Google Wave

Yesterday at their I/O conference, Google demonstrated a new communication/collaboration tool that appears to be intended to kill email as the standard form of personal web communication. My first feeling is: Good! Have you ever tried to use email for long, branching communications? The flat, threaded view is trash, and a tree view is not much better. I would love to see this get mainstream attention because it might not only kill email, but also kill off less collaboration tools I personally find less than enjoyable to use. Sharepoint, for instance, I have found to be clunky and have poor integration with email. That isn't really the fault of Sharepoint - email was never meant to be an issue tracker or dynamically update websites. Nor would you want it to, it doesn't have the tools. One of the first things they show off with Wave is how easy it is to do just that (particularly bugtracking). Wave is also free, open source (in some fashion or another), and federated. That last bit means your Waves don't necessarily need to live or interact with Google at all - just like internal email servers you can whip up a Wave server and apparently quite easily. The motivation for Google doesn't immediately occur to me. Best, moderately educated guess is that it might have something to do with HTML5 - the next version of HTML currently supported by roughly zero browsers yet - will be easier to index and search than Flash/Flex/Silverlight. Is Wave supposed to be HTML5's killer app, driving the browsers to pick up support for it faster? As a side note, there appears to be a conspicuous number of references to the television show Firefly in the above presentation and in the project. In the show, the standard communication term used was 'wave', the poll robot they demonstrated included an option for Serenity as the Best Movie Ever, etc. This isn't too wild for them. Keep in mind that Google Earth was apparently inspired by the "Earth" program described in Snowcrash.

There is location and then there is behavior.

Google Latitude, which effectively embodies the business case of Loopt until some kind of conversation occurred at Google, allows users with mobile phones to opt-in to a service which broadcasts their location. People can search for their friends locations and retrieve Twitter-like messages by them. Location is a good start, but more interesting is a presentation I recently viewed on behavior and its use for location based apps like this one. Why just try to find your friends somewhere when you can go ahead and predict where they, and people like them and you, are going to be? I rather like the privacy policy too (anonymity, you own the data you create).

GIS In the Cloud

Cloud computing has been the hot topic in many GIS circle for the last year or so, largely for the same reason it is building steam more recently in most IT circles in general - datacenters and bandwidth speeds are nearing the point where the promise of mass cloud computing is feasible for corporate users (which is where the money is). For anyone previously not versed in this topic, cloud computing is basically the movement of applications, services, and data from local storage to massive datacenters run by people like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft. You probably use it already - say if you use GMail rather than a local application like Outlook or Windows Mail. Maps have obviously moved there too. If you own a computer you probably use some kind of online map for directions. It doesn't necessarily need to be in a browser either - Google Earth and NASA's WorldWind might be local applications, but all of the data and services are running off of datacenters somewhere else. It is believed this somewhat slow progression is going to accelerate as activities typically preformed by local IT departments for small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly replaced by cloud apps offered for basically free by the above organizations. It might seem foolish to marry yourself to a particular platform or business in this fashion but (1) a lot of these things are built on open standards like LAMP anyway and can be transferred around and (2) companies marry themselves to a vendor all the time (see SAP). Traditional desktop software vendors are shifting to do their stuff at least partially as a service (and thus online). Windows 7 isn't going to have a mail program, it is going to fill that functionality with Live Mail. ESRI, the biggest GIS software vendor, has made it a point to make it extremely easy to put online data services into map documents just as you would add in layers on a local computer. A great number of GIS data providers, largely governmental, are not by and large going to venture into the cloud all that soon, not without intervention by legislators. Why? Liability, tradition, data sensitivity. What data public exists is often of variable quality, especially when overlaid with other information from other sources. Throw some bad data out there, even if you include metadata that includes a hefty disclaimer, morons will still use it to hike into a blizzard and and sue you for having to eat their children. Even with good data, there is the problem of interpretation. Take a parcel layer from any given city/county government in the United States and throw it on Google Earth. GE does a pretty good job, but I would wager good money the satellite imagery isn't accurate to a quarter of an inch. The parcel layer is, by law. The number of people who will go on to Google Earth and stir up property disputes without this knowledge is probably substantial enough to be a factor in deciding to release it. And of course there is the security issue. Knowing what substation can black out a particular city block, what water main is feeding that block, communication lines, emergency vehicle GPS locations - this stuff could be used not just by some existential terrorism threat but by normal criminals to cause all sorts of mischief and evade capture.

