blog

The Internet continues to change the way we create & consume, but sometimes the new modes are not so new.

During the Renaissance portrait painting became popular – commissioned paintings of individuals, groups and families showing them in situ with the intent of capturing the visual appearance of the subject. It first became common among noble families, royalty and church leaders looking to have their greatness preserved for the ages, but it later became less exclusive and in the 18th and 19th centuries it’s popularity took off among middle class families.

During the 20th century portrait painting suffered a decline, largely due to the ease of photography as a method of capturing a likeness, but also because western society’s taste moved away from crafted goods to the mass produced. Painted portraits felt provincial, much like hand made furniture in the era of Ikea.

This trend had begun before Gutenberg and had the great benefit of progressively providing the masses with access to books, porcelain, transport, art, plastic, electronics, music, theatre and the Internet.

A combination of economic forces (mass-market, mass-distribution, mass-production) and the popularity of mega-brands squeezed artists out of the mainstream. The role of the craftsman, artisan and artist was greatly reduced and displaced by the factory worker, mechanic and miner and eventually by the programmer, management consultant and life coach.

Slowly bespoke artefacts have taken on a new meaning, a hand made chair became a sign of wealth rather than poverty. But for the mass-market, mass-production is it. Artists either make it big and became superstars or struggle to gain recognition. The traditional middle ground for the common artist has been lost.

One of the trends being enabled by the Internet is the breakdown of the economic factors that have caused this polarisation. Production, marketing, shipping and transactions are being commoditised and it is becoming viable for individuals to create and reach a market without having to pitch their ideas to companies with worldwide distribution and marketing clout.

Want to publish a book? Go to blurb.com and self publish. Want to market a line of unique lamps? Put them on etsy.com and buy some AdWords. Want to get exposure for your new single? Post a killer video on YouTube (10 million views in under a month, no major record label backing).

The flip side of this coin is that the market is seeking out unique, short run or hand-made products again. Sites like Threadless.com changed the way we look at T-shirts from being a vehicle for logos to a vehicle for creativity and self expression. The value people place on mass produced objects such as CDs is falling – but there is plenty of value seen in unique or limited release material.

My family recently commissioned a portrait from Nan Lawson. It wasn’t expensive and the whole transaction, from initial contact to feedback on a couple of iterations to the final payment, was conducted over the Internet. We love the personal nature of the portrait, the way it captures us, our tastes and the our time, but most of all I’m excited that the Internet is enabling a renaissance of commissioned creativity on this scale.

On the 19th June Google held a whole-day developer event at their Pyrmont office to showcase their new Google Wave technology and Gruden were lucky enough to be invited along.

The Day

As interesting as the technology – was the format used to showcase it.

The day started with a couple of short talks introducing the Google Waves system, the various pieces that make up the whole and Google’s vision for the technology. The 80 odd developers were then broken into small groups, each accompanied by a couple of Googlers and taken off to various corners of Google’s amazing Sydney offices for a lunch and informal Q&A.

The second half of the day was dominated by the hackathon – the idea here was for the developers to work together or alone on some wave related development of their choosing. During this extended period it seemed that the entire Wave team were on hand for discussion, brain storming, feedback and assistance. The documentation guy was there to hear how documentation could be improved, the Python API girl was immediately on hand to answer my App Engine questions, the UX guy was closely observing how people interacted with Wave and where they had troubles, the Java team were recompiling the API server to include additional dependencies. This level of interaction seemed to be a great way for the Wave team to learn how people are going to approach their product and a great way to help the developers who turned up to get up and running quickly. It was also great to see the level of talent we have locally – Google maps was developed in Sydney and it’s this same team that are behind Wave.

The hackathon culminated in people demonstrating their days’ work live in front of the group over traditional geek fare of beer & pizza. There were nearly 30 demos ranging from GPS hacks to games of connect 4 and hangman to bots that could define terms and tell you what is next on TV. The winner on the night was a shared white-boarding app implemented in Flash.

What is Google Wave?

There is no simple way to explain it. The most succinct explanation is possibly phrased as a question – if email was to be re-invented today, from the ground up, what would it look like? And by “from the ground up” we’re talking client, server, protocol, the lot.

At a fundamental level, Wave is an open protocol specification. The idea is that, as with email, a variety of companies will develop competing clients (eg. Outlook, Hotmail, Mail.app, Thunderbird) and servers (eg. Exchange, Postfix, Courier) based on the Wave specification.

On a more practical level Wave is email, real-time chat and collaborative content editing & versioning rolled into one. It allows for multiple people to communicate in real time using text and rich content, while retaining the full history of the conversation and the ability to browse backwards and forwards through this history.

Wave also incorporates a framework for developers to create gadgets (client side mini-apps that run within a wave) and robots (server side applications that interact with waves in various ways).

In Google’s own words:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

- http://code.google.com/apis/wave/

If you want to know more about Google Wave there is a fairly lengthy video of it’s unveiling during the keynote of the Google IO conference a few weeks back. This video contains a number of interesting demonstrations.

There are also a number of online resources depending on whether you are interested in the back story, the big picture, the APIs or the protocol.

Will Google Wave change the world?

Maybe, but not any time soon. The protocols that we all depend on to send and receive email were initially developed in the early 80’s and while things move a lot faster now they still years to mature and get adopted.

Google Wave represents a major paradigm shift for end users to get their heads around which is not helped by the fact that it currently has serious usability issues. It is also very much in early beta – crashes are not uncommon and it needs some serious optimisation to avoid causing browsers to occasionally hang. Most of the time these are friendly and just require browser refreshes, but they are frequent.

But for all this it is an incredible step forward at many levels and it addresses many of the current shortfalls in current modes of digital communication. Google have shown they can address performance and usability issues in their products, so the extent to which Google open up and allow competition will probably be the deciding factor in Wave’s success.

Thanks to Jan Vaughan for the great photos

xkcd.com is as brilliant as ever today: