Andrew Natoli

Just recently like a lot of people, I have learned of the new and upcoming Google Wave. For those of you unfamiliar and don’t have time to watch a one hour and twenty minute video, Google Wave appears to be the next big thing for collaboration and communication online. By now I’m sure a large number of us know the practical uses for a Wiki. From creating a public database to simply organizing data and projects, Wiki’s have become one of the bigger methods of online collaboration, seeing as users can write and edit data with their peers.

One of Google Wave’s primary features includes something very much like e-mail, but a step further. Rather than continually “forwarding” messages between a group of people, Wave lets you add and remove people from the conversation whenever and they won’t miss anything. Wave also offers a new chat system where users can actually see what the other is typing, live, rather than “Buddy is typing…” Perhaps the most impressive feature Wave offers however is its Collaboration feature. Imagine working on a Wiki with others but only one person is allowed to edit the page at a time. Here’s where things have changed; apparently anyone who’s part of a project can edit a page live with everyone else. This meaning, you see every letter they add and word they change, as they’re doing it, and you see what you’re doing to. Very impressive.

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Originally intended as a marketing tool to help businesses and developers advertise their products to a large mass of active users, Facebook’s Page system has gotten a bit way out of hand. We remember when “groups” came around, right? There had become a group for everything. If the title of the group described you, you’d join it. Suddenly you were cool. That hasn’t become enough though; soon after Facebook’s most recent change which included adding “Suggested Pages” to the homepage, the abuse of the page system has exploded. No longer are people joining the “I like blowing myself up” group, they’re becoming “fans” of blowing themselves up. Just think of how sick it sounds already!

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I’ve used Feedburner a few times in the past and have run a few feeds through it, but a visit by me to their site was more of a tri-monthly thing, and in return I wasn’t aware of what had been going on there over the past two years. In May of 2007, Google had acquired Feedburner but not until about two years later was the change complete. Browsing through some old blog entries from April, I’ve read up on complaints by users on how the service had become very peevish and unreliable. “The RSS Blog” even asked Is Feedburner Dying? Perhaps the developers behind Feedburner were just too busy with what surfaced a few weeks later; users flocking to feedburner.com found themselves on a Google login page and from there-on, feedburner.com became feedburner.google.com. Not the biggest inconvinience perhaps, but it probably would have been nice to users if Google could have just kept Feedburner under its original domain like Yahoo! did with Flickr.