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Google Wave is still available only to a subset of lucky users who’ve gotten invites for the service, but the buzz around it is huge. No wonder, then, that the first Google Wave related Firefox add-on is already available.

It’s called Google Wave Notifier, and it has a simple function: it sits at the bottom right of FirefoxFirefox

and notifies you about new wavelets in your inbox.

Of course, to be able to use it, you need to supply a Google WaveGoogle Wave

username and password. The author warns that the plugin has been tested and works with Firefox 3.x.x but not version 3.7a1pre.

I regularly use a similar add-on (Gmail Manager) that notifies me about new messages in my GmailGmail

accounts; Google Wave Notifier should be just as useful. You can find it here.

What is Google Wave?

Even after using Google Wave for a few months now, it is still hard to describe exactly what it is. It's as much of a real-time chat room as a platform for editing documents collaboratively. It can also be used as a Wiki, to replace email and IM within an organization, or just to organize a pub crawl, as Wave's Lars Rasmussen points out in today's blog post. There can be no doubt that Wave feels oddly familiar, especially because of its typical Google design, yet it's also represents an alien concept for most users, as it combines so many services into one extremely flexible package but still remains deceptively simple to use.

We got a chance to talk to the core Wave team, including Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon, last night. They were obviously quite excited about the launch and told us about some of the details regarding the invitation process, Wave's current features, and some of the team's plans for the future.

Highlights

We will look at the details of the launch below, but here are some of the highlights:

• Google will send out more than 100,000 invites tomorrow
• they will go to three groups: current users on the sandbox server, users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com over the last few months (first-come, first-served), and a few select enterprise users on Google Apps accounts
• more invites will be sent out as the team expands capacity
• users will not be able to invite their friends to Wave directly, but every Wave user will be able to 'nominate' 8 friends who will get to the front of the queue for new accounts
• all Wave accounts will move from the sandbox to the wave.google.com domain
• Wave's contact management system will be integrated with Google Contacts
• the Wave team will highlight robots and widgets from a select number of vendors
• Internet Explorer users will be prompted to install and use Chrome Frame

Wave.Google.com

While the early Wave testers were on a wavesandbox.com account, starting tomorrow, all of these accounts and all the new users will move over to the wave.google.com domain. If you have tested Wave before, don't expect any new features yet. The Wave team plans to add new features over the next few months, but the current focus in on making sure that the system can scale.

Nominate 8 of Your Friends

Unlike the Gmail beta, Google Wave users who get into the preview tomorrow won't be able to invite friends directly. Instead, they will be able to 'nominate' 8 of their friends for accounts. As the Wave team plans to continue to send out additional invites as it stabilizes the system and adds capacity, these nominated accounts will move to the front of the queue and should get accounts relatively quickly.

For tomorrow, Google officially says that it will send out about 100,000 invitations, though as the Wave team told us yesterday, it will probably send out a few more than that.

Google Contacts

Google Wave will be able to tap into your Google contacts (the developer preview didn't offer this feature). For now, it will only show contacts who are already using Google Wave, though.

Invite a Robot to Your Wave

On Wednesday, 100,000 users will also be able to use some of the robots and widgets that the developers in the preview wrote over the last few months. These range from widgets that allow you to play games with friends to sophisticated teleconferencing apps, with Twitter and blogging apps in between. We will have a close look at some of the more interesting applications tomorrow, but the featured apps will include a real-time, competitive Sudoku game, a Lonely Planet travel widget, and video chat from 6Rounds and a teleconferencing plugin from Ribbit.

For now, Google Wave will not feature an app store or marketplace for widgets and robots. Instead, every user will see a wave with a small number of featured apps in their accounts and be able to install these thanks to the new installer process the Wave team introduced just a short while ago.

Chrome Frame

When Google launched Chrome Frame, it's Internet Explorer plugin that can replace the IE rendering engine with Google Chrome, the Wave team already announced that it would support this feature. And indeed, when you go to the Wave homepage with IE, you will now be prompted to install Chrome Frame. As Lars Rasmussen told us, the team is very enthusiastic about Chrome Frame, as it allows the developers to focus on features instead of making sure that Wave runs in Internet Explorer.

In our own experience, Wave definitely works best in Chrome. It will work just fine in Safar and Firefox, though for the most fluid experience, Chrome is currently the best browser.

Still Some Kinks to Work Out

The Wave team stresses that there are still a lot of problems to work out before Wave can really live up to all of its promises. While there was some doubt that the Wave team could actually get the system scaled up and ready for a wider launch earlier this summer, our experience with the developer preview has been very positive over the last few weeks and we definitely noticed that the system became fast and more stable. Now that 100,000 new users will join in, we will obviously have to wait and see how well Wave can scale up to this kind of demand.

