Bye bye Google wave

Many sources reported the end announced death of Google Wave: among them Dan Nosowitz at Fast company (http://www.fastcompany.com/1677794/google-wave-poorly-understood-and-underused-is-officially-dead), Ryan Paul at Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/08/wave-cancellation-google-gives-up-on-next-gen-messaging.ars), Matthew Ingram at GigaOM (http://gigaom.com/2010/08/04/google-pulls-the-plug-on-google-wave).

Well, is the end of Google in social networking? I don’t think so, but is a big stop for Google on this area.

Of course the Big G is telling that can reuse part of the work done and that is part of company culture to learn from failures.

But a failure like this is difficult to understand, because ruins in part the quite perfect track record held by Google.

It is difficult to explain why those who created Google mail, Google Docs, Google earth and so on where not able to create something usable and appealing.

When I first tried Google wave I really had difficulties to understand what was the real use and potential: this is uncommon in Google applications which are often brilliant examples of “do something and do it well”.

I think the problem could have been in trying to put everything in one place, creating some confusion.

I hope that Google reenters in social networking market with something more attractive and understandable, because can be a good player against Facebook predominance.

This post as a comment at http://www.fastcompany.com/1677794/google-wave-poorly-understood-and-underused-is-officially-dead, at http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/08/wave-cancellation-google-gives-up-on-next-gen-messaging.ars?comments=1&p=20685642#comment-20685642 and at http://gigaom.com/2010/08/04/google-pulls-the-plug-on-google-wave/?go_commented=1

Google oracle, tell me…

…how many books are in the world? 🙂

As reported in Fast Company by Dan Nosowitz, taking the info from a post in Google blog (http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html) the first thing to discuss is how to define a book “[…] Separate editions count as separate books, right? How different do two editions have to be to count as two books? What about compilations of existing works? You can’t even rely on the established systems, like ISBN: ISBN is a fairly recent system, only adopted widely in the 1970s, and it’s distinctly more accuracte when documenting books from the western world. Each individual standard classification has its own troubles, and seemingly absolute data like author and title are actually very nebulous and thus not particularly useful.

The way Google’s chosen to deal with that problem is by collecting metadata and weeding out as many duplicates as possible. Each title is called a “cluster,” incorporating all kinds of different editions and forms of a single “work” or “tome.” That leads to a count of 210 million clusters, but those clusters in turn have to be purged of non-book materials catalogued by, among others, the Library of Congress. Those non-books include microform, film, maps, and, weirdly enough, about a thousand t-shirts. Then Google excludes serials, many of which are often given to one work, muddling the count. […]”. (full article at http://www.fastcompany.com/1678254/how-many-books-are-there-in-the-world).

So the number is…. 129,864,880 (update at last sunday), believe it or not.

Google as an answer for everything :-), but, without jokes, their effort on books archiving is really a great one.

This post as a comment also at http://www.fastcompany.com/1678254/how-many-books-are-there-in-the-world

Lee’s law on bad days

Mother said there would be days like this, but she never said there’d be so many.

Lee