Google Wave, a new API/protocol and platform was presented on Google I/O. It’s a hosted, embeddable communications and collaboration platform that introduces quite a few interesting features that are currently either not available or require multiple service vendors/providers. It was written in Java/GWT.

Google has made it clear that the protocol is going to be open and there will be open source [reference] versions of the server and client, although someone could — theoretically — write their own before that by following the specifications on the aforementioned site. Wave includes Robots and Gadgets which are server and client-side applications [respectively]. The former are automated participants for waves and gadgets are applications that run on the client and allow for new input methods. Google is also allowing for embedding of waves on third-party websites through the Wave Embed API.

This is a great project by Google, which, of course, is going to be a building block [and trojan horse] for online collaboration; viz. Google Office + Collaboration; features that might, in the not-so-distant future, render Microsoft’s workhorse [Office] dead. The fact that they are open sourcing the whole thing is fantastic news.

While the potential is there — and is undoubtedly great — I believe that we should be careful before judging how disruptive Wave is going to be in the next few years. Many technically interesting projects have withered and died for numerous reasons, sometimes political other purely business. Wave is probably going to be extremely useful for intranets from the very beginning. The reason for this is that it’s very easy to use the Wave infrastructure where a single server hosts the service. But its promise, its full potential lies in the fact that its an Open System; it might become an extremely disruptive technology for the whole ‘net. Besides replacing all sorts of pointless centrally hosted services [twitter, disqus, facebook], the Federation protocol is probably the single most impressive thing about Wave; it assures interoperability and maximises plurality without creating walled gardens. What’s more, that the protocol is open and that the code is open source means that in the future the Wave platform might evolve into a fully distributed protocol. The Openness of Wave and the Federation Protocol is the single most impressive, brave decision I’ve seen Google take and one that elevates Wave well above other similar technologies.

To the Google team behind Wave, in the words of their own Lars Rasmussen: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” =)

If anything the sudden appearance of Moblin 2.0 Beta and its excellent User Interface has proven, beyond any doubt, that corporate support is essential if linux — and the open source community — is going to survive beyond a very very small niche.

Linux on the server has been doing well despite Microsoft’s pretty good record with Windows Server in the past few years (and contrary to its failings with Vista), its dominant position on the desktop and its proven marketing muscle and the reason for this has been that Linux on the server has had the support of many large corporations living off it.

This has not been the case on the linux desktop, and it is probably the reason why so little has been achieved in the past seven or so years in that field. On one hand, the stagnant Gnome 2 platform barely kept alive primarily by Redhat and Novell that depend on it and on the other the interesting and fresh KDE4 platform that’s extremely immature and incomplete and leaves thousands of everyday use cases unsupported.
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“…And what can we do about it”. Linux usability (and the sorry state of desktop linux) has become a staple of this blog, but bear with me for a bit. Here’s a video by Bryan Lunduke from the Linux Action Show with reasons why the linux desktop still sucks for many (most) users. This comes from someone that like linux and wants to see it succeed; most of the stuff mentioned is pretty valid criticism that touches upon the lack of cohesion, regressions, QA and many other aspects of modern linux distributions.

Moblin 2.0 is a netbook-optimized linux distribution/environment originally created by Intel and largely based on the work by OpenedHand, a startup bought by Intel in 2007. This is the introduction video to Moblin. And, as far as linux goes this is by far the most advanced, well-thought, usable environment I’ve ever seen.

Sure, it may be tailored for netbooks, which means the task of creating it was much simpler than creating a beautiful, usable and functional full-fledged desktop environment; and of course, from a developer perspective Hildon and GTK are not exactly ‘modern’ or well documented, in contrast to — say — modern Cocoa. Still, it’s a fantastic first step in the right direction and shows the promise of what focused work can do to bring FLOSS closer to the state of the art in those areas where it sorely needs improvement.

Reboot.

Labelling any fictional universe, any story, any work as a ‘franchise’ couldn’t be considered anything, but demeaning to those that love it. Yet I am lost for words when I try to determine how the Star Trek series of movies and TV episodes could be called.

After 2002′s ‘Nemesis‘, it was all but clear that the beloved The Next Generation (TNG) crew was long overdue for retirement. One might say that it was apparent well before that movie hit the cinemas; even 1998′s Insurrection lacked the feel and canon that defined the TNG series, the last Star Trek that Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, participated in. At the same time, ‘Enterprise’ the latest TV series to hit TVs just after the turn of the century was demonstrably, obviously so far from universe, æsthetics and philosophy of the ‘franchise’; there was little of the sophistication, little of the idealism, little of the sense of responsibility that defined the Star Trek TV series that came in the previous two decades: TNG, Deep Space One and Voyager — The Original Series being the exception, having been created at a time when science fiction on TV was clumsy at best and it being Roddenberry’s first outing — that first attempt, largely devoid of the technical sophistication of its successors, deficient of skill and execution, still included enough of the brilliance of Roddenberry’s universe that would make it successful in the long term; akin in some ways to early adventure computer games: it wasn’t so much the execution/implementation, it was about the concepts, the ideas.

In 2002 the Star Trek universe was dying; lacking direction, vision and the charismatic crew to bring it forward it was more of a rotting ‘franchise’ than art. It made little money to Paramount and there were few ways out of the decay. So, yes: Star Trek needed a reboot. And a reboot it got.
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