The i9/11 and the iPATRIOT Act

Excellent, excellent talk on the future of the internet with some very smart people. Jonathan Zittrain: Author of "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (available free here). Lawrence Lessig: Lawyer and author of dozens of books about free culture, recently having switched from talking about copyright specifically to a more broad range of IT and government corruption issues. Vin Cerf: He basically invented the internet with two other guys. No, really. Currently he is Google's chief internet evangelical (that is his real job title). The whole video is good, but the thing that stands out the most is a comment made by Lessig - the PATRIOT Act wasn't written really quickly in the wake of 9/11, it was sitting in a desk drawer waiting for the opportunity to be passed by a frantic legislature. He asked Richard Clarke, former chief counterterrorism advisor to numerous presidents, if a version of the PATRIOT Act for the internet was waiting for some kind of major internet-based attack which could be compared to 9/11 in terms of disruption and financial loss. Clarke said that, without question, there was. The heart of the problem is our national infrastructure is based on a system that our representatives are largely entirely ignorant of. Here is Senator Ted Stevens demonstrating such ignorance. Here is John McCain admitted to not knowing how to use a computer, much less the internet. None of this would be a problem, except these are the kind of people that can (at least attempt) to legislate internet activity in the country. And when some major incident occurs, which is inevitable due to the open nature of the internet, they may kill the largest and most important communication/content/distribution instrument ever conceived by humankind.

The artificial barrier of licensing, a GIS/Surveying example

There was news recently of a feature story pulled from a professional survey magazine because the work in question was, according to the State Licensing Board, depicting activities that should only be done by licensed surveyors rather than GIS professionals or anyone else. James Fee doesn't know what part of this mess is the worst, but I'd like to take an amateur stab at it. The artificial barrier that government licenses produce can in fact be a good thing when the occupation is such that a minimum standard is required to avoid large-scale fraud, but in so many cases could probably be done by private organizations. Many are put in place by a vocal and monied minority in an attempt to create what amounts to a cartel. I believe one example involved a manicure license that costed thousands of dollars. Professional survey licensing may fall under this, but my limited knowledge of that industry compels me to limit such rhetoric. This isn't the biggest problem with what occurred. Actually, the biggest problem wasn't even the suggestion GIS professionals - or for that matter, simply knowledgable members of the public with increasingly cheap GPS devices - are not competent to do location based field work. For so much geographic data, a 10m resolution is a godsend where previously no one was collecting data. And as more nations put up satellites it will likely become even finer resolution for smaller and more casual devices. This is not to suggest there isn't a place for professional surveyors - both for ultimate liability responsibility and expertise with the more effective tools and procedures. But the percieved elitism is somewhat disconserting. As a GIS/programming guy, I don't find anything I do so absurdly difficult that it would pain my eyes to read an article about an amatuer trying it. The biggest problem is that a state licensing board can effectively kill an article. There isn't any way in which this is a good thing, and I hope whoever has their hands on it leaks it to the internet.

Geodata distribution, piracy, and the future business models.

