Rob’s Personal Aggregator

Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point, and I was immediately sold. (Jens insists it took him hours to convince me, but I like my version better.)

We had a blast the next couple years turning Where 2’s prototype mapping site into Google Maps. But finally we decided it was time to leave the Maps team and turn Jens’ new idea into a project, which we codenamed “Walkabout.” We started with a set of tough questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms? 

After months holed up in a conference room in the Sydney office, our five-person “startup” team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we’re very eager to return and see what the world might think. Today we’re giving developers an early preview of Google Wave.

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we’re inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

• The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave). 
• Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
• The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave. 

So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else can we do with this?

If you’re a developer and you’d like to roll up your sleeves and start working on Google Wave with us, you can read more on the Google Wave Developer blog about the Google Wave APIs, and check out the Google Code blog to learn more about the Google Wave Federation Protocol. 

If you’d like to be notified when we launch Google Wave as a public product, you can sign up at http://wave.google.com/. We don’t have a specific timeframe for public release, but we’re planning to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview. We’re excited to see what feedback we get from our early tinkerers, and we’ll undoubtedly make lots of changes to the Google Wave product, platform, and protocol as we go.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager

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Canning is one of those home kitchen skills that seemed to be lost in the last few generational shifts. That’s a shame, because it’s an economical, menu-boosting skill, and pretty easy to pick up.

Photo by thebittenword.com.

In a supplement to a New York Times piece on the glories of canning—a phrase that includes putting food in jars, making preserves, pickling, and other preservation methods—you'll find a whole bunch of resources for indulging your inner Italian grandmother. The Times supplement itself provides an overview of what to know before getting started, but a step-by-step slideshow and a sidebar video on “Checking the seal” provide visual help. If that’s not enough, there are links (included below) to U.S. Department of Agriculture guides, free online courses in canning (seriously), and instructional videos from Jarden, the maker of the gold standard Ball/Kerry jars.

So, wait, why would you want to get down with canning, exactly? Besides the glory of making your own homebrew pickles, you can get ahead on better-than-Prego tomato sauces, salsas, and other pantry staples. You also waste less food by turning that whole bushel of apricots your friends brought over into delicious cereal toppings for this winter, when your fruit options are going to be far more limited.

Hit the links below for some preservation primers, and drop your own canning/preserving tips and tales in the comments.

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rsullivan25: Looks like we’re in for another hot sunny Okanagan weekend – 29 at the airport means 32 downtown!

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Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky – if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.

When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.

We knew from our March blog post about the release of the Yahoo! Image Search filters that our community wanted an easy way to search for images that could be reused. By launching the Creative Commons license search with Flickr and making it available to all our Yahoo! Image Search users, we aim to promote reusable work and to be transparent about the guidelines issued by the creator of a particular image. We’re proud to be the first image search engine to offer this capability.

Try it and let us know what you think. We bet your next PowerPoint will be prettier than ever.

Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai
Yahoo! Image Search

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We recently helped you get to know your edible outdoor greens, but if you're looking to grow—not eat—your plants and your thumb is anything but green, here are a few low maintenance options.

Photo by Ingorrr.

National Geographic’s Green Guide focuses specifically on the low water variety and recommends avoiding hibiscus species and impatiens. Both come from tropical, rain-heavy regions, which means they’ll need more water.

Instead, the article suggests going with lambs ear, rosemary, or lavender, all of which can survive on less water—lowering the cost of maintenance both in terms of water usage and time required to keep your plants healthy.

The American Gardener’s David Ellis, quoted in the piece, says that native species are generally better at surviving on less water than exotic plants. He suggests avoiding “rapidly growing tropical plants with soft, pithy, and fleshy trunks.”

The article also offers some suggestions for choosing low water maintenance lawn species, so hit up the full post for more.

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