Google Wave Impression

So, Google Wave is live for beta testing and i received an invitation. I still have a couple of them left, feel free to ask. First come, first served.

I and all of my friends who tried it have a “what now” feeling as soon as we log in. And then loneliness. It is like improved email, but we already have email.

The scrollbars are weird. Terribly weird. Not the way to go. They already made this mistake with Picasa. Please not again. I love the stupid old-school scrollbars.

Waves don’t become read after i click them. Silly bug, they’ll probably fix it.

Mtmihim

Google’s PR people Mtmihim me.

Every few days, Google tells the world about the wonderful free translation tools it offers, but the problem is that they completely Mafnim, because they can not translate one sentence correctly between each pair of languages.

Why do they think the public will buy the lie that stupid?

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The above was automatically translated from Hebrew. What i actually meant to write was this:

I’m puzzled by Google’s public relations people.

Every couple of days Google tells the world about the wonderful and free translation tools that it offers, but the problem is that they completely suck, as they aren’t able to translate a single sentence correctly between any pair of languages.

Why do they think that the public will buy this stupid lie?

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And i’ve got to admit that this particular translation is not that terrible, but i already made the original somewhat synthetic. Any real world translation is completely useless.

Aklocpa

I wonder how much time will pass until the word aklocpa will appear in search results.

Oh (edit): after two hours it already appears.

Conspiracy

The question is not whether Iran is a dictatorship or a democracy.

The question is whether the civil unrest there is a Google conspiracy or a Twitter conspiracy.

Wave

1998: I was working on the final project in the programming course. We were a team of seven people. Thanks to my famous Microsoft Word prowess i was in charge of writing the documents that were part of the project, but the other team members also had to update them and it was quite troublesome. So i told my friend El’ad an idea i had: “How nice would be it be if i could collaborate with my team members – if we could write the same document simultaneously. It would be a nice startup!” El’ad told me that it seemed rather useless to him.

Some time later El’ad told me about his own idea for a startup: “Let’s say that you have some files on your computer, for example music or images, and these files may be interesting to other people on the web that you don’t even know, and you want to share them and help people find them…”

To which i replied: “Who on Earth would want to do such a thing? That’s what websites and FTP are for.”

A few months later all the websites were buzzing about Napster’s fucking up the music business and El’ad told me that they implemented that idea of his.

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2007: I went to Catalonia for a week and didn’t go online for all that time. When i came back, all the websites were buzzing about Radiohead’s fucking up the music business further with “In Rainbows”.

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2009: I haven’t used the web since Thursday morning. Today i went online and every website was buzzing about Google Wave.

Google Wave is a combination of a word processor, an email program and an instant messaging program that is written in HTML. We’ll have to wait and see whether this will fuck up Microsoft’s business model, but the important parts for me are that it has a very cool spell checker, and more importantly – that it allows several people to edit the same document simultaneously.

Take a look at the video: Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009. At 00:35 you’ll see exactly the thing i envisioned in 1998. It even has Hebrew there.

So, El’ad, you can say that you had your revenge on me. But i’m still quite proud – i envisioned an idea that took many more years to implement.

Finding Google

It’s been said that you can find almost anything on Google.

But can you find Google on Google? Or anywhere else?

Google has offices in Israel. In Haifa, for example. If you come from Tel Aviv on highway 2, you’ll see on your right a large building with the Google logo, between Microsoft and Intel. To the best of my knowledge they have some engineers there and they also have a marketing office in Tel Aviv.

However, i couldn’t find the exact address of Google Haifa or Tel Aviv anywhere.

I tried Google corporate page. There’s a long list of countries there, and Israel is not included.

I tried searching the google.com domain for “Israel” using Google and Yahoo. Nothing.

I tried to find a contact address where i can send an email to Google. The best i found was a form for press requests; the page about it said “If you aren’t a member of the press and write to this alias, you will not receive a response.” Damn. (If i use WordPress, am i “a member of the press”?)

I tried to find contact info for Google Israel on the Israeli Yellow Pages. I tried searching for “Google” and “גוגל” and found nothing.

Am i stupid?

Vladimir

If you type владимир (vladimir) in Google and let it guess the popular queries, then Vladimir Putin is second and Vladimir Vysotsky is first.

Thank God.

Jew me

My name is Amir Aharoni and i am a Jew.

(Thanks to Elad for the link.)

37

A friend pointed my attention to this:

1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Click “Get directions” under the search bar.
3. Enter London as Start address and New York as End address.
4. Click the Get Directions button.
5. Notice the estimated time. Also, notice no. 37 in the directions list.

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Oh (edit): Why, of course i’m not the first one to notice it. Google Operating System, Google Blogoscoped.