I see the embedded Wave below ... do other people? Sounds like only people who are logged into Wave can see it. I can actually edit it right here. I can't figure out how to make the wave public and I think that might make it appear for all. You should see a wave inline below that looks like what is in this screenshot.
src="http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/embed.js">
The Nittany Lion is Missing from TLT at Penn State on Vimeo.
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet--logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.Good piece about the rising tide of instant communication tools. What will an environment like Wave do to email? We'll have to wait and see, but I am curious how people feel about email ... is it still the number one way to communicate? What about for collaboration?
A little video some of the people in TLT made recently.
We have been hearing rumors about the Google Drive online storage service for years now. This mythical GDrive would give users the ability to easily store and access all of their files in the cloud. Lots of other services already offer this, of course, but few of them are at the center of our online lives as much as Google is. Yesterday, Google Sites, a service that lets users build their own websites without ever having to touch the HTML or CSS code, just launched an update to its unified 'insert' dialog. This dialog brings together all of your files from almost all of Google's services and looks a lot like we would imagine the GDrive to look like.I have to say that Google Sites is becoming a very interesting service. We have at least one faculty member here at PSU who has walked away from the CMS and does everything in Google sites (and the related services). His demo is impressive.
More than 300 students at Bucknell University got hit with letters from a collection agency last week charging that they had illegally downloaded material from Cayman Academic Resources and must pay $500 "to settle this matter."Something to watch out for as more and more attention gets paid to RIAA activities.
Still one of the most useful tools in this group, if still largely a proof of concept, is Pete Warden's Mailana. Give Mailana a Twitter username and it will tell you who the top 20 people that user has had reciprocal public conversations with on Twitter - who they are engaging with the most.Interesting way to look at relationships. Also interesting to think an entire industry can spin up so quickly around a single space.
The New York Times just released an interesting new tool that allows users to filter articles from the newspaper's website by tags and keywords and turn them into custom feeds. While developers could already build similar tools on top of the paper's Article Search API and TimesTags API, the new Custom Times Feeds give everybody the ability to create persistent searches based on their personal preferences.This is interesting, but still very limited. I did create a feed for Apple, Inc. yesterday and it has already shown me articles I missed. I would like to see a mashup builder in there, though.
Facebook announced this afternoon that it is tracking what it calls its version of Gross National Happiness, based on an analysis of the positive and negative words people use when updating their Facebook status. It's very interesting to see how people feel about various world events that Facebook has cross referenced - US users are more happy on Thanksgiving than on Christmas, for example. The new index is interesting, but it's also a frustrating example of just how much value Facebook is withholding by not allowing everyone access to the anonymous, aggregated activity and conversation of more than 300 million people.This to me is another example of the power sitting under FB headquarters ... and also an indication of how dangerous it is to be giving them all of our data. They aren't opening access to the content that we are putting in. This is a huge missed opportunity for us all.
If you're not one of the 100,000 lucky users who gets an invitation to Google Wave today, don't fret. You can check out Google Wave right here.I've written about my experiences with Wave over at my other blog. Strangely enough my developer preview account has not yet flipped into a full account. I'm hoping it does here very soon. The story linked above gives a great intro to the whole Google Wave universe.
