The Real Meaning Of Google Wave

Google Wave, the Internet giant's new online collaboration tool, is making, well, lots of waves. Google Wave lets users work on the same content object, dubbed a "wave," which can house both text and multimedia. Users can reply to messages and edit together in real-time.

The question asked to Tom Mornini :

Media : You've said that the long-term impact of Google Wave is probably underestimated. Why?

Tom Mornini: The problem is that people think of Google Wave in terms of the demo video, which does a great job of showing how Wave could achieve the next step beyond current tools for e-mail, which is used in some ineffective ways. The concept of e-mailing around attachments just makes me want to throw up, because it is inefficient and so error prone. It leads to multiple versions with no way to know the message-by-message evolution of the thinking that led to the current draft. The demo showed a better way based on Wave, but most people stop there and think Wave is that application. It's not. Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation.

Media : What did you like about the demo?

Tom Mornini: What the Wave demo showed is support for a continuum from the shortest messages to longer and longer forms of content. All of it can be shared with precise control, tagged, searched. The version history is kept. No more mailing around a document. This takes the beauty of e-mail and wikis and extends it in a more flexible way to a much larger audience.

It is all based on components called Wavelets that are documents that exist in a single version, which is kept current on distributed servers. So if I add a comment or the first entry in an e-mail-like communication, my server has a copy and so does everybody else's server. And then anybody who changes or updates those Wavelets specifically creates new versions of them, and all of the old history is maintained. And that's where they show that very impressive playback capability where you can see the very first message once you're added into a communication and see how the conversation progressed.

Media : Why is the playback facility so important?

Tom Mornini: As a CTO of a growing company, when certain e-mails finally bubble up to my level, it is not uncommon for 20 people to have been involved. Then I have to start at the bottom and read up to make sure you know all the history--that is how the issue started and was analyzed. If the e-mail was a Wavelet, I could playback that conversation from the beginning and see how the analysis developed and who said what.

Media : So, if Wave is not just the demo application, what is it?

Tom Mornini: Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary.

The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes.

But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.

Media : What's an example of new things that will be possible?

Tom Mornini: Any Wavelet can be assigned to services that act upon it. In the video they show, they can add a spell checker as a service that gets every update to the document so it knows when to re-check it. So people can build additional functionality and sell it in a secured fashion by only accepting Wavelets from clients. This solves a huge problem in the world of how to incorporate third-party services in an application.

The hierarchical security also allows many interesting things to happen safely. Let's say we're on a worldwide mailing list of a million people on this Wave, and you and I want to have a little side conversation. At any point in the tree you can set that only Dan and Tom have access to this document, or this sub-hierarchy. And in doing so, by definition, the rest of that tree is only replicated between those people's Wave servers so that we can have an entirely private conversation within the context of a Wave that we can both share, but you and I are the only people who ever have any chance of knowing that it happened.

The world will be shocked at how many applications will be built there.

Media : Is it interesting to you that the concept of presence, that is, the idea of whether someone is online or not was not emphasized in the demo?

Tom Mornini: In any of the Wave stuff that I've looked at, I don't believe presence has been mentioned. It wasn't part of the demo and I didn't see anything in the white papers I read. I don't think they're planning on that being a big part of it, but I could be wrong. But clearly, it seems that you might want to know if someone was available to communicate with. If I knew you were there, it's not difficult for an application to start up a Wave between you and I, and I can just start typing and if you start responding then we're done. If you are not there, then I send it like a traditional e-mail, which doesn't even really require a send. I just create the document and make sure it is available to you.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

But the demo video for Google ( GOOG - news - people ) Wave doesn't capture the importance of the tool as a disruptive and innovative development platform. Tom Mornini, chief technology officer and founder of Engine Yard, a company that offers an integrated software stack for Ruby developers, discusses the real meaning of Google Wave. check it down for the video ...

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Google's Biggest Failure Is Marissa Mayer

Google's perfectionist cupcake princess is totally misunderstood! That's the claim Marissa Mayer the VP who oversees Google search, makes to a credulous New York Times, which licks up the frosted version of her career.

