Serendipity35

Bryan commented on my recent Android post and alluded to Google Wave. Wave is a under-development app that pushes what is possible in the browser. It was given a developer preview at Google I/O. There is a video (80 minutes) of I/O you can view (including a few crashes).

Google Wave is for communication and collaboration on the web. It will launch later this year. It is open source and they will rely on the community to help build the tool.

It is conjecture now, but I can imagine this tool easily being used for synchronous communication in courses. I can also imagine a time, not so far in the future, when we can build our own "learning management system" using free and open tools. Take note Blackboard.

Google defines a wave this way:

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.

They demonstrated using Orkut with Wave, so I guess Orkut is still very active though it still has not gained a big user base in the U.S. (I haven't used it in any serious way since 2006.) Of course, Wave also works with an Android phone or iPhone.

Some parts of this app aren't even supported in HTML 5, so it is pushing the walls of the box. 

Perhaps, Wave is an answer to the question "What would email look like if it was just being developed today?" Real-time collaboration. Natural language tools. Wave's concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time.

If you are on the tech side of things, watch their tech video.  Developer types can learn how to put waves in your site and build wave extensions with the Google Wave APIs. Google Wave uses an open protocol, so anyone can build their own wave system.

This is all (standard procedure for Google) very "beta" for now, but you can watch the video, sign up for updates and, if you are the tech type, learn more about how to develop with Google Wave.

Way back in 2004, Facebook launched. It was for students and it centered around schools. In 2006, they opened up to everyone else and the school aspect moved out of the center.

Facebook has crossed the 100 million users mark. That's big. For comparison purposes, MySpace hit the 100 million mark in 2006 after 3 years. It took Facebook 4 and a half years.

At Passaic County Community College, MySpace is bigger with students than Facebook. (There's a good study waiting out there on why students choose one over the other, or use some other social network like Orkut.) MySpace offers you a kind of web site with tools and connections and lots of freedom to hack the design (hence the large number of really ugly sites). In Facebook, you always know you are in Facebook. There are lots of applications to add, lots of ways to connect. You can pull in your outside blog, but you can't have a blog there (as you can with MySpace).

Facebook has a new program called Schools being tested that literally connects to their school. It allows students to view their course calendar. Drop/adds show up in Facebook as soon as the registrar’s office reports them. Schools can also include ways for student groups to have pages within Schools where students can interact. The Schools program was developed by Inigral and it is being tested at Abilene Christian University.

from PC World:

The Facebook application is managed by the institution not the students and is plugged in to the school's database giving educational institutions more control over how and what information is shared.

Students who opt in to the application can view their entire course calendar within Facebook and if they add or drop a course at the registrar's office those changes will be immediately reflected in the Schools application.

Does Facebook want to reconnect to its base (the political season has me thinking in these terms) of students? Or, is Facebook looking to become an enterprise level higher education software package? Would the latter actually make them so mainstream that they would lose any cool factor that students find appealing?

Two headlines from the virtual world...

First, from the blog of Second Life comes words that Linden Labs and IBM Teleport Across Virtual Worlds. Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world Second Life, and IBM announced that they have achieved the first recorded teleport of their avatars from one virtual world into another.Sounds like something out of Star Trek. Researchers from the two companies teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world without logging out of one world and logging in to the other.

Apparently, they have been working on this type of thing since last fall and author Nick Carr had half-seriously wondered if World of Warcraft avatars could attack and conquer parts of Second Life if they were allowed to pass from world to world.

One possible point of interest in all this for educators is that as virtual worlds slowly make their way into classrooms, interoperability across virtual worlds will become critical. For Second Life, it will help them maintain the viability of SL as an increasing number of virtual worlds become available. I'm not convinced that SL will be the platform for educators, but it may be one of them. The portability of users and digital assets will be important to creators.

In some ways, it reminds me of the CMS wars. Second Life is WebCT/Blackboard - the big commercial player with a strong foothold. But coming along are "open source" worlds that will compete and may look more attractive to educational institutions - the Moodles of virtual worlds.

Speaking of which, reading Niniane Wang's (Engineering Manager at Google) post on their house blog, I see that they have launched their own virtual world project.

...I'm excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.

The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web.

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”.

Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop.

To learn more about Lively, please visit www.lively.com. Lively is available through a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer and is Windows only for now.

Lively is not a "world" like Second Life but instead splits the space into different rooms. It runs completely in the browser and you use your Google account to log in and create your own avatars, interact with other users, watch YouTube clips on virtual TVs, share your own photos etc. It's pretty cool that the rooms can be easily embedded into any web page.

Creating rooms is fairly simple using a number of templates to get started. For now, all virtual items for Lively are for free. Moving avatars around the rooms is clunky (you have to drag them through the room) and SL users may find the rooms and limitations restrictive at this early stage. I only played for a hour or so in it, but I couldn't fly or interact much except for chat. The rooms and avatars generally look more like videogame graphics than the rich SL locations at this point.

There have been rumors for awhile that Google was planning something like this in Google Earth, and it would be exciting to think that these rooms might be able to move into the Google Earth world in some way.

Google posted a rather unimpressive Lively video in YouTube, but it will give you a sense of how these rooms and avatars look now, or check out some of the popular rooms.

Back at the start of summer, Google launched Google Gears. They said they were making the web better by making it work offline

This month they launched a way to make the web more social. They introduced OpenSocial, which is a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web. Developers can write an application once and it will run anywhere that supports the OpenSocial APIs. Those of us using the sites get more applications in more places. OpenSocial Using uses standard JavaScript and HTML.

Who has signed on to this OpenSocial application community? So far, it includes MySpace, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

Anyone missing? Uh huh - no Facebook. Those guys are building their own less-open social network of API's - and an advertising world.

On the "social net" part of the Internet, hundreds of millions of people are sharing photos, videos, ratings and reviews, bookmarks and forming communities. But if you're a developer, do you create for MySpace because it's a big player and then adapt it for the next site? And then do it a few more times? OpenSocial opens platforms for developers to extend.

Wait - isn't that what Facebook did awhile ago? They opened their own APIs and gave access to user profiles and friend networks, and if a user elects to add an application (and it seems like their are a few new ones every day on Facebook) it can post activities so that all your friends know your activities.

Good, but developers still need to customize their application for each one. Considering how many of these Web 2.0 companies are just a few people, it's not very practical.

Do you think that any of the big educational software companies will ever open their applications like this?

Maybe in platforms like Moodle, but I just don't see it happening with players like Blackboard. Remember when Blackboard created Building Blocks to allow developers to add on? Then Turnitin.com was able to connect. Now, Blackboard has unveiled a new plagiarism prevention service of its own, SafeAssign that detects unoriginal content in student papers and delivers reports within the Blackboard Learning System. Open?

Blackboard is selling features. Facebook is clearly using the APIs to drive more traffic to their advertising. Google is... well, I'm not sure. Driving users to their ads? Helping organize the web?

Colleges can use these APIs too, but some will question whether driving traffic to a site is something they want to do. Maybe schools AND developers will want a slice of the revenue.

If, like me, you didn't get an invite to the CampFire One event at the Googleplex, you can watch the video version. The developer types that were there explain this open, programmable web.