3 posts tagged “google”
New Year's Eve is traditionally time to look back, so here's about the only cogent observation I can come up with for the end of the year: 2007 is the year that video started taking over the web. In 2005, video was almost entirely trapped in the realm of proprietary codecs and plugins, hidden away as QuickTime downloads or Windows streaming media, behind nasty UIs with checkboxes for your connection speed and preferred format. Last year, Flash video became widespread, and, of course, YouTube was sold for a fortune to Google.
This year, embedded video is everywhere. Some blogs seem to be half-full of Flash previews, and it's beginning to be a minefield browsing my delicious network; an interesting sounding link will turn out to be an hour and a half lecture on Google Video. All the criticisms I no doubt made of podcasting on the spool, somewhere, apply here, but even more so: who has 90 minutes to concentrate on a presentation, every day or two? (If you can really absorb information in the background, you're obviously way better at multitasking than I am; congratulations.)
Meanwhile, the Guardian and other newspapers have video on their front pages every now and again, and video adverts on their stories as often or not (or so it sometimes seemed). (As Tom noted on the spool, this might be backwards.) The BBC's audio and video, stuck in the pre-Flash world, regularly gets stick for not moving to the exciting new way of bombarding everyone with moving images, whether they want them or not.
There's beginning to be more and more worry about the twilight of books, and indeed literacy. That New Yorker article goes on to note:
The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.
This wouldn't really be that much of a change, I suppose; as the article says elsewhere, television and radio have been resurrecting orality at the expense of literacy for the best part of a century. The web seems to be recapping the history of mass publishing from the first primitive printing presses, to HDTV, at breakneck speed; what took five centuries is being replayed in two decades.
Given we still don't really understand the changes that happen to society when movable type (the metal sort, not the software package) was invented (I've seen people arguing it led to the 150 years of religious turmoil in Europe centred on the Reformation, and others highlighting its role in the Enlightenment; probably it contributed massively to both), I can see why people need to be concerned about what the effects of such a shift are. I believe this is what Doris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech was trying to ask, in a passage that was widely misunderstood by web 2.0 boosters:
The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"
The move to a post-literate society may be inevitable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be spending some time thinking about what it means. In the meantime, I'll be sitting at the back, grousing when discussion relies on you having watched the latest viral nonsense, and hoping that there'll still be books, full-length blog posts, and interesting articles for me to read.
or, why I won't be migrating to Google Mashup Editor
Last winter I wrote a small web application called groupr which let you look at photos from your Flickr groups in one place. I did that partly because I thought it would be useful (it is, a bit) but also because I wanted to play with the platform the company I'd once worked for had released. That platform was called Zimki, and it was, in hindsight, a pretty ambitious thing for a small company to attempt.
Zimki is a hosted server-side Javascript application framework, complete with a data storage model and a templating engine (actually two). It makes it easy to quickly knock up a small web application, or at least it does once you wrap your head around it and get hold of tools to save you using the (frankly awful) web pages provided for editing your app. It's the closest I've seen to what Marc Andreessen has called level 3 platforms:
A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.
Indeed, this is exactly how Zimki works. Unfortunately, it's also closing by Christmas.
There's a big company out there who also have something that looks a bit like a level 3 platform. Google Mashup Editor also lets you run code in a hosted environment, build multi-page sites, and read and store data from the web. Unfortunately, there's no way I can port groupr to it.
Firstly, there's a very limited set of server-side computations allowed. If there's not a module or control for something, you can't do it. This is the first thing I ran across. groupr has a local config file with my Flickr API key and secret, and it uses MD5 to calculate the required parameter for the authentication step. It turns out that's impossible with GME.
Secondly, there seems to be no way to pass data in to the application other than by user interaction or feeds. Notably, you can't inspect HTTP query strings, the mainstay of web programming since 1994. Since Flickr's frob is returned in an HTTP parameter, this means it's impossible to ever use GME for a Flickr application that requires authentication. Well, actually, you could do everything on the client side, but then why use a hosted environment at all? I doubt I'd get enough use out of its templating language to justify the effort.
As with my complaints about Skitch, this is almost certainly a case of me wanting a product to be what it's not, but I can't help feeling that if Google aren't prepared to build a real Level 3 platform, nobody is. In the meantime, I suppose revert to writing my own apps with web frameworks that use SQL and which need work to scale, just like everyone else does.
Today sees the release of Google Sky. (Annoyingly, it doesn't yet have a domain, or even instructions on how to use it' what you need to do is download Google Earth then use the menu option View > Switch to Sky. Maybe there'll be a post to the Google Earth blog later.)
Once I'd figured out how to actually get into it, I started playing, and it's very pretty. I've not been a big user of Google Earth, so the interface wasn't entirely familiar, but it will be for those of you who've messed around with the terrestrial version. I'm also not sure how it compares to specialised astronomical packages like Starry Night, but I can imagine they're a lot better at finding how to observe a planet in the sky above your town. Google Sky, by contrast, is a lovely tour of the deep celestial sky, putting into context some of the glorious imagery from Hubble and other telescopes.
Anyway, it's free; why not give it a download and have a quick play?
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