I’m greatly disappointed by this announcement.

When Google launched “Google Wave”, I watched the full developer announcement made at Google I/O, and throughout the course of the lengthy description and demonstration my excitement grew as my mind grasped the possibilities of this new technology.

This was email evolved, rolling out real-time communication on the net. It heralded a fundamental change, in my mind, of how we could interact with each other and our various locations on the net. It suggested an opportunity to have a single place wherein you could manage all your communication across the net, whether it be your blog content, comments you’d left on other websites, communication on social networks, document collaboration, or instant messaging. On and on grew the list of potential use cases in my imagination.

A small example

Picture this: I am at my computer and I write a blog post in Google Wave. When I finish with the blog post I publish it on my site. It’s an article about a research area with which I am unfamiliar. I decide to include a friend of mine in the post and ask his opinion on it. He comes online and replies that he’s unsure whether my article is completely correct. His comments appear real-time in my Google Wave inbox, and real-time on my website. I embed a search result displaying some of my sources of information (again, appearing real-time in both our Wave clients and my website). He suggests I add another friend who has more experience in this area. At this point I need to leave the office and go home. On my way home my phone buzzes to tell me that my Wave has some new content. Said second friend has come online and is suggesting corrections. All of this appears real-time on my phone. I verify the new research material and edit my blog post whilst sitting on the train.

This was just one of the use-cases I imagined, but there were thousands more.

Lack of adoption

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.

Urs Hölzle

As you can see above, Google’s “SVP of Operations & Google Fellow” has stated that Wave hasn’t had the required level of user adoption. Personally I am not surprised, and I cannot really argue with this at the base level at which it is stated.

I think the new Wave technology (an open protocol by the way) is amazing. Am I using it? No. “If you’re not even using this ‘revolutionary product’, how can you possibly feign disappointment ?!” I hear you cry. The reason is as follows.

I believe the failed adoption of Google Wave has nothing to do with its supposed complicated UI, or the inability to work out how to best make use of the new protocol. I believe the core issue is that it was not backward-compatible with older protocols – namely old-fashioned, non real-time POP/IMAP/SMTP email protocols. Google Wave arrived and I quickly received an invitation to use the service. I signed up and played around with it, finding a few of the old Jaiku crowd to test the service out. It was a little buggy and not helped by my, then, poor net connection, but I could feel the potential brimming over. However it quickly fell into disuse. Beyond a smattering of users with whom I connected, Google Wave did not offer any integration with my standard daily use of email. All of my regular contacts were on other email systems, or, if on Gmail, were not aware of Google Wave or didn’t care to find out about it.

I quickly realised that for Google Wave to become a daily part of my usage of the net, it needed to wholesale replace Gmail, and beyond that, to offer account integration with other POP/IMAP mail services. I wanted a situation where I would log into Google Wave and from there be able to check all my email. If the user with whom I was communicating was on a normal email protocol, then I would receive their messages in the standard non real-time fashion. I would send my replies through those same protocols. However, if my conversation was with a fellow Wave client user, then the Wave protocol would come into effect.

My computer usage is all about streamlining: setting the smallest number of applications which I need to have constantly active. Those applications are ever-present in my computer and mobile use and generally revolve around communication. Work email, personal email, and instant messaging like Skype and Google Talk. Above that I have work-related applications which I run as needed, but the mainstay of my technology world is communication. Google Wave represented another layer, another application to track – and one that was not available on my phone, hence reducing the ability to stay on top of the flow of information.

Had Google offered the option to replace Gmail with Google Wave then I could have seen myself adopting it as one of my ever-present applications. In addition, it needed to exist on my Android phone.

As these things weren’t offered, my usage of Google Wave was non-priority communication with other users who, as far as I could tell, were in the same situation as me. It rapidly fell into disuse as it did not fit into my daily productive use of technology.

It was a new protocol damn it

I can’t imagine that this technology will go to waste though, and I’m sure Google will look at ways to integrate the real-time aspects of the technology into other offerings, and in their blog post they do state:

The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began.

However, it still feels like a failure and a disappointment to me. Wave was a new protocol, a new system that system administrators could include on their servers. I saw it becoming ubiquitous – another protocol that servers handled along with the older, more basic protocols like POP, IMAP and SMTP. There was no reason I could see why other web-mail providers couldn’t integrate it with their mail services. Hotmail or Yahoo mail could recognise that a recipient used the Wave protocol and deliver your missive utilising that protocol. Beyond that, I saw integration of this protocol in other web services – WordPress, Facebook, IM, Twitter and more.

If you didn’t like the UI available in the client at wave.google.com, well that didn’t matter – you would, in theory, be able to use a different client with a different UI. It’s just a protocol, your interaction with that protocol was only limited by the developers of applications that accessed this service.

Some of my peers were apprehensive of yet another Google service which required data submission to the ever-present behemoth of the web, but I defended it – pointing to the open nature of it;  the federation possibilities of it; and clarifying that it was no more than a new protocol which had no inherent attachment to Google beyond the fact that they created it and then released it into the wild.

