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For years there have been rumors that Google would release an OS that would take over the world. The taking over the world part doesn’t seem very likely, but Google has announced an OS.
Their new OS will arrive in later 2010, and is aimed at netbooks. Not surprisingly, the OS is both open-source and Linux-based.
Apparently, the main idea is to create a lightweight OS that will boot to a web browser in just a few steps. From there, you can use the web browser to access Google services.
With so few datails, it is difficult to to know anything more about it, but a Google OS sounds promising, as long as it doesn’t take over the world
HTML 5’s support of using the Ogg Theora video format in the upcoming <video> tag looked really promising for innovation in the web video area, but not everyone agrees on the new spec.
The critical different between Ogg Theora and the competing H.264 formats are that Ogg carries no petent license fees, while H.164 requires anyone who implements it to pay a patent license. Because of this, Mozilla and Opera would prefer to use the Ogg Theora format, as planned
Apple and Google, however, aren’t jumping on the boat, though. Apple, who has been a major supporter of H.164, using it extensively in iTunes videos, is apparently concerned about unknown patents which Ogg might violate. (Remind you of the whole Novell-Microsft thing?) Google, on the other hand, simply cites Ogg Theora’s supposedly lower quality, though they have not released anything to back the claim that Ogg offers much lower quality at the same bandwidth.
It just doesn’t make sense to make a video format that requiers a patent license in a standard like HTML. HTML is an open standard so that people can implement it – it shouldn’t depend on someting you have to license.
Firefox 3.5 Preview Shows New Hope For Open Media Standards
The preview release of Firefox 3.5 is showing some neat tricks relating to online video, but not the kind that comes in a little proprietary bubble of Flash.
For example, the new Firefox 3.5 will be able to smoothly resize videos on the fly within the page. The interesting part, though, is that these videos are in OGG format – in other words, entirely open. With such a mainstream browser showing off what can be done with open video formats, there is a good chance that flash will lose its dominant position, or at least have to share a little. I’m not one to say “death to Flash” just because it happens to be proprietary, but an open video standard would allow for so much innovation. Already numerous projects are attempting to unify our media-watching experience. Just imagine the sudden freedom to create an even better experience if all that media was available in open formats.
Flash has been essential to the rise of sites like YouTube, but it might be time for something more flexible to replace it.
Google Squared vs. Wolfram Alpha
First WolframAlpha, which tells me that this Saturday is 157th day of 2009, arrives and now we have Google Squared, which tells me that the most important operating system is Linux, which is the same as Ubuntu. They both are headed towards the same goal, but in different directions. Google^2’s result is more useful (and wrong), while Wolfram’s result is actually correct, though useless to 99% of us. How, then, are they heading for the same goal?
Both services fundamentally aim to organize and structure the current information chaos. WolframAlpha works on facts, ignoring anything that it cannot mathematically calculate or analyze. If you ask it something and it answers, you can be pretty sure it’s right, but it can’t answer most of your questions right now. Google^2, on the other hand, will happily answer just about anything you ask (ask being used figuratively, since neither service takes questions), it just might not be correct or relevant.
ReadWriteWeb mentions in an article about Google^2 that the descriptions of each item would be more useful if they just quoted from Wikipedia, but that’s not what Google^2 is for. WolframAlpha might pull a specific piece of information from a specific source, but Google^2 is just looking for any match to the relevant topic, not a verified one.
In their current forms, both services have only limited uses. Wolfram is an excellent calculator and source of statistics/trivia. Google^2 is a good starting point if you know knothing about a topic. Eventually, though, both services should become a full-featured, accurate, non-picky engine to extract structured information from chaos. The question is: who gets there first?
Google Announces Wave: GMail Meets Google Docs, Meets Chat
Google has announced a new product that is supposed to reinvent email.
The main product combines GMail, including its chat feature, and Google Doc’s real-time collaboration. Each “wave” is like a whiteboard that involves a number of people. Multiple people can edit it at once anywhere in the wave. Photos and other media can also be added into the wave. In addition, Wave will be open-source and APIs will be released, allowing plugins to be included in waves or waves to be included in web pages.
It’s impossible to know if Wave will take off and replace email or die off like so many other Google projects, but it’s good to see someone taking a second look at something so ordinary and everyday.
It’s a well known fact that YouTube is, at present, a money black-hole for Google, despite its impressive and growing traffic numbers. Silicon Alley Insider, though, argues that Google will not be able to sustain this much longer and that YouTube is not going to be able to turn a profit anytime soon. I don’t think YouTube is quite so dead, though. In fact, I think they are moving quickly in the right direction, though the monetary climb may be slow.
