GDrive: Possible Game Changer?
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Mobile, Web
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about the forthcoming online storage service from Google. Call it GDrive, call it Platypus — the vast majority of tech bloggers seem to think it old news. I feel there could be a lot of potential for Google’s storage offering to be a game-changing product.
It appears that the GDrive will sit on your desktop and sync files automatically with online storage. Those files will be accessible from the desktop and browser at least as easily as they would be on your own hard drive.
Here are three ways this could be huge:
- Your files will become computable on a massive scale
The difference between local and online storage in this case will not just be the absence of space limitations, the data will also be accessible to the nearly infinite computing power of Google. Both individual users and in anonymous aggregation, there’s magic that’s possible when our data is so accessible to unlimited processing power. - Mobile Access
The article includes some of the first discussion of mobile access to GDrive files. Seamless syncing of data assets between desktop access and mobile access could change the mobile landscape in a big way. Combine this with what could turn out to be a flourishing ecosystem of mobile apps via Android, and perhaps the promise of OpenSocial, and you’ve got some powerful new mobile social networking opportunities. - Gears + GDrive = Awesome
Do all of the above, on a plane. Someday Google will notice that I’ve got a trip scheduled on GCal and offer to sync up my recent GDrive files to Gears for the journey. Especially if I’ve been searching a lot on locations far away on Google Maps of late.The Gears functionality of quickly making files local and them syncing them back up when you get back online is going to be a huge deal. Combine Gears with effectively infinite storage and computing power and you’ve got a lot of possibilities!
It’s easy to be cynical about the details coming from the WSJ. It’s easy to wonder whether Google will ever bring its storage product to market, whether it can be trusted given the number of times its own company blogs have been hacked, and whether it’s even a good idea given the near omniscience the company will soon possess. I feel, though, that important new information is coming out about the GDrive and the product will play a fundamentally different role in our lives than existing products in the same space purport to.
Tags: android, gdrive, mobile access, mobile apps, storage service
The Social Graph & Beyond
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Mobile, Semantic, Web
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog post about what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision.
Berners-Lee positions the Graph as the third main "level" of computer networks. First there was the Internet, then the Web, and now the Graph - which Sir Time labelled (somewhat tongue in cheek) the Giant Global Graph!
Note that Berners-Lee wasn’t specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (aka layers of abstraction):
- The Internet: links computers
- Web: links documents
- Graph: links relationships between people and documents — "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.
The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:
So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer.
Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "… at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected - for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google’s OpenSocial aims to achieve.
What’s more, says Berners-Lee, the Graph has major implications for the Mobile Web. He said that longer term "thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildly differing devices which will give us access to the system." The following scenario sums it up very nicely:
Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline side, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.
I’m very please Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What he wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.
Tags: graph, semantic web, tim berners lee, web vision
Sun Worried Android Could Fracture Java
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Future, Mobile
Earlier this week, Google release programming tools for its new Android mobile phone software project, that shun the existing Sun standard-setting process in favour of a Google-specific variety. Sun responded on Wednesday by expressing concern that Google’s Android project could fragment Java into incompatible versions.
"Anything that creates a more diverse or fractured platform is not in [developers] best interests," said Rich Green, executive vice president of Sun’s software work, speaking to reporters at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. "The feedback from developers is, ‘Help us fix this.’"
He said Sun wants to work with Google to nip any problems in the bud. "We’re really interested in working with Google to make sure developers don’t end up with a fractured environment. We’re reaching out to Google and assuming they’ll be reaching out to us to ensure these platforms and APIs will be compatible so deployment on a wide variety of platforms will be possible," Green said.
Google unrepentant
Google didn’t adopt a terribly conciliatory tone in its response, arguing that when it comes to Java fragmentation, Android is the solution, not the problem.
"Google and the other members of the Open Handset Alliance are working to help solve fragmentation and supporting the developer community by creating Android, a mobile platform that responds to the needs of the developers, has the backing of industry leaders, and will be available as open source under a nonrestrictive license," Google said in a statement.
And asked whether it would discuss the issue with Sun, Google said, "We’re talking with industry leaders around the world about Android and the Open Handset Alliance but we’re not commenting on any of those discussions."
On Monday, Google indicated that it expects fellow members of the Open Handset Alliance phones who are working on the Android phones to help keep its variation of Java familiar to programmers.
Java today is governed by the Java Community Process, in which a number of companies vote on which features to accept into the Java system and create standard mechanisms called application programming interfaces (APIs) by which Java software can use those features. The extent to which Android will or must conform to these APIs is not clear.
For those who need a refresher on the Microsoft history here, the software company licensed Java back in the 1990s, way before it became open-source software. However, Microsoft added some features to Java that meant that it could work differently on Windows machines, a move Sun saw as undermining the "write once, run anywhere" promise of the technology.
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