Now I fear that the potential contained in this new protocol is lost. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but it feels that I will still rely on (and be limited by) POP, IMAP, and SMTP for many years to come, and I won’t find myself in a few years time, setting up my new computer and configuring Thunderbird to add a new account using “WAVE”.

My message to Google

Dear Google,

I don’t feel that you have really given the Wave protocol adequate time to develop, and I feel that you’ve missed opportunities to increase user adoption by completely separating your Wave client at wave.google.com from older communication protocols.

I hope that you’ll reconsider the halting of development of this new protocol, as I still believe that the possibilities presented by Wave are well worth pursuing and could offer valuable improvements in the way that people communicate in the future.

Yours sincerely,

Alex Leonard

Image from Shekharsahu on Flickr

I’ve got a particular naming standard to keep databases grouped and as I only access our server via the command line this habit of using naming schemes means that I can easily search for those groups of databases using the following MySQL command.

SHOW DATABASES LIKE "prefix%";

Obviously you’d replace ‘prefix’ with whatever your naming schema dictates!

In order to do things absolutely right (and in case they decide to post-publish older items), I need to be able to check when the first post was published on their WordPress installation.

I figured I’d share the code out here in case someone else finds it useful (and in case anyone can suggest improvements to the code). I’ve wrapped it up as a function so you can throw it your functions.php if it’s something you’ll re-use.

/**
 * Get First Post Date Function
 *
 * @param  $format Type of date format to return, using PHP date standard, default Y-m-d
 * @return Date of first post
 */
function ax_first_post_date($format = "Y-m-d") {
 // Setup get_posts arguments
 $ax_args = array(
 'numberposts' => -1,
 'post_status' => 'publish',
 'order' => 'ASC'
 );

 // Get all posts in order of first to last
 $ax_get_all = get_posts($ax_args);

 // Extract first post from array
 $ax_first_post = $ax_get_all[0];

 // Assign first post date to var
 $ax_first_post_date = $ax_first_post->post_date;

 // return date in required format
 $output = date($format, strtotime($ax_first_post_date));

 return $output;
}

To echo it anywhere on your site just run:

echo ax_first_post_date();

I’m hoping to be a little better at keeping track of useful WordPress functions that could be reused, so have created a sub-category of my WordPress category called “Functions”. If nothing else it will be a useful reference point for me.

Update

As soon as I hit publish I knew I should have held off until I added in a date format parameter. I’ve updated the code now so that you can tell the function what format the date should be returned in (using standard PHP date format).

Ban Ki Moon

Got a great spam email today, direct from Ban Ki Moon, the secretary-general of the UN. Apparently I am being compensated for being scammed..

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family? You may not understand why this email came to you. We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS.

This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of USD $850,000…

It’s so nice of ol’ Banny to think of me and ask about my family. He’s a good head for sure. Also looks like all of this economic trouble must be a thing of the past if they can afford to compensate me so royally for some scam I don’t remember.

Oh, if you want to drop him an email, apparently his personal email address is info@javaparagon.com

Photo by worldeconomicforum on Flickr

According to Internet World Stats of the (approximately) 6.7 billion people in the world, 1.8 billion of these have access to the net.

If that’s true then, scarily, Facebook hitting 500 million users would mean that approximately 28% of all internet users have a  Facebook account (or 7% of all people in the world).

And don’t forget, you too might have to poke your grandma one day..

Click here to view the embedded video.

Image by Carlo Nicora on Flickr

There followed two incredibly nerve wracking hours with much chanting and singing (with it consistently amusing me that the strongest Dutch chant was always “Olé Olé Olé”).

Anyway, I’m sure everyone knows now that Spain have won the World Cup for the first time, thanks to an excellent goal from Andrés Iniesta at the very end of the second half of extra time. The Spanish contingent went loco and I attempted to capture some of that excitement on my new camera. So I present a short picture diary of the most Spanish night in Phnom Penh imaginable, viva España!

Feliz pueblo español en Phnom Penh!

Click on photos to enlarge

And in case you missed the goal that ended nearly two hours of heart-stopping anticipation, you can check it out in the video below. I can only imagine the scenes in Spain – the country must have gone proper mental!

Update: every time I find this video it gets taken down by FIFA a little while later. So I’ve taken a copy of it and uploaded it to Vimeo, but made it private on Vimeo. Hopefully they don’t find my lowly blog and send me a DMCA take-down notice…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Obviously this is an old rant, but one that clearly still hasn’t penetrated the consciousnesses of those with an exiguous knowledge of technology and its pertinent etiquette.

Which is worse? It’s not quite a chicken and egg situation here – quite simply if no one mass cc’d like this, then no one could be tempted to click ‘reply all’ in the first place. Still, I don’t think that lessens the crime that is clicking ‘reply all’. Seriously, think about it before you send that unimaginative and pointless reply to fifty people you’ve never met.