Mayer, who runs Google's core search business, is the best known Google executive outside the search engine's CEO, Eric Schmidt, and its billionaire founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And she's proven far more willing to pose for magazine covers and appear on morning news shows, making her the company's public face.

But she seems surprised that with such publicity comes criticism. According to Mayer, the reason why she draws negative press is because of sexism and stereotypes:

I think it's very comforting for people to put me in a box. ‘Oh, she's a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.'

It's true that San Francisco, the last mainstream publication to profile her, focused on her most girly habits. But that has nothing to do with why so many rank-and-file Googlers outside the company's cloistered management despise Mayer.

To grasp that, it helps to understand Google's grandiose self-image: The company's spoiled engineers are led to believe they work in the most perfect meritocracy of ideas that the world has ever seen, motivated by the betterment of mankind through technology. At Google, the theory goes, who you are and who you know doesn't matter. It's only your ideas that count.

And yet, as the Times profile reveals, the real source of her power is the ability to manipulate Schmidt, Page, and Brin:

" Given her longstanding relationship with Google's founders and Mr. Schmidt, she has become something of a sounding board for other managers, a number of whom routinely gravitate to her office.

At the end of a recent day, she met with two senior executives, Joe Kraus and Sundar Pichai, to discuss the company's social networking projects. Many executives at Google believe that social networking is important to its future. Ms. Mayer was meeting with Mr. Kraus and Mr. Pichai to help them prepare for a meeting the next day with Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page to discuss how the company could leverage information-sharing among Google's many services.

"It's important you pregame Eric or it will be a disaster," Mr. Pichai tells Ms. Mayer about the pending meeting, asking her to seek Mr. Schmidt's support on their behalf.

"I know, I know," she responds. "I will call him or write an e-mail. I want them to see how complicated this will be."

Ms. Mayer e-mails Mr. Schmidt that evening. At the meeting the next day, Mr. Pichai's and Mr. Kraus's ideas are approved

The Times article does not mention a key reason why Mayer has such influence: Early in the company's history, she dated Page. (He is now married, and Mayer is engaged to Zack Bogue, a real-estate investment manager and lawyer.)

In dictating the appearance of Google's Web pages, Mayer freely admits she makes subjective decisions. In more than a decade on the job, she has not yet codified her design instinct into a written style guide. Instead, Mayer's whims, which managers under her must make a study of, are what rule.

Mayer may be talented. But her personal ties to Google's top management and her exerscise of arbitrary power are a betrayal of Google's supposedly meritocratic values — a betrayal obviously tolerated at the very top of the company. That, and not her spending time putting cupcake recipes in spreadsheets, is what exasperates her fellow Googlers.

That, and her perfectionist streak. Look at how Mayer dismisses a potential hire over a single bad grade:

" One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. "That's troubling to me," Ms. Mayer says. "Good students are good at all things."

Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of 3.5, out of 4, which meant she had exceeded her manager's expectations. Ms. Mayer is suspicious, however, because her rating hasn't changed in several quarters.

"She is looking for a way out," Ms. Mayer says.

Mayer complains that the media has not examined her life deeply:

Besides, Ms. Mayer says, there are some things that she hasn't previously revealed about herself and that the media have overlooked. Like her self-described athletic prowess.

"It hasn't shown up anywhere that I am really physically active," she says. "I ran the San Francisco half marathon this year. I did the Portland marathon. I went skiing just yesterday. I'm going to do the Birkebeiner, which is North America's longest cross-country ski race. That just shows you how much there are gaps."

Ah yes, the Portland Marathon, in which Mayer placed 7,074th out of 7,862 contestants. Or the Birkebeiner ski race, in which she placed dead last in the women's competition. Good students are good at all things.

Did she really mean to invite media scrutiny of her athletic career? What's really telling about it: In the handful of times where Mayer has competed on her own, without the backing of a billionaire ex-boyfriend and a pliant boss, she has proven to be an outright failure.

At the beginning of the piece, Mayer once again denies rumors of her impending departure from Google — rumors which Valleywag first reported. Perhaps she has realized that without Google, she's nothing. Can you blame her for clinging to her job?

