If you have anything to add regarding open source and Wave, please comment below.

3. Opportunities with API

Excerpt from the Wave site:

What is the Google Wave API?

The Google Wave API allows developers to use and enhance Google Wave through two primary types of development:

• Extensions: Build robot extensions to automate common tasks or build gadget extensions to provide a new way for users to interact
• Embed: Make your site more collaborative by dropping in a Wave

Google Wave is currently available in a developer preview as the APIs and product continue to evolve. Accounts on the developer sandbox will be given out to people intending to build with the Google Wave APIs prior to the public release.

The best and most frequently-used Twitter apps run via the service’s API. Why is that? Well, perhaps the reason is best explained by Rich Friedrich’s famous quote:  ”All Of The Innovative People Don’t Work For Your Company.” With Google Wave, we’ll undoubtedly encounter significant innovation powered by the API. Both freeform experimental applications and professionally designed interfaces will emerge, perhaps leading to a revolution in how digital conversations take place.

I’m particularly excited to see how academia will leverage it, enabling search around the conversations typically restricted to classrooms and lecture halls. How do you think it might be used?

4. Opportunities with pattern recognition

Sergey Brin once rhetorically asked (paraphrasing): Why ask humans to do what computers can do much better?

One of my favorite examples of how Google leverages pattern recognition to provide users with a powerful and valuable service is its “did you mean?…” feature. Whenever you type something incorrectly into Google’s search engine, it will almost always correct your spelling. Not only that, but sometimes it’ll recognize common phrases or articulations that appear to have been generated through some type of futuristic mind-reading capability. How does it do this? Is there a gigantic dictionary? No. Each time a user executes a search and then immediately corrects the term and searches again, Google considers this a typographical correction. There’s no handmade dictionary in the Google brain, but rather a clever pattern recognition system that detects common misspellings or lazy keystrokes.

We can expect Wave to feature some powerful pattern recognition services as it accumulates users and data. By analyzing how people use it, Google can hone Wave into a hyper intelligent facilitator of communication. It’ll predict our need for media assets as we engage in discussion; it’ll recommended resources for knowledge enhancements; it’ll tap into the social sphere and introduce you to others of like-minds. Of course, privacy options will exist to protect those who fear the over lookers, but for those who embrace digital openness, the possibilities are astounding.

5. Integrative Features

The last theme that interests me is a speculative one of hope and desire. I work with a lot of different software and media formats. My job requires me to regularly integrate multiple forms of media from multiple applications into a synthesized experience. To anyone else with this work-style, you know how time consuming and frustrating the little tasks can be. The preview of Wave demonstrated some handy manipulation of images with some neat drag and drop features, among others. I am an advanced user, who can assemble almost anything I encounter. But for others, it’s a burden that hinders the quality of their output and is demotivating right from the start.

My hope is that Wave will be a leader in the race to truly integrate most formats into a collaborative sandbox. File management, video playback, voice conferencing, asynchronous access to PDF, etc. I want it all. And like Freddy Mercury said, “I want it now”. Not just for me, but mostly for others who are less savvy. It’s time that we simplify the process of integrating typically incompatible features. Hopefully, Wave will do that by heightening the average user’s willingness and effectiveness of working with data forms more sophisticated than text.

Summary

This will definitely be an app to keep an eye on. Wave bears a lot of promise. I have a feeling that, like other Google apps, it’ll improve smoothly and naturally as more and more users adopt it. It’ll likely find a few core user groups at the beginning and then spread like wildfire among the increasingly vibrant community of web-service-early-adopters. Perhaps it’ll leverage the Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Facebook APIs along with a native connection to Gmail, creating a single environment for one’s web needs. The permutations are scary-huge, as is my appreciation for the Google crew who push forward and break standards in the hopes of developing something more efficient and effective.

For those who want to watch the preview video, all 80 minutes can be enjoyed here.  Cheers, AMR.

Gmail made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, so I joined up years ago.

Luca Brazi AOL  sleeps with the fishes.

So, Barzini Yahoo! will move against you first. He’ll it’ll set up a meeting with someone that you absolutely trust (Apple?) guaranteeing your safety and at that meeting you’ll be assassinated.

I have a sentimental weakness for my children employees and I spoil them as you can see.

Here’s a great post about Google’s breadth and dominance.

Salut!  Cent’ anni!

If you don’t remember it, that’s fine, because Standford still hosts it’s textual coming out party.

Visit the document “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” and be wowed.

Its concluding sentiment will bring a tear to any nerd’s eye (or webcam implant):

Because humans can only type or speak a finite amount, and as computers continue improving, text indexing will scale even better than it does now. Of course there could be an infinite amount of machine generated content, but just indexing huge amounts of human generated content seems tremendously useful. So we are optimistic that our centralized web search engine architecture will improve in its ability to cover the pertinent text information over time and that there is a bright future for search.

AMR

Image credit: http://www.charlesmunroe.com/SergeiBrin_LarryPage.jpg