Month: May 2009

Google Waves Goodbye To Old Messaging

If you look at the ways we communicate online, you’ll find they are nothing more than fresh paint on archaic methods…some of which date back to the days of six-shooters and stage coaches. All of the innovations thus far have been in the form of bolt-on extras. It’s kind of like duct taping an iPod to an 8-track player then splicing headphone cables to the speaker wires. You still have an 8-track player. Think about it, email is a mimic of snail mail and IM is just glorified telegraph communication.

But it looks like the guys and gals at Google have decided to step up and do something for online communication that nobody has successfully done thus far. They scrapped everything and designed a system from the ground up to leverage all the web and modern technology has to offer for communication into a single tool. This tool is Google Wave. If you visit the site you will be presented with a video of the tech demo that lasts nearly an hour and a half. It’s well worth the watch.

So what is Google Wave and what makes it so special? That’s not an easy thing to describe. It’s partly a framework, partly a protocol, partly an application, and all wrapped in yummy bacon. In the video, one of the designers of Google Wave mentions that email was actually invented over 40 years ago…long before the advent of the internet. So the driving force was if email were invented today, what would it be like? I have to say that in this regard it looks like they are succeeding amazingly. They touch on things far more in-depth than I will here, but I will hit the high points.

The gist of the application side of Wave is collaboration. Take email, IM, blogging, forums, Wikis, Twitter, Flickr/Picasa, YouTube, and basically any Web 2.0 site/application and stir. Bake in Google’s think-tank for two years and you get one heckuva slick piece of coding magic. You can write a Wave (which is the term used for any type of communication) and add people to it. We won’t call them recipients. They’re more like participants. They can then reply or add or edit or privately reply not just to the message, but to specific pieces of a message. In real-time. No more seeing Hoser is typing messages forcing you to wait eleventy hundred minutes for them to finish. You see what they are typing almost character for character which allows you to go ahead and start formulating or even typing in a response.

Then you can drag files (pictures, movies, whatever) directly into the Wave which shows up almost immediately in their Wave client if they are looking at the Wave at the time you do so. In the case of pictures, you get thumbnails pretty much instantaneously while the full pictures are still loading. This makes for some really interesting possibilities. Given that this is a Google project, you know that the search is really nice. No surprise there. The surprise is this: it runs completely in the browser. But this doesn’t scratch the surface of what it can do. Oh, did I mention this will be open-source?

Yes, Google has already announced this will be an open source system and they are encouraging developers to create their own Wave clients and even server implementations. There will be a series of APIs to allow anyone to create robots (snap-ins) to connect Wave to other services. They show a Twitter robot, a blog robot, and even a translator that does…get this…real-time language translation for conversations. They want to see what kinds of amazing things other people can come up with to extend Google Wave even further than they have imagined. Oh, did I mention that the real-time updates work even if you have your own Wave server implementation? Yep, you get the same sweetness between Wave servers so it could be as universal as email. That’s where the Wave protocol comes into play.

I really can’t go into much more about this or this post will take four years to read. Go watch the video. Seeing it work is far more impressive than any simple text post could hope to be. I’ve seen the future…and I’m wearing shades.

How to Reboot a Franchise

There have been many attempts over the years by Hollywood to reinvent a franchise. By and large, they have failed miserably. The problem is studios try to fill every frame with as many of the currently popular cliches as possible while casting pretty boys and hot girls. There’s little wonder why fanboys and fangirls are pretty bitter about the whole thing. The atrocity that dared to be called Dragonball: Evolution is a recent example of how to do everything wrong and guarantee that you’ll piss off every fan of the original work. Such acts used to culminate in torch and pitchfork bearing mobs righting such disgusting wrongs.

And yet, I have the joy of saying somebody got it right. I just left the theater from watching Star Trek. I’ve been reading all week the various twitter posts from geeks and celebrities (and celebrity geeks like Wil Wheaton) about how completely and totally awesome this reboot of the flailing franchise is. I’ve pondered over the tales of how this one act of media beauty can finally give the fans a shred of hope that Hollywood won’t mercilessly rape everything we geeks hold sacred and dear. And I worried. I’ve heard this tripe before and it always ended in bitterness and disappointment.

Tonight was different. Tonight was fun. It was…GOOD. Somebody in the movie industry finally grew a brain cell and learned how to select an appropriate cast. Pine as Kirk was perfect. While it wasn’t quite the same attitude of ST:TOS Kirk, you have to understand he’s just getting his feet under him. I think the difference was completely appropriate for the time frame of the movie. He still has to put a few notches on his bedpost on the Enterprise before he can be the swaggering self-confident James Tiberius Kirk we watched when we were younger (No, I’m not that old. I saw re-runs as a kid).

Quinto as Spock was wonderful. Although I have to admit that it’s a little weird to see Sylar with pointed ears. You won’t understand if you don’t watch Heroes. His face is very reminiscient of a younger Leonard Nimoy and he can pull off the mostly emotionless Vulcan with style. I don’t know that there could have been a better choice for someone to fill those very large shoes. Besides, Quinto’s experience on Heroes as Sylar has given the experience of playing a range of emotional states and the ability to be very convincingly cold. That’s two for two.

Urban as McCoy was a joy. See what I did there? Though a little stockier than his namesake from TOS, his bearing and his screen presence is like seeing DeForest Kelley reincarnated in the role that geeks will forever hold in a special place. My only regret from this casting is that Kelley did not live long enough to see this wonderous sight and masterful portrayal of a role that defined and will forever be remembered for.

Uhura and Sulu were well done. The former is more bold than her TOS counterpart but fit well if you include her character in the movies. It’s understandable considering the studios were already pushing boundries simply by having her in the cast back in the late 60’s. The latter did a respectable job. He was slightly humorous in the right places and effective at action when it was called for. Let’s face it, Sulu was a man that filled gaps but almost never took center stage. In this he succeeded admirably.

Weakest in the line-up was Chekov. They tried really hard to overplay the accent. He was nearly unintelligible because it was so thick. While it lended a gag or two, he is quickly tuned out. You have to go a little out of your way to notice he did a bang-up job running the transporter systems when others could not do it. If only they had made it more like Koenig’s portrayal where you have the accent but it isn’t the all powerful force driving the character as it seemed to do here.

Finally there is Scotty. Pegg stole every scene he was in. The accent was spot-on. The emotion was just right. Everything about his performance made everything else better. I’m not kidding when I say he literally owned every scene he was in. It didn’t matter if he was in the background with the rest of the starring cast and he only had one line. It was his scene and he did it all with style.

I could continue to gush about how ridiculously amazing the cast is but I have to have a word or two about the plot. While the story isn’t masterful, it is functional. They accomplish a total reboot of the Star Trek universe without invalidating everything we hold dear. Don’t get your hopes up about an epic story like LOTR. After all, this is Trek and few stories they tell are that epic. It was a fun ride, though. The token bad guy is just that…token. He’s pretty uninspiring and not worthy of cleaning Khan’s shoes. But I don’t hold that against Abrams. Every epic has to start somewhere and I’d rather he get the shaky footing out of the way now. Especially since this movie was pulled off with such an amazing cast that you can easily overlook the less than stellar plot and easily forgettable bad guy.

Bravo to everyone involved in breathing a fresh breath of life back into one of the most titanic and game-changing sci-fi creations of all time. May this reboot live long and prosper. (And burn slowly, Rick Berman, for the horror you visited upon a beloved mythos)