Google Wave Reinvents E-mail, Instant Messaging and More

E-mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet. Yet, it is the most common form of communications on the Internet. What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?

Google plans to reinvent hosted communications. Google Wave which has been unveiled today is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web.

Google Wave was developed by the Sydney-based Google team that created Google Maps, used by millions of people worldwide. Led by Lars and Jens Rasmussen and operating as a remote start-up within Google, under the codename "Walkabout", the Aussie team focused on improving the way communication and collaboration works for users on the web. They developed Google Wave, equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.



What is a wave?

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Open Communications Platform

The Google Wave API is an open platform allowing developers to extend the functionality of Google Wave itself, or extend other applications with waves. The Google Wave Federation Protocol enables sharing waves between wave providers. Check out the introduction on the Google Wave Developer Blog for more details.

It's time to reinvent communications!

Sun's Open Source 3D Virtual World - MPK20

MPK20 is a virtual 3D environment built using the Project Wonderland Toolkit. In this 3D world, employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. Just like on Sun's physical Menlo Park campus, known as "MPK," inhabitants of the virtual MPK20 office building can work together in planned meetings, or can talk informally in unplanned encounters. Unlike the physical campus, however, in MPK20, the community can be built and maintained without the constraints of physical location.



MPK20 is a sample virtual world built using the Project Wonderland open source 3D virtual world toolkit. Within the world, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and games.

The Wonderland toolkit is built on top of the Project Darkstar server infrastructure. Darkstar, a platform designed for massively multiplayer games, provides Wonderland with a scalable and secure multi-user infrastructure well-suited for enterprise-grade applications.

Check out the interesting demo videos on the MPK20 project page.

Metaplace: Virtual Worlds Meet the Web

Innovation happens when ideas are combined. What do we get when Virtual Worlds meet the Web? Second Life on the Web? Areae has unveiled Metaplace on the Techcrunch conference. It has the potential to change the way how virtual worlds are made.


Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Using a suite of tools anyone can make worlds and put them on their web pages.

The differences: Metaplace vs. Second Life

Second Life is a rich client based immersive 3D metaverse. It is a walled garden although Linden Lab plans to open it up to some extent. Metaplace on the other hand is a web-based network of online worlds right from the start. It is an open metaverse that looks more like the web.

Metaplace: the web-based metaverse

The open web like nature of Metaplace is present on the technical level as well. It is not a walled garden. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. An object can be scripted in MetaScript so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser (imagine a newspaper with real headlines can sitting on your virtual desk). MetaScript is based on the Lua programming language that is also used by other MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft.

There is a huge interest for the alpha application for Metaplace which will close today. The open beta is planned for spring 2008.

Open source metaverse projects

Immerse 3D environments are getting more and more popular. There are two major open source projects in this space:

Croquet is a software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.

The OpenSource Metaverse Project was created to support virtual worlds that allow customization by the player and creation of custom worlds. It aims to provide an open source metaverse engine and a client that is flexible, scalable.

The OpenSource Metaverse Project is analogous to the web. You can create hyperlinks to any other metaworld running on any metaverse server worldwide. In this aspect it is similar to Metaplace.

Let there be new virtual worlds!

Amazon EC2, S3 + Hadoop = Open Source Utility Computing on Google Scale

Google is the undisputed King of Scalability. The High Scalability blog collected the open secrets of the Google Architecture. Two important components are:

• The Google File System
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

These distributed technologies are the foundations of their scalable and reliable storage and processing clusters.

The open source Hadoop project implements these functions so you can build a Google like cluster in your data center. In case you do not have 100s of servers at your disposal ask Amazon for help. The Amazon EC2 and S3 utility computing services can host your cluster at a reasonable price. Check out this tutorial by Tom White who illustrates how to use Hadoop and Amazon Web Services together using a large collection of web access logs:

• Running Hadoop MapReduce on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3

Yahoo has recently announced their support for Hadoop.

"Looking ahead and thinking about how the economics of large scale computing continue to improve, it's not hard to imagine a time when Hadoop and Hadoop-powered infrastructure is as common as the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack that helped to powered the previous growth of the Web."