Wave at the geeks and religous nuts.

Ok! I admit it. I am a try-hard early adopter. I'm not a real early adopter because the real ones will go out and "buy" something that brand spanking new gadget and I'll only partake in the free technological revolutions. That's why I love closed beta's because once you're in, your instantly popular because others need an invitation (possible from you) to be in the "in" crowd as well.

I persevered with twitter for a long time before I worked out how to make it useful, how to block out the spammers and how to develop meaningful conversations with strangers. Perhaps I'm getting less patient or perhaps I've just lost the need to be that kid with the newest pair of Air Jordon's but Google Wave seems a whole lot of something we've always had.

For about a week now, I've tried to make Google Wave useful. The problem is I don't have enough friends that use Wave. I've invited a couple of colleagues and I have a couple of friends that already have Wave accounts but even though I've made Wave my home page I can't see how I'd use it to replace what I already use. For instance, the collaborative nature of Wave at the moment is in a threaded conversation for most Public waves. Unless it's a closed bunch of friends that could happily use one of many instant messaging services, the open conversations just seem like the comment section of a blog. Sure it's in real time and collaborative but it just makes it all the more difficult to follow the conversation.

If you perform the with:public search you see a stream of waves that are open to all users. A quick scan of the topics and you will realise who the real early adopters are. Immediately you have wannabe bloggers (like myself) polling people about which is the best is the best new mobile, how to actually use Wave and my favourite, Ask a Christian. In essence doing this type of search is like watching the public stream on twitter.

In fact, I get the feeling that Google have let the lunatics (a.k.a. engineers) take over the asylum on this one. From the back end, wave really is revolutionary and like Facebook is a platform that will support the imagination of every computer science student in the world. It is a user interface that mashes up the potential to mimic every major SNS in existence. As developers take hold, someone will develop an incredibly addictive version of Mafia Wars for Wave. In fact there's already a collaborate Soduku clique in Wave. You can mimic a chat room, you can mimic twitter, you can mimic facebook, you can mimic instant messaging. The problem with a pimped up social site is the person driving that "2 Fast 2 Furious" vehicle is usually a wanker.

But seriously, I'm not brave enough to really predict that Wave is a flop especially since this is still a preview and Google has really really deep pockets but I've been trying really really hard. I like Google and I want to believe that Wave will be as successful as GMail but honestly I don't feel so confident.

I could go on about not being able to intuitively work out how to do anything or how a notifier that could tell me when my contacts came online (like when you use GTalk in Gmail) but I'm going to stop whining now and will keep trying to find function because I haven't given up on you yet Google. I will say though, Dr. Wave needs a Mr. Hyde to work on making UI easier to use.

The future of Google and possibly life on this planet.

Just  yesterday, I got two invitations to connect via a social network. Not a big deal but that social network was Orkut. I can't remember when I signed up to Orkut but it must have been during my socialmediaholic stage. I first thought nothing of it but slowly but surely, like the liquid metal pieces of the evil android in Terminator II the pieces of Google's plot for complete internet domination is coming together.

I am a great supporter of a lot of Google's individual services. My main personal email address is a Gmail account and through that I can if I choose to use their GTalk IM service. I use Picasaweb along side Flickr and Photobucket. Some of the things that I don't use though are Orkut which sits in an odd market space. Not quite Linkedin but not quite Facebook either. Sort of like the poor cousin to Plaxo Pluse populated mostly by netizens from India. 

I use Google Reader religiously (mainly because it lets me read blogs that are otherwise blocked in China) and of course if you're reading this blog then you know that I also use Blogger which is also a Google Inc venture. At the back of your mind you know that this was all part of a huge strategy to take over the cyber-World but all these free services were just too damn convenient to ignore. Add to that Google Docs and you almost don't need to install any software on your computer.

Nothing seems new there but if you look at all these jigsaw pieces how would you put them together? Lets break them down:

• Photo site with face recognition.
• Blogging platform with blogger profile information.
• Document/ spreadsheet manipulation and storage.
• Social Network.
• Instant Messaging (that includes Skype like VOIP)
• Email (that can also support private domain names)
• Google News.
• Google image search.
• Google Checkout.

and last but not least

• Google Profiles.

Effectively this search engine company that promised us that they will "do no evil" has amassed the ingredients to completely control our online lives if it chooses to do so. To their credit, each functioning part of this online monster was launched and grown independently, like the individual arms and legs of a Voltron like manga robot but when they join together they appear to be some kind of undefeatable super robot. Imagine for a moment...