For now, chances are that Wave will still crash at times. For major updates, the team will also have to take the whole system down for a few hours now and then.

Missing Features

Some features, however, still need to be implemented. Some of these are quite basic, like the ability to remove users from a wave, while others are a bit more complicated, like the ability to set specific user permissions on a wave. According to the Wave team, many of these missing features will be implemented within the next few months.

How Will People React?

Overall, it will be interesting to see how the Wave infrastructure holds up tomorrow and how people will react when they first see and use Wave.

So excited. This may change everything about business and communication?

Google just rolled out a small tweak to their “search snippet” format that appears beneath the title of each returned result. The few lines of text are intended to give you some insight to the content of the page and whether it’s the most relevant result to answer your query.

In the new version, the search snippet includes contextual links right into the precise section of the page they think is relevant to your search. If there are several relevant subtopics, they will all be linked beneath the search result for more precise access to the information you’re looking for.

The second addition accompanies more specific queries and adds a “Jump to X” link as the very first element of the search snippet. Again, the idea is to send you more quickly and directly to exactly the information you were looking for in your query.

To us, this smells similar to what Microsoft is trying to do with Bing’s Instant Answers feature, designed to pull in pertinent information on specific queries right into your search results. Google’sGoogle

version is still a step removed — you have to click further into a search snippet to get at the actual information — but it’s a similar general strategy in terms of delivering more precise results on an initial query.

What do you think: is BingBing

pushing Google to innovate more quickly with its own search engine? For us users, it sure seems like the search engine race is heating up again. As Wayne Campbell would say, “Game on!“

By Adam Pash, 3:00 PM on Tue Sep 22 2009, 1,220 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

Google today released a new browser plug-in called Google Chrome Frame that creates an unholy union between Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, rendering web pages in IE using Chrome's rendering engine.

That rendering technology includes Chrome's support for HTML5 and its lightning-fast JavaScript engine. How does it turn IE into Chrome? By creating a new frame inside of Internet Explorer that basically embeds the Chrome browser. It's sort of like the previously mentioned IE Tab tool that embed IE in Firefox, so users can access the now-rare IE-only sites. In this case, though, it's embedding Chrome in IE instead of the other way around, for the much more common dilemma of sites that won't render correctly in Internet Explorer.

The (most) obvious question: Why would I install this plug-in rather than switch browsers to Chrome? The folks at Google point to IT lockdown that won't allow users to install a new browser; Ars wonders whether such restrictive IT departments would be any more likely to approve this plug-in. If nothing else, it's a pretty bold move on the part of Google.

The other obvious question: How do I get it working? Actually, you don't have to do anything—it's up to web developers to throw a single tag on their pages to ask Internet Explorer to render a page with the Chrome Frame, if it's installed. We're pretty sure it'll only be a short while until someone comes up with a tweak to make Chrome Frame a default rendering tool on every page, but until then, it's up to the web building community to take notice.

The Google Chrome Frame plug-in is a free, open-source download for Windows only, and works with IE6, 7, and 8. It's currently in its early stages, so expect an occasional bug or two.

Google Chrome Frame [Google Code via Ars Technica]

via toucharcade.com

I'm not sure what it is about dual-stick shooters, but these games seem to generate huge followings on the iPhone platform. It may just be that the multi-touch screen suits the control system so well. Regardless, the latest dual stick shooter to make a big splash in the App Store is Alley Labs' Meteor Blitz [$1.99].

The game bears more than a passing resemblance to Super Stardust HD for the Playstation 3, so if you loved Super Stardust HD, that would be a very good thing.

Meteor Blitz is a dual-stick asteroid shooter that offers both Arcade and Survival modes. The game centers around your ship which can fire a variety of different weapons. The standard projectile weapons include a plasma gun, flamethrower, and ice cannon. Different weapons are better for use against specific obstacles. Ice meteors respond best to the flamethrower, while the fire meteors succumb easiest to the ice cannon. Other weapons at your disposal include screen-clearing bombs as well as the gravity gun which can be used to slingshot meteors into enemies causing massive damange. See this video showing the gravity gun in action.

As you destroy enemies and asteroids, coins are collected for weapons and ship upgrades. Meanwhile, in game bonuses give you extra lives, bombs, shields, enemy slow down or the ability to attract coins.

Aside from the onslaught of meteors, enemy ships constantly descend into the game field requiring near constant movement to avoid death.

