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The conversation container will become the new AppStore. Adding capabilities to a conversation requires that you be able to find that software and import it into the conversation. The conversation container is king in this respect. There's a big potential here for conversation containers to displace the iTunes App Store as the hottest new software distribution channel. I would be shocked if Google isn't already looking at this--if they have the pre-eminent conversation container then they have an opportunity to displace Apple in the App Store business.
While most of us were aware of the Wave API and the potential for developers to build and charge for their applications, Google’s intentions to build a full fledged app store were not so concrete yet highlights their commitment to the platform and the developers building for it.
If you're still skeptical about Google Wave, you need to check your head. Don't judge it based on how it looks today, try to have a little vision and see what it can (will) become. Google is obviously making a huge bet on this--as they should.
As overpriced as I think Google's stock currently is based on their current advertising model, and as overpriced as the market as a whole currently is, it's damn tempting to pick up some Google stock right now. They obviously have the vision and are executing on it.
More thoughts on this to follow as it was just a guess before but it's now become a reality.
I view a major shift in technology, like the one that I see materializing right now with Google Wave (the protocol), as a huge object crashing into a an existing landscape. There's this massive change right in the middle, a new space that has to be filled, and then all these fissures spidering out from the main event where the rest of the world is affected by that event--new spaces that must be filled with something.
One of the fun things about technology disruptions is trying to figure out what the landscape will look like after the main event. It's those changes that nimble businesses can take advantage of to pivot into the new spaces that were created. For example when the Web finally went mainstream it created an entirely new industry, but it then proceeded to change the way every other existing industry operated to some degree, and we're still working through that with things like hosted applications and the SaaS model.
This is a follow up to my last post about Google Wave, er, XMPP. That post generated a ton of commentary and questions, and my goal here is to address a lot of them, as well as take a stab at outlining what a post-Wave Internet looks like to the average person.
So here's the deal with Wave: If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you'll miss the boat. And it's a big boat. If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.
In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture. Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself.
I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code. I haven't done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you're going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.
Reading through the Google Wave specs this weekend, I realized that Google has really accomplished something wonderful with the security model baked into the Wave protocol. (Not the CLIENT, specifically, but the extensions Google made to the XMPP PROTOCOL.)
Usually security is done one way, in just about every application on earth: you create the thing you want to secure, whether it's a file, or an email, or a piece of content, or a financial transaction, then you find a security button somewhere that usually looks like a big lock or something:
You click that button, and from there you can select the users who you want to have access to your thing. This is all fairly standard, and there are very few deviations from this. Entire companies have been founded to make this process a little less painful.
I don't think I've ever looked at an application's security model for the first time and thought "wow, that's really easy", which is the way EVERY feature SHOULD be.
As part of my recent love affair with the iPhone, I've gotten very interested in augmented reality. I LOVE a novel and engaging way to present data to people--it's been my job for pretty much the last 7 years, so it's really cool to see some genuine innovation in this area.
I've mentioned augmented reality once or twice before, and the buzz on it has been building lately, not many people I've talked to have heard about it yet. So I figure I'll drop my 2 cents on the matter.
Augmented reality is simply overlaying digital displays on the real world, typically using a mobile device as the viewport. So instead of a completely virtual world you have the real world with virtual overlays. This video actually describes it much better than any explanation could:
Not only can this type of overlay be done on top of public areas and rooms, but you can also overlay virtual objects on well-defined spaces, such as on a piece of paper sitting on your desktop:
Augmented reality is much closer than I would have imagined even a year ago, I totally missed the significance of having direct access to a mobile video stream. There are a few technical hurdles to application development, mostly around the speed of mobile devices, but those are being attacked and solved one by one every day. The image processing and recognition, 3D virtual browser displays, and toolkits are now available and can be used in real applications today.
The iPhone OS isn't scheduled to support direct access to the video feed until the next release, and that's required for augmented reality apps. (Although I understand that several of these apps are already available today on Android devices.) I suspect that after that release hits you're going to see a flood of these applications, and I'm really looking forward to it.
I'm looking forward to integrating the real world into my apps as well.
A couple of glasses of vino on a Sunday night and I got to thinking about what I believe will be the technologies that are going to reshape the world in 2010. After a stagnant year or two in there are some really killer things on the horizon right now.
I've been fascinated by quantum physics since I was a kid, learning about how reality works just really pushes my buttons for some reason. Or, should I say, learning about how little scientists know about how reality really works intrigues me.
I finally got an iPhone recently and I'm a huge fan, I'm already tinkering with writing some apps. It's a fantastic piece of engineering, really a work of art in the way they put the whole experience together, AT&T issues aside. It's inspired me to consider some new applications that I hadn't thought of yet.
But that's not the point of this post. Ever since I got it, I realized that I really didn't need my laptop anymore 75% of the time. Most of the stuff I wanted to do on the road I could do from my phone now. Last time I traveled I didn't even pack my laptop, and I didn't miss it once.
Most of my computer usage when I travel is pretty lightweight, and having my computer in my pocket has really made my technology usage more spontaneous and fun. My social network usage has skyrocketed due to the fact that I can whip my phone out of my pocket and be recording a thought and done with it in about 30 seconds.
Grabbing your phone and staring at it for a bit is socially acceptable, at least where I've lived, and so now using the computer for bit is also socially acceptable now.
My computer usage patterns have changed. I'm a lot more hesitant to bust out a laptop, fire it up, wait for it to load, fire up a browser, and go to the site I want to use when I'm in the middle of a conversation than I am to get out my phone. I can pull out the phone and use it for a few seconds while not even leaving a conversation.
That was a huge revelation to me, I'm still kind of digesting it and its implications for software.
This is interesting. I think Facebook just killed Twitter by buying FriendFeed.
I use Facebook as a private outlet. No business contacts, just friends and family. I use Twitter (@jasonkolb) as my public outlet: professional contacts, people I meet via my blog, etc. It's nice having that separation, but I know that Facebook is trying to be Twitter Turbo, and I hope they don't kill the "private" side in the process.
I actually like FriendFeed, and I have an account that I never use except thru Twitter. FriendFeed is like Twitter but better, with threaded comments, no stupid 140 character limit, etc. The ONLY reason I use Twitter primarily instead of FriendFeed is the user base. That's the ONLY thing it has going for it over FriendFeed.
The only leg up Twitter has is the buzz. It sure seems like Facebook just neutralized that bit, we shall see. Facebook is FAR bigger in the non-techie crowd that *I* know. Most people hear what Twitter is and aren't very interested, most people aren't as prone to blab about stuff as I am.
I can't wait to see how this integration works: will Facebook cripple the Twitter to FriendFeed integration? Will my Facebook posts now flow into FriendFeed?
I don't see any way Facebook lets FriendFeed tear people away from its site (where it can place ads) in favor of fat clients. This can only mean that FriendFeed as it exists today will be neutered in some form to push people to the Web client, I'm dying to see how they maintain their eyeball count.