The big talk in the GIS world is the presentation Jack Dangermond of ESRI and John Hanke of Google at a recent conference (Where2.0). In it, they effectively outline the plan to do as much as possible to encourage the greater GIS community to openly offer their data to be served up by their products, which are going to be integrated in a much closer fashion when 9.3 comes out in a few weeks. A lot of firms and even public agencies offer geographic data for money, and they are probably going though a variety of stages of "freaking out". Already a lot of data that they could formerly milk has been put up in some form or another in Google Earth, VE, or NASA's WorldWind. Anyone who has taken a passing interest in the internet for the last decade can probably tell you this model, selling data for profit, is not going to work forever in the same way it always has. The sustainable model in the digital age is in offering expert, specialized services rather than trying to produce artificial scarcity via DRM or hiding yourself entirely behind a firewall. Ask the entertainment industry how the latter two options are working out. For geographic digital data, this is already happening. Go on any given piracy website and prepare to find the latest TomTom or other proprietary maps/data. Undoubtedly there are more specialized and discrete sites out there just for geodata (or if there isn't then there will be when the demand exists). This kind of thing can be mitigated by making your product very accessible (easy to buy) and superior to the free alternatives. Working with Google or other distributors to set up a one-click purchase system for geodata together with free samples and an open format. Continue to improve by offering semantic and interest associations (people who bought this also bought this, etc). Young people - time rich and cash poor - will still pirate the heck out of it. But when they join the business world they will be pitching your data to their bosses/clients. And they'll be buying it themselves because they will eventually be relatively poor in time and rich in cash. Selling to businesses will still be perfectly viable though (they assess the risk of piracy a little differently than individual actors), but the mass market is a different animal.

The benefits of being a late bloomer

This isn't a post about an embarrassing teenage angst. It is actually a story about natural resources, the industrial revolution, and programming for Windows. Ars Technica, one of the better tech sites on the internet, recently did a series on the lead up to the most recent malaise we've seen with Windows programming. As I read the piece, I kept noticing parallels between Microsoft's difficulties and the early innovators in the industrial revolution. Despite the fact that you probably know nothing about the 19th century about Britain besides the fact the nascent United States kicked its ass off the better parts of North America, it is actually pretty relevant. Rule Britannia Britain ran the 19th century. It controlled all of the sea lanes, dominated world trade/finance, and ran nations which were ten times its landmass and population by occasionally machinegunning down crazy-brave hordes of natives who were attacking them with spears. It got this way because it not only was the first to recognize and reap the massive benefits from new industrial machinery, but also because it ruthlessly closed itself off in terms of technology to retain their advantage. A lot of the first major industries that started in America were based on stealing the technology anyway - not completely unlike piracy in China at the moment. In the late 19th century this initial advantage actually started to hurt them in places. A "second" industrial revolution started when better techniques for creating stuff like steel were developed. Nations a little behind the times compared to Britain could buy better stuff fresh without the perceived cost of replacing older equipment. A newly united Germany bears mention here. Relevance to Windows development Programming in Windows is a bunch of old equipment that needs replacing according to the Ars series (they are not at all alone in this suggestion). Old 16bit windows stuff will still work in the new 64 bit systems, but the odd things you have to account for to maintain this backwards compatibility makes programming new stuff for it a tremendous pain. Relatively late comers (in terms of popularity) like Apple and the more user friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu can and do start from scratch in order to build better tools and not incur the kind of fallout that would happen if MS did the same. Apple pulled this of by creating a virtual machine for their old apps. Desktop Linux distributions don't really have to worry about this because their user base really isn't so large as to cause mass customer loss at breaking compatibility. The apparently sexier place to do development is for the web, which is OS neutral and can increasingly do stuff that was once limited only to the desktop. That stuff that still needs to be done on a local machine - heavy audio/image/video processing - have a lot of good tools on alternatives to Windows. The only exception here seems to be in the gaming industry, which in general steadfastly refuses to develop for multiple operating systems because, from what I understand, the open tools for rendering graphics (OpenGL) are more difficult to use than Microsoft's DirectX.

Favorite nerd stuff of 2007

Yes, everyone seems to be doing something like this. And probably got it finished a week ago. So sue me.

