Anybody who hasn’t heard of Google Wave had better sit up. It’s been in development by a team led by the brothers at Google Labs who brought us Google Maps (along with the API that’s helped make it so useful and popular).
They’ve dubbed it as what email would have been if it were invented today. It takes the best of online/offline collaborative messaging and smooshes them together into what the preview announcement describes as product, platform and protocol (which will be open). All of this is currently being made available to developers to start hacking together “robots” and “gadgets” which will surely bring about some terrifyingly brilliant, if not convoluted and sinister collective artificial intelligence which I’ll dub Skynet (when Wolfram escapes into its own robot instance) but is probably closer to Borg.
Anyway. Sounds neat.
Google Calendar has been down for me for the past hour and a half. The most irking thing about it is that I get bounced to this page, which offers no way out or to check back that the Calendar is up yet. Unhelpful –
à la 1994.
I don’t really know what’s going on here but…I kinda want in on that action.
I’m not in love with Twitter like some – it’s fine. It’s a thing. But I think I just coined a name for people like Maureen Dowd who rail against Twitter without a clue.
Slashdot has recently had a few posts involving Openfire and I just have one question: what the heck is Openfire, exactly? The Openfire website doesn’t tell us anything other than it “is a real time collaboration (RTC) server”. In the Openfire Support forum, somebody asks this question point-blank and the only useful answers tell the person that they don’t need Openfire. Can anybody shed any light on this? Is it just an instant messaging/chat server? Does it burn coal or use nuclear energy? Will your attractiveness to the opposite sex increase exponentially? Come on, how hard can it be to have a Features page?
This isn’t so much about Openfire specifically, but just poor website representation of a product. This actually happens more often than I find believable.