The game's control system is the typical dual analog stick control system with spot on sensitivities. Weapon switching and bomb triggering are done with nearby buttons at the top right and bottom left corners of your right controller, while speed boost is triggered by tapping your left controller. There is no way to flip the control system left/right. See this video:

As you can see, the art and animation are top notch with all the flourishes you'd expect. The developers also seem to have paid a lot of attention to some other details in the game that are worth pointing out. Pulling your fingers off the dual pads will automatically pause the game. The game also features practically no load times. This YouTube video shows initial launch and the near instant resume on relaunch. And finally, your global rank is given to you in real time as you play (video).

Overall, Meteor Blitz is one of the highest quality space shooters we've seen for the iPhone. It delivers 6 unlockable worlds with a good variety of enemies, excellent controls, and a lot of fun. At only $1.99, this one comes highly recommended.

App Store Link: Meteor Blitz, $1.99

A South African IT company got so fed up with the national telco's notoriously poor Internet service that they decided to set up a race that pitted the telco's network against a carrier pigeon. The pigeon won.

Now, this is very funny, but I think that over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn't an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.

I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.

He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper.

SA pigeon 'faster than broadband' (via Engadget)

« Sharing Data Visualization Methods Across Disciplines | Main

Visualization at the Crossroads

Category: Boundaries of science
Posted on: September 11, 2009 11:53 AM, by Greg J. Smith

Michelle Borkin is astute in recognizing the manner in which information visualization can collapse the distinction between disciplines. Borkin notes that reading visual representations of star formation and human disease are not unlike exercises as MRI and telescope data are similar in terms of "format, size and noise." Remarkable similarities exist between other fields and visualization is not necessarily tied to the standard operating procedure associated with a specific domain. To the visualization jockey, a network diagram is a network diagram - at least at a schematic level. If the focus is connectivity amongst users of a social web platform or the labyrinthian management structure of a sprawling multinational, the approach could be quite similar. With this in mind I've curated a selection of projects that build bridges between fields. These will be spread out over two posts with the first being recent work and the second highlighting some information visualization classics, so without further ado...

Ben Fry - On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, 2009: An elegant study of the evolution of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species over several editions. Drawing on work by Dr. John van Wyhe, the project codifies edition by edition revisions and additions and displays the changes to the text in an interactive animation. These types of exercises are ubiquitous within web culture (i.e. tracking Wikipedia edits) but rendering a canonical scientific treatise as a "process piece" provides a window into the development of Darwin's theories.

Mitchell Whitelaw - The Visible Archive, 2009: Produced for National Archives of Australia, this research project explores multiple datasets of this institutions holdings to produce maps of the collection. A response to the opacity of the traditional text-based interfaces for accessing archives, The Visible Archive proposes a number of alternative views of the holdings that include tag clouds, histograms and interactive sketches that highlight the relationships between various sub-collections. This methodology draws from statistics and software art and deploys this thinking in an information science context.

 

Marco Quaggiotto - Knowledge Cartography, 2008: This research provides numerous interfaces that foreground pedagogy and academic influence. To an outsider, the connections between scholars, departments and institutions can take years to decipher and this project uses network theory and geographic thinking to visualize these relationships. Stepping away from the rigidity of citation tracking, Knowledge Cartography proposes fluid frameworks for understanding complex relationships. See also City Murmur, an ambitious qualitative urban mapping project in which Quaggiotto is involved.

Jer Thorp - NYTimes: 365/360 - 2008, 2008: Taking advantage of an Article Search API, the image on the left provides a concise map of the organizations and personalities that were mentioned in The New York Times in 2008. This strategy was used to distill a decade and a half of coverage down to a series of yearly gestalts that track trending influencers and (implicitly) reveal political and cultural shifts. Considered in this light the newspaper becomes a tool for the retroactive polling of public interest and the flurry of the news cycle is silenced in favor of a more expansive view of journalism.

Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg - Fleshmap, 2008: A self-described "inquiry into human desire", the Fleshmap employs a number of bottom-up approaches to catalog public perceptions of the body and erogenous zones. Pictured above is a detail of a genre by genre analysis of how the body figures into various music styles as evidenced by lyrics. Is this work cultural studies or statistics? There is most certainly a light-hearted embellishment of the graphic treatments of the various results and the project was obviously intended to be accessible and provocative.

 

 

TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets.

• Catch up with overnight global twitterings as TweetDeck stores all updates whilst running
• Continual status updates of TweetDeck and Twitter
• Resize TweetDeck as either an unobtrusive column, full screen or anything in between
• Especially useful running full screen on a separate monitor
• Filter tweets from up to 1 hour to the last 7 days using the Timeframe bar
• Auto updates from the Twitter API