Perhaps we should blame the persistence of such things upon the modern fascination with sharing all amongst extended social groups, which ‘connect’ wholly unconnected people in an overly familiar way. Perhaps before the meteoric rise of these social entities, the message was being slowly received and such mass mailings, or their equally evil reply-all siblings, were fading out. Or, well, perhaps not.

I tend to write a short reply (single) to the sender, saying that it’s generally best to avoid such displays of all your extended friend’s email addresses, not knowing which nefarious member of this group will decide the time is ripe for a wonderful harvest of new fodder for their mailing list, their desperate need to further the expansion of their social networks, or whatever opprobrious plans they may have. Although I simplify my message a little.

I hope I do not directly offend anyone by writing this. It is, I assure you, all said in good humour

Spain celebrates

Congratulations to Spain on their 1-0 win against Germany last night. I was too tired to stay up and watch it but it’s great to see Spain knock out Germany and know that whoever wins the final it will be their first time lifting the world cup. I will admit that I had pegged the Germans for the win (no bets placed though ) but was rooting for Spain.

Of course, I’m biased in favour of Spain due to the large Spanish contingent in existence in Phnom Penh. I anticipate a late night on Sunday surrounded by loco pueblo español.

Olé, viva España, córcholis!

Photo by penguinstorm on Flickr

Sketches of Spain

A number of years ago I bought a CD – Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain, released by Columbia Records. It’s a wonderful recording which starts out with a fantastic interpretation of Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo.  I probably first listened to it back in the 90′s when I first discovered, and fell in love with, the music of Miles Davis.

Fast forward a number of years to somewhere around 2004: my love of CD’s as the format of choice had completely died, supplanted by storing my music on hard drives. Around then I decided to rip my entire collection of CD’s – in and around 600 albums. However the CD case for Sketches of Spain contained no CD! I looked everywhere for it but deemed it to be lost. Every once in a while I’d remember the album and check my digital collection to find it wasn’t there, and I’d move on.

Yesterday after listening to a couple of Miles Davis albums (it had been a while), I decided to rectify the missing Sketches of Spain issue.

The “you can’t have it” approach to commerce

My first stop was Emusic, with whom I have a subscription which provides 100 track downloads a month for €30. As far as I can tell all Columbia Records releases are absent from Emusic, no doubt due to lack of DRM or some such. I then searched on Amazon’s music store. There was indeed a digital version available, however apparently due to licensing restrictions I can’t buy mp3′s from Amazon UK unless I’m in the UK. The thought occurred to me that I could run my net connection through a variety of proxy connections but it’s such a pain that I couldn’t be bothered.

Buying a physical CD release really wasn’t an option in my mind – I’m fully digital now from purchase to speaker – and the fact that I’m living in Cambodia makes purchase of a CD even less likely!

The “I’ll get it some other way, thanks” approach to buying

So I turned to Google and searched for “buy miles davis sketches of spain flac download“, figuring if I’m going to buy it online it may as well be in a high quality lossless format.

• First result: The Pirate Bay ¹.
• Next 9 results: All torrent or similar illegal download links.
• What did I do: I downloaded it illegally of course.

Columbia Records, or their parent company, have obviously decided that it’s most important to protect their music catalogue by making it difficult to purchase online. Perhaps they have an exclusive deal with iTunes for worldwide purchases, but I’m not an iTunes user and don’t plan to be.

Whatever their reasons, by confounding my attempts to make an official purchase they actually guided me into the temptation of downloading their music illegally. I don’t feel in any way bad about it, considering that I originally bought it and lost it – so I’ve paid my money to Columbia. However I was willing to pay for it again, but instead torrents offered me a simpler option and provided the music at a higher quality than I would have received from most online music stores.

There’s a couple of good articles by Warren Daly over at Invisible Agent that round up a lot of my thoughts on this subject:

• Pay for illegal music downloads?
• The war on music

Basically, music labels need cop on and get with the times. Stop condemning your customers as criminals while not providing an avenue for said customers to be legitimate.

Fishing Trawler

I know quite a few vegetarians who have, for various reasons, changed to pescetarianism or pesco-vegetarianism, which is essentially a vegetarian that also eats fish, but avoids other forms of meat.

I have always felt that if it was necessary for me to abandon vegetarianism (for health reasons or similar) the last thing I would do is revert to eating fish.

More than 20 million people employed in the fishing industry may need to be taken out of service and retrained for other work over the next 40 years if the final collapse of fish stocks in oceans around the globe is to be avoided, the UN warned today.

Source: Guardian Newspaper

In my mind, when it comes to the question of sustainability, the concept of pescatarianism is seriously flawed – entirely due to the unsustainable nature of the fishing industry (in it’s current form).

Whilst I’m not suggesting that there aren’t issues in other food related industries don’t face their own issues with regard to environmental impact, those other industries are likely not endangering such a vital part of the earth’s eco-system to such an extent.

The Guardian article linked to above is well worth the read, and it refers to a UN report which is also worth reading.

Photo by adstream on flickr