Goodbye to Google Wave

Google Ending Google Wave

Google will kill off Google Wave, they told in a blog post. It was a technically very inspiring web app which, however, arrived without any particular and clear use case. This caused not only interface usability problems (Wave was good at allowing you to do a lot of things at once, but it often wasn?t really good at anything in particular, e.g. plain chat when needed). It also caused social frictions as people were using the tool with different, colliding expectations.

Lessons Google Can Learn From Wave?s Failure

from Mashable! by Christina Warren

Google kills Wave

from kottke.org by Aaron Cohen

RIP Google Wave

from Mashable! by Adam Ostrow

Update on Google Wave

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users? lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even ?playback? the history of changes?all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

Washed Up

Google Wave was supposed to be the most revolutionary Web 2.0 tool yet for higher ed. This week, Google pulled the plug. What happened? more

China and Wikipedia?s Top 100 Lists

I went to Linyi, China, in June because a chance to teach in Thailand suddenly evaporated due to the May crackdowns on ?Red Shirts,? leaving me with under-utilized air tickets.  So I asked a colleague to arrange for an invitation to lecture at the University of Linyi, China, in her home town.  She has always apologized for her home town, which as a demographer she points out is ?not that important? even in Shandong Province which has several cities more important than Linyi.  As for Linyi itself, it only has about ten million people.  Unimportant though Linyi may be, that type of population should be enough to put it in the top 20 large cities for the world, i.e. somewhere between New York City and Los Angeles! Alas, a search of Wikipedia?s list revealed that while Linyi did indeed have 10 million people, but apparently such raw numbers are insufficient for getting it on any of the top-20, or even top 100 lists.  Apparently raw numbers is not only what such biggest cities lists are about.  China is big, but why shouldn?t a city of 10 million make some kind of list?

A Brief History of 9 Popular Blogging Platforms

from Mashable! by Stephanie Marcus