The cell phone is a piece of technology that more and more people are putting in their pockets. They are one of the quickest evolving gadgets on the market. In addition to enhancing the communication capabilities of their products, they added so many extra features to what was already sought by the society.
YouTube is pushing its Facebook Connect integration further by allowing its users to see the videos that their friends share on Facebook. YouTube users had previously been able to find their Facebook friends on YouTube as well as update their Facebook profile with their various actions from the site. While it's nice to see YouTube embracing Facebook more and more, it stops a bit short of being an impressive Connect implementation. YouTube is getting there, but seems to be lagging behind a little in this department. An implementation that shares, on Facebook, what you are watching, on YouTube, would certainly make sense, although it might clutter up users' Facebook profiles if they are a prolific YouTube watcher. For now, the addition of this new feature is a welcome inclusion and serves as a great way of getting trusted recommendations for videos to watch on YouTube. YouTube said this feature is in "test mode" for the time being. In my testing, I was not able to get this feature to actually work. This can be sometimes be expected while YouTube irons out the kinks with new features that aren't quite ready for prime time. If anyone has better luck, let us know in the comments.
It’s out. The world’s most popular blogging engine has released it’s latest update and there’s a little something for everyone. Along with a mass of bug and security fixes, Wordpress highlights the following as the major geek candy: The 2.9 release also includes a slew of changes for WordPress developers, with 84 changes for 2.9 listed on the Codex. Changes range from improved documentation for the WP Filesystem to support for new post types and limiting checks for “blog by email” to every five minutes.
Windows 7 is scarcely more than a month old. Most of the people who will eventually use it haven’t gotten around to trying it yet; those that have are still settling in. And the Win 7 experience will change rapidly as remaining bugs are squashed, missing drivers arrive, and compatibility glitches are ironed out. Even so, it’s not too early to start gauging what real people think of Windows Vista’s replacement. So to riff on Ronald Reagan’s famous question from his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, Are Windows users better off today than they were a few weeks ago, back in the Vista era? We decided to ask the Technologizer community, a group of tech enthusiasts with a high propensity to acquire new operating systems quickly and push them to their limits. Starting on November 16th, we surveyed our readers (and Twitter followers) about their experiences with Windows 7. Our goal: to do a reality check on themostly favorable initial reviews of the new OS (as well as our own survey of largely enthusiastic Windows 7 beta testers back in March). The 550+ Windows 7 early adopters who took our survey mostly echo the positive response that the upgrade has received from professional reviewers, pundits, and users of pre-release editions. A sizable majority say they’re extremely satisfied with the OS and rate it as a clear improvement on both the beloved Windows XP and the widely-panned Windows Vista. Crippling installation problems–the bane of every upgrader’s existence, and always a legitimate reason to postpone switching OSes–were rare. Our full report follows. But first, some quick facts on the folks who took our survey: It’s important to note that our goal wasn’t to survey a representative, projectable, normalized sampling of all Windows 7 users. The responses that follow are from members of the Technologizer community who chose to take our survey. Their opinions are their own–but we think they make for interesting reading even if they’re not the last word on how average users will react to Windows 7.
Last week, TechCrunch published a story about me not yet trying Google Wave ("Gmail Creator Thinks Email Will Last Forever. And Hasn't Tried Google Wave"). The is apparently unacceptable, or as one commenter put it, "Paul may have been trying to be cool and ironic, but really he should be ashamed for not having tried Wave yet." I'm not sure if this is because I have an obligation to try all new products, or because my views on the longevity of email will seem hopelessly naive once I try Wave, but either way, I mustn't disappoint the good people of TechCrunch :)
The Google Wave About page and video does a good job of summarizing what Wave is and how it works. If you want to learn more about Wave, I would start there and skip this post. That said, here are my thoughts on Wave:
First off, Wave is clever and full of interesting ideas.
Second, comparisons to Facebook and Twitter are nonsensical. If Twitter were CNN Headline News, Google Wave would be Microsoft Office. Wave is less of a social network and more of a productivity tool. It's Google Docs meets Gmail, or as Google puts it, "A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."
Third, although Wave is very promising, it's clear that it still needs some refinement. This is why Google calls it a "preview release". The trouble with innovative new ideas is that not all of them are worth keeping. While developing Gmail, we implemented a lot of features that were either not released, or not released until much later. Some of the most interesting ideas (such as automatic email prioritization) never made it out because we couldn't find simple enough interfaces. Other ideas sounded good, but in practice weren't useful enough to justify the added complexity (such as multiple stars). Other features, such as integrated IM, simply needed more time to get right and were added later. Our approach was somewhat minimal: only include features that had proven to be highly useful, such as the conversation view and search. It's my impression that Wave was released at an earlier stage of development -- they included all of the features, and will likely winnow and refine them as Wave approaches a full launch. The Wave approach can be a little confusing, but it allows for greater public feedback and testing.
From what I've seen, the realtime aspects of Wave are both the most intriguing, and the most problematic. I think the root of the issue is that conversations need to be mostly linear, or else they become incomprehensible. IM and chat work because there is a nice, linear back-and-forth among the participants. Wave puts the conversation into little Gmail-like boxes, but then makes them update in realtime. The result is that people end up responding (in realtime) to things on other parts of the page, and the chronological linkage and flow of the conversation is lost. I suspect it would work better if each box behaved more like a little chat room. A single Wave could contain multiple chats (different sub-topics), but each box would be mostly self-contained and could be read in a linear fashion.
So now that I've tried Wave, do I expect it to kill email? No. The reason that nothing is going to kill email anytime soon is quite simple: email is universal (or as close to it as anything on the Internet). Email has all kinds of problems and I often hate it, but the fact is that it mostly works, and there's a huge amount of experience and infrastructure supporting it. The best we can do is to use email less, and tools like Wave and Docs are a big help here.
I don't know what Google has planned for Wave or Gmail, but if I were them I would continue improving Wave, and then once it's ready for the whole world to use, integrate it into Gmail. Moving Wave into Gmail would give it a huge userbase, and partially address the "email is universal" problem. They could use MIME multi-part to send both a non-Wave, HTML version of the message, and the Wave version. Wave-enabled mail readers would display the live Wave, while older mailers would show the static version along with a link to the live Wave.
Technology and business have mixed in the last several decades. One cannot exist without the other. Business is facing new challenges every day, problems that only technology can solve. Once in a while crisis occur that brings up questions about security and safety. Lets imagine the following situation, you are a bank owner and a car full of money gets hijacked or robbed. Only connection you have with the drivers is radio. Reacting to the crisis is slow and inadequate. In such situation all odds are against you. Having accurate and up to date information is the key in solving the problem. Here technology comes to help. There are modern Vehicle Tracking system that help locating faster your stolen truck full of money and putting the robbers behind bars. GPS systems are developed such way that you will have complete information about the vehicle you want at any moment of the day.