• StumbleUpon: I first heard about it as an up-and-coming search-like engine in Wired. Effectively, it is a psuedo search engine that relies on user generated interests - not passively as Google does with link backs, but with actual intentional voting. There is something similar on the open source front (Wikia). Link

• xkcd: How did I miss this gem before? Link.

• DS R4: Play movies, listen to music, emulate classic games, and back up your whole DS game library for a little more than the cost of a single DS game. No mincing words, you want one of these if you own a DS. If you plan on buying one you'd be a fool not to get an R4 (or an M3, which I've been told does basically the same thing). Link.

• Mozilla Firefox 3 beta - It is still beta but amazingly stable. Automatically restarts with the tabs you had open when you closed it, prettier search bar, and way better multi tab support (no slowdowns or crashes with the 987,345 tabs I tend to have open). Bad news: perhaps it is just me, but the bookmarking isn't as good and more difficult to manage. Still really nice for beta.

• A finished Methods section draft: It is a good feeling having this thing 1/2 to 2/3rds done. Lets see how viciously my thesis chair, Bob Hickey, tears it apart. I think I might post it and have the 0 people that visit the site mock it.

• Ubuntu/QGIS: Though not ready to take over the huge ESRI-house I work for or actually threatening Windows desktop domination, the speed and good looks of the new open source GIS platforms that can be created for zero cost (and without having to reformat your computer - use use VMWare Player to create a virtual machine).

• Death of DRM music: For those that don't know, DRM is the reason you can't move around music you buy off iTunes to whatever you want as many times as you like. All of the major music content holders have realized what people on the internet have been telling them for years - only legitimate customers are hurt by DRM. Pirates - a term with already includes probably everyone younger than 20 - simply hack it or rip CDs their friends get during parties. Video will be next as it is easily as trivial to defeat.

• @GoogleTalks: It will be a supreme challenge for Google to keep its relatively good public image even as it grows more massive and run by more suits than engineers. They have given the internet many, many good things. One that is less commonly mentioned is this series of talks which include all of the major candidates, many famous/influential authors, and some other folks. Link.

• Portal: Game of the year out of nowhere. Witty dialog, excellent ending, and interesting mechanics.

Google Earth locations now editable.

It was only a matter of time really. You can now edit points on Google Earth. To prevent people from trashing what is a pretty decent database of locations, you can also immediately view the original location as an option. I'll probably have a lot to say about this when I get done with work, but my immediate thought is how much more open will it get (user uploaded polygons? lines?), what will be the synergy with Android (mobile computing will no doubt integrate GPS technology), and if you can add points/lines/polygons willy-nilly, when is the government going to take a keen interest in semi-anonymous, amateur members of the general public plopping down points on things they'd prefer wasn't easily searched for? Update: My comments above are probably premature. You cannot, as far as I can tell, add points to Google Earth (in the sense those points are immediately and automatically shared with everyone else). Though I will admit I haven't played with GE for a while. If you could add points like that, you would likely start having the Wikipedia effect - vandalism and advertisement would become quite rampant without dedicated administrators and probably a secondary staff of trusted volunteers. Since Wikipedia hasn't and quite honestly are unlikely to solve that problem, it becomes a question of the costs vs. the benefits. I would say it would be worthwhile if such user-created features were implemented such that the whole of them would be turned off as default. Some basic/super popular layer categories could be created ("good neighborhoods", "pleasant views", "hiking trails"). Anyone entering it of course could add dynamic tags that you could search for in another search tool. Update II: From CNET

To curb potential abuse, users aren't able to edit the location of a business that has already verified its location via Google's Local Business Center. There's also an official review system that has to double check your edit if it's more than 200 meters away from the original location.

Update III: Well check out how ridiculously behind the times I am. http://wikimapia.org/ This is pretty neat. Although a lot of the entries are clearly advertisements and and some vandalism, but that is the double edged sword of public created data.