I admit that largely home-made video is a hard thing to monetize. In fact, an incredibly hard thing to monetize, since it is (a) hard to target and (b) unpredictable. The advertiser can’t decide to advertise on a particular show, they just have to throw the dart at the wall and hope they land on something they like. When that dart has a big check stuck to it, most people don’t want to throw it blindly. Those issues aside, though, YouTube is doing a couple of things that give me hope they can monetize themselves.
- For one thing, YouTube began offering you the option to buy songs featured in videos. Rather than fighting music in the background of videos, YouTube has somehow managed to reach an agreement where, in most cases, they just put up a lower third ad that shows the song name, album art, and a link to buy it on Amazon MP3 or iTunes, presumably with a commission for YouTube.
- YouTube has also started offering, along side the roller-skating dog videos, more formal content like old Star Trek TV shows. These can, and are, being much more easily monetized with inserted video commercials.
This is a good start, but it will not get YouTube all the way there. Rather than trying to, like Hulu, fight with movie and TV studios who would rather stay in the 20th century, YouTube should reach out to so-called “new media.” YouTube should be the hosting service for video internet shows. These could be easily monetized, since they are more predictable, and, if YouTube shared the revenue with the producers, it could become an easy solution for new media content producers to make some money.
The fact that YouTube is trying new ideas gives me hope they can survive, although I admit the odds are against them.
A ComputerWorld article expresses a concern I hear a lot about cloud computing: that it is just not reliable. It’s true that at this point, with GMail being down too often, it can be hard to have confidence in the cloud, but we have to keep in mind that this may change with time.
It’s true that you can’t be quite certain what is stored in the cloud will always be available, but local storage isn’t perfect either. Right now, it would be risky, at best, to store critical information only in the cloud. In ten years, though, ht might be different. In fact, it is easy to see a cloud computing service proving to be more reliable than standard desktop storage in the next five or ten years.
Today’s cloud computing is plagued by connection issues and various other glitches, but we cannot allow this to get in the way of its potential.
Eventually, who knows if we will even have desktop applications?
Many people who are critical about the “cloud” as a platform point out that some things can just never reach the cloud. One frequent example is a video editor.
When we are talking about hundreds of gigabytes being modified, cut, edited, and put together, how can all of that possibly be done in the cloud? Just the data transfer alone would take years, right? Well, yes. For now, that is.
Mozilla has just launched Bespin, a web-based (“cloud”) code editor for HMTL, CSS, and JavaScript. It i in very early stages, so I don’t expect anyone to be using it full time in the next few weeks, but, in the long term, it looks promising. Who would have thought that code editing could be brought to the cloud? After all, most developers have highly specialized environments based on their own personal preferences.
The point is, if we attempt to limit the possibilities of the cloud based on the technical limitations of today, you confine yourself far too much.
Imagine trying to use Flickr in the days of dial-up. It would take hours to upload the high-resolution photos and view other people’s photos. It just wouldn’t work. Today, however, uploading even the biggest photos is no problem for most people. How can you say the same will not be true of HD video in 10 years?
Limiting ourselves to the possibilities of today’s web is a mistake. Given the rapid pace of technology, the cloud appliations that might be a joke today could be the killer app in 10 years.
Google Says Every Site "May Harm Your Computer"
Earlier this morning (as of 10:00AM EST), a bug in Google search caused every site, including Google.com, to be marked with “This site may harm your computer.” I tested this on two different computers on two different internet connections with two different browsers and the result is the same.
This glitch, in addition to probably confusing the heck out of some novice computer users, had some interesting possibilities, as illustrated below:
Help and Support Fail
Government Fail
Self-Respect Fail
Full Version of Government Fail
(click to enlarge)
Sometimes bugs are annoying, but this is just awesome!
Appcelerator Titanium: Like AIR, But Better
A while ago Adobe released Adobe AIR. AIR was a way of running web applications on your desktop, even when you don’t have an internet connection. The great thing about AIR was that it was cross-platform, so, in theory, you could run any AIR application on Windows, OS X, or Linux. The problem was, that never really worked. Only a few applications really ran right on Linux. In fact, the Linux client never even came out of beta. Worse, AIR was not open-source. Normally, I would not be that bothered by an application being closed-source, but for a technology that could conceivably be running all of our applications, open-source would be far preferable.
Finally, it looks like the right thing has come along: Appcelerator Titanium. Appcelerator Titanium claims to be “the first open platform for building rich desktop applications.” Basically it lets you write desktop applications in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, just as if you were writing a web application. Like Adobe AIR, though, you don’t need an internet connection to run Titanium applications.
Appcelerator Titanium is a promising replacement for Adobe AIR that, in the long term, would be a far superior option, since it would not take us down a route of closed systems controlling our applications, our data, and our computers, but instead allow for an open way to develop great web applications that run on any desktop, no matter the OS.
Appcelerator Titanium can be downloaded now for OS X or Windows. The Linux version will be coming soon.