You check your Gmail, that is connected to your GTalk so you can be contacted by text or voice. Your news source also comes from the search aggregation of Google News that you get via your Google Reader. What you read is then shared with people who connect to you in Google Reader's shared items but also through Bloggers who follow your profile and whom you follow back. Eventually the people you follow join Orkut and put up personal information, photos etc like what people already do in Facebook. As the networks grow then become more interconnected. Your Google addessbook is the same as your IM list which then becomes the same as your Orkut friends who become the same people who subscribe to your Picasaweb albums. Oh and should I mention they probably have your credit card details too via Google Checkout.

Big deal I hear you scream. The danger is not the interconnectivity, it's the business that Google is in. Hoarding information. From Orkut it gets a piece of your personal information, from Picasaweb it learns what you, your family and friends look like and with geotagging they know where you've been. Your communications via GTalk and email are collected which is why you are given 7 Gig of storage space for free. Even Google Docs which is a better movement to public cloud computing than even Microsoft has out will be in the Google servers. Slowly slowly, bit by bit your identity from the smallest piece of sms to information on entire family trees will be collected, tagged and made searchable on Google's servers.

To top it all off, Google's new Profiles service lets you do all the hard work by linking all your social information onto one page.

All this story needs is a little bit of science fiction to make it scary.  

Remember when there was a little bit of hoo haa about adsense and context based advertising? Something that we now accept as the norm. The arguement against this was a privacy issue. We didn't want Google execs looking at our emails to put relevant ads into Gmail. Google told us only machines and algorithms were involved in the selection of contextual advertisements.

With so much of our information potentially hoarded by one company, how far are we really from developing artificial intelligence or at least those semi intelligent systems that form the basis of things like the Terminator, iRobot or Alien plot lines.

Don't laugh, when I was a kid, mobile phones were things that appeared in Star Trek and nobody knew what an email was. By the time my kids grow up, will the world be ruled by a machine?

Top 10 Snips for October: Palin, Hanson, Censorship and the US Economy

1. http://snipr.com/43vfc Is Sarah Palin really Pauline Hanson?

2. http://snipr.com/4rjg9 Internet Censorship. The recurring nightmare for an expatriate Australian.

3. http://snipr.com/431hl Your affair can kill you | NEWS.com.au

4. http://snipr.com/42mnv We are all accomplices in the global economy

5. http://snipr.com/43s8q Sarah Palin feet firmly placed in mouth.

6. http://snipr.com/4575s Google launches Mail Goggles to save you from yourself | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET

7. http://snipr.com/42kyb Con of the Century! | FED Up USA

8. http://snipr.com/449rg China discovers oil, gas well in Bohai Bay - People's Daily Online

9. http://snipr.com/40bk4 World's fattest man to wed | NEWS.com.au

10. http://snipr.com/430dr The 'Brick' is... | Apple Factory innovation

Google Chrome Review

It's just a freakin' browser innit?

While the lights are out in Twitterland

During this period of "maintenance" when twitter is down on a particularly unproductive Friday, I took the opportunity to take a look at what folk were saying on identi.ca. In doing so I felt a little dirty. Like I was cheating on Twitter when she was on a business trip, then it struck me how I have developed emotions for these social networking services. Not the people on them, I could care less about what happens to @scoblizer in real life but the attachment was to the service. I actually felt that I was cheating on Twitter by using identi.ca while She was down.

So I posted my feeling and one of the humans that actually appear on all my networks Joey in Hong Kong asked the question:

@dedlam LOL. What about FF? Who's your favorite mistress?

My reply to her was that FriendFeed was also a favourite mistress but to our surprise both of us independantly concluded that Plurk was the beer goggle induced "hot" girl you pick up from a party and take home and find in the morning that... well lets just say "not so hot".

Upon reflection, I have become a little frightened by the prospect that as social networks and online communities take on a life of their own. The bond that we feel towards the community is not because of the members but because we as species have evolved into a monsterous abomination of nature that develops emotional attachments to binary code, html and telephonic touch-screen devices with motion and light sensors.

The next venture coming for the Google labs is aptly named Android, but with this sudden moment of clarity, I ask, Is this emotional attachment part of an elaborate scheme? Will the next generation be part human and part technology? Starting as genetic cyborgs within two or three generations will all our humanity is bred out of us the dominant species on this planet will indeed be Android? I shudder to think what lies in store for the human race.

Is Twitter Satan's Spawn?

(Can you tell it's Friday afternoon?)