Wave similarities

I went through a presentation given by Lars Rasmussen for Google Wave. And I found striking similarities to a project I had dome with Enthiosys called Prune the Product Tree. The idea of PTPT (as we called it) was giving a roadmap to a product by live collaboration. This collaboration was done using manipulation of images (drag, drop of items in a canvas using SVG/VML) and chats between users. It also showed the online and offline activity of a user had revisions of the stuff he did.

Playback was some thing Luke had in mind. As in the users who see the entire collaborated content could playback the evolution of the product by just the click of a button. The playback would continuously get the data and then playback each and every action taken by the users. These action items may vary from adding, moving, and deleting the items(fruits/leaves) or comments. Cloning and editing of the product tree is also possible.

The difference was that it did not use HTML5 but used the native SVG (firefox/chrome/safari) or VML (IE)

Google Apps team Edition is out ..

Google has come out with another of its 'bundled' suites. This time they have bound Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google talk and a Start Search page for the members of teams - and they have called it Google Apps Team Edition. All the users have to do is to sign up with a domain (like abcd.gef@creekwood.com where creekwood.com becomes your domain) and you will get a mail sent to this address. After clicking the confirmation link you are all set and ready to access these apps. You could invite other members of the same domain and then the collaborative effort kicks off with messaging, document sharing and Calendar scheduling. We even saw the collaborative effort in the case of Google Docs when they introduced the Forms in Spreadsheets. The Google Docs have been revamped and the UI looks great !

Anyway this seems to be a great way of collaboration but still it is under Google. Major organizations may consider this as threat full ( I feel so). Small companies with a distributed workforce may consider this as a blessing in disguise. Anyway Google Rocks yet again. Heres the Video.

Social Graph API

This is a new one from Google. This Open Api tries to gather information from a website and tries to link to other sites. This is a great idea as such because then even if you have your content distributed, a person could actually search and connect those contents. It gives the person more visibility and opens up more details about his personality, likes and dislikes, his friends and other social details. Though there are speculations about the negative effect that this will have on the community, crackers may use this information for malicious activities, I feel that the idea is great. The lesson that the content that must be protected should be protected and must be maitained by the needed takes charge here.

The Api requires that the data be formatted in a way so that the crawler (which only takes data which is visible in the Google search) may understand this and interpret. Say the 'rel' attribute is searched for terms like 'me' and 'friends' to actually connect to those other sites. The point here is that a single site which has all those links nicely tagged will serve as a starting point for all your distributed content and any person could correlate to your activities using that single site.

I tried this with blogger and it seems that the taggings are not done as yet for blogger. I hope this will soon come into picture. TechCrunch has an article about this. References are given below.

Social Graph Api From Google
Social Graph Api Docs From Google