Source

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Top 25 People Celebrated By Google

Since 2002, Google has honored 25 historical people with custom-made versions of the Google logo, displayed for one day on the Google homepage.

Judging by the people Google have selected so far, don’t expect any WWF wrestling stars to show up anytime soon. It’s an elite collection of highly influential scientists, artist and architects who have made their mark on human history and culture.

Here they are, all 25 of them, in reverse chronological order.

René Magritte : (1898 - 1967) Belgian surrealist artist, famous for his often witty and amusing images.

Marc Chagall : (1887 - 1985) Russian Jewish modernist artist. He was a pioneer of modernism and one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century.

Diego Velázquez : (1599 - 1660) Spanish painter and portrait artist, many of his famous paintings depicting scenes of historical and cultural significance, royalty and notable European figures of the time.

Walter Gropius : (1883 - 1969) German architect, founder of Bauhaus and a pioneer of modern architecture.

Alexander Graham Bell : (1847 - 1922) Scientist and inventor famous for, among other things, inventing the telephone.

Luciano Pavarotti : (1935 - 2007) Italian opera singer, part of “The Three Tenors” and one of the world’s most famous vocal artists.

Yuri Gagarin : (1934 - 1968) Soviet cosmonaut who was the first man in space and the first to orbit Earth.

Edvard Munch : (1863 - 1944) Norwegian symbolist painter, known for his expressionistic art. His painting The Scream is one of the most recognizable in all art (and indeed the one Google used as basis for the themed logo).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle : (1859 - 1930) British author mostly known for his novels about Sherlock Holmes, one of the most famous fictional characters of all time.

Percival Lowell : (1855 - 1916) American astronomer (among other things) famous for his study of Mars and founder of the Lowell Observatory, which after his death discovered Pluto.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart : (1756 - 1791) Austrian musical prodigy and one of the most popular classical composers of all time.

Martin Luther King Jr. : (1929 - 1968) African American minister, probably most famous for his work against racial segregation and discrimination, which also earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Louis Braille : (1809 - 1852) The inventor of braille, a widely used reading and writing system for the blind and visually impaired (he was blind himself).

Frank Lloyd Wright : (1867 - 1959) American architect and interior designer. The American Institute of Architecture has named him “the greatest American architect of all time”.

Leonardo da Vinci : (1452 - 1519) Italian polymath, doing groundbreaking work as a scientist, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter and more. Often described the archetypal Renaissance man and one of the most widely talented people of all time.

Vincent van Gogh : (1853 - 1890) Dutch Post-Impressionist artist and a pioneer of Expressionism. And yes, he’s the one who cut off part of his own ear.

Ray Charles : (1930 - 2004) American pianist and soul singer. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him as number two on its list of the 100 greatest singers of all time.

Gaston Julia : (1893 - 1978) French mathematician who devised the formula for the Julia set, common for generating fractals.


Alfred Hitchcock : (1899 - 1980) British film director and producer, a pioneer of the suspense and psychological thriller genres. He is one of the best-known filmmakers of all time.

M. C. Escher : (1898 - 1972) Dutch graphic artist, famous for his mathematically inspired images of impossible constructions and geometric figures.

Albert Einstein : (1879 - 1955) German theoretical physicist, best known for his theory of relativity but contributed greatly to multiple fields within physics, for which he also received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He is regarded as one of the most influential people in human history.

Michelangelo : (1475 - 1564) Italian painter, sculptor, architect and engineer. Together with Leonardo da Vinci, he is often cited as the archetypal Renaissance man.

Pablo Picasso : 1881 - 1973) Andalusian-Spanish painter and sculptor. Famous for (among other things) founding the Cubist movement. He also has one of the longest full names we’ve ever seen.

Andy Warhol : (1928 - 1987) American artist and illustrator and a well-known figure in the Pop Art movement. In addition to his many works of art, he is also famous for being the originator of the concept of “15 minutes of fame”.

Piet Mondrian : (1872 - 1944) Dutch painter and an important contributor to the abstract De Stijl art movement.

Now, one wonders, who’s next in line to get his/her own Google logo? Any ideas? :)

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