10 concerns with Google Wave

I'm a longtime Google lover and am just as excited about Wave as everybody else; ever since the release of Gmail i've been wondering why Google doesn't do something exactly like this. That being said, i'd like to bring up ten short, sweet, and to-the-point concerns i've been wondering about that are worth some consideration. Please forgive me in advance if i'm speaking too soon; i'm still waiting for an invitation of my own. 

Complexity
Wave is advanced, but will users be able to grasp it fully? Even email is confusing to some people. Google usually does an amazing job at designing user interfaces, but i wonder if Wave will feel heavy due simply to its complexity.

Overall Stability
Google Wave, the client, seems to still be buggy and slow according to many people. I'm sure they will work it all out, but if it's this hard for Google to implement their own protocol, that might be saying something about the future of it.

Desktop Application
When will someone create a desktop client? I hope they haven't made it too hard to do so.

Social Networking
Many people say it will be the Facebook/Twitter killer, but let's keep in mind that, just like email, Google Wave is a communication platform which makes it a very closed network. Is it possible for Wave to replace the functionality of social networking sites that require information such as groups to be much more publicly accessible? Perhaps it is possible through applications, which might be a better model anyways.

Instant Messaging
Wave is a much better communication method than email and IM because of both it's structure and instant character-by-character transmission, but how will that affect other networks like Jabber (XMPP) which is used for Google Talk? Will applications like Pidgin and Empathy be able to implement some sort of IM-only Wave protocol support, or will other networks be able to integrate well into Wave?

Multimedia Content
Text is wonderful, but much of our communication is shifting towards audio and video calls online, and although there are Google Wave applications that support it, it doesn't look like Wave itself will handle it in and special way.

Spam
Has it been considered? I'd like to know now that spam won't end up being worse on Wave than email. Although it is more difficult to spam wave currently, in the future those technical obstacles may have been overcome, and the problem could be worse than today.

Identification
Email today is used for ID on almost all websites. How are contact ID's managed? Google has been playing with tools like OpenID, OAuth, and WebFinger; will those be incorporated into Wave?

Data Portability
This is less of a concern for two reasons. One because Google's Data Liberation Front seems appropriately considerate of us being in control of our own information, and two because if the next and last concern is a problem, it might far overshadow this one.

Competition
Google Wave is much more advanced than email, and that complexity makes it harder to implement. This might drive power upwards, and be very anti-competitive. We could be limited to a few Wave providers, and we might all just have to use Google for the applications they have.

"It's a strange irony that today's Google Wave news was followed by a real Tsunami. I'm hoping Google never releases Armageddon."
--Some Twitterer

Still, email is out of date, and i hope that all of these concerns will soon enough be crossed off and Wave will successfully take over as the next generation of online communication. Are you ready to surf the web on waves? Sorry, i had to.

Dropping Compiz for Mutter (Metacity 3) compositing?

I'd like to ask the Ubuntu developer community to consider freeing up valuable CD space by removing Compiz and just using Mutter (Metacity 3) compositing in the default installation for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Lucid Lynx. From what i have read, the core of Metacity is a lot better than that of Compiz, but some work is needed first to avoid making the change a regression. While Metacity does still lack the huge amount of features available through Compiz plugins, only the few basic essential ones are needed anyways. Extra effects using Compiz can still be easily installed just like everyone did before it came prepackaged with Ubuntu. Once Metacity compositing does everything that Compiz does under the "Normal" Desktop Effects setting in Ubuntu's appearance preferences, then we'll have reached the feature parity we need.

Metacity provides a number of benefits over Compiz. It doesn't depend on accelerated graphics so users that don't have the necessary hardware and drivers for Compiz can still use it and enjoy the applications which require compositing, although it would be nice if Metacity was able to take advantage of accelerated graphics. This does make it ever so slightly more CPU intensive than necessary for users with decent 3D drivers, but it is less resource intensive as a whole, and for the majority of users, the memory consumption is what they notice when Compiz is enabled.

Unlike Compiz, Metacity is actually standards compliant, so it doesn't malfunction when using certain applications. A smooth and consistent desktop shouldn't have any of that. Compiz deviates from the Unix philiosophy and, as Dylan McCall posted to the Ubuntu developer discussion list, many of "Compiz's effects are entirely out of scope for a window manager and rely on horrible, kludgey, unsightly workarounds. All of Metacity's effects are in scope and only exist if they're going to work consistently. Everything else, for example fancy window previews on the window list applet, can and should be implemented by the individual child applications."

He adds that switching between Compiz and Metacity produces an inconsistent user interface which is pronounced by the fact that depending on your hardware setup, Ubuntu will fall back onto Metaicty if it can't enable Compiz:

...users get confused when they switch between Compiz and Metacity, because the two have profoundly different feels, and in some cases different key bindings. Metacity uses workspaces, while default Compiz uses viewports (and a different number, if I remember right). One follows the extended window manager hints spec to precision, another has quirks.

Because of that, switching the window manager should not be considered standard operation. I definitely don't think it is acceptable to dump it as a prominently displayed option as if it is something user friendly to do.

Dylan brings the future of Gnome into consideration as well:

One obvious next step in GNOME's evolution as a desktop environment is the more rigid integration of the window manager with everything else. For example, GNOME-Shell is based on a heavily modified Metacity. In the future a lot of cool stuff will depend on Metacity (or whatever it comes to be called later on). It would be a shame to miss it.

Overall, Metacity is actually prettier, gives the desktop a smoother feel, provides better consistency, and takes up less system resources making Ubuntu feel faster, but some work is still needed before Compiz could be dropped. Can we commit to making this a long-term goal and put it on the roadmap?

Calling all FOSS Game Artists and Free Content Producers!

The first Ubuntu Gaming Team meeting was a huge success! With over two hours of discussion going strong, we covered a lot of ground. One of the major topics for out next meeting, and our most ambitious project, is coordinating the creation of a distributed content development platform. For this, we will need lots of input from FOSS game artists and free content producers like the Blender Open Movie Project.

The meeting will be on 9/27 @ 19:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GamingTeam/Meetings/Minutes/2009-09-27
Please contribute to the agenda!

Lack of good content is the #1 impediment for FOSS games. Most developers are not artists and the challenge of content creation is much more difficult than code. The need for FOSS content is the same for code, but current platforms that exist for code do not offer features needed for content. Code is all text and much easier to handle, while content is difficult as you cannot “diff” a picture or a blender file. On top of that, while distributed code development has been refined since computers were invented, content is a much newer ground, especially to apply FOSS distributed development to, and it simply hasn't received any of the focus and effort that code has.

We need input to help agree on a base for the platform and what features are most needed. Additionally, we might like to look to Canonical and/or the Blender Institute for support as they will benefit most from and be willing to contribute to such a project. 

Sorry Reddit, i was called out on my blogspam in person!

I just got back from the Boston sub-reddit meetup, and it was incredible! I expected us to have a table with maybe 20 redditors tops, but we had an entire room reserved for us and upwards of 40 people showed up! Great success and thanks to everyone who came-- we must organize another one of these in the future.

Anyways, while i was there, a couple guys recognized my handle, and called me out on spamming their, and related, sub-Reddits with my blog posts. Not in a horribly confrontational way at all-- it was very entertaining actually-- but i made this promise to them on my way out, and it extends to all of you as well: i will not be submitting any more links to posts from this blog on Reddit. I'd gotten a little carried away with submitting many of my posts at once across multiple related subreddits, so i'm sorry about that! From now on, i'll only be depending on you guys my agents to submit my posts for me.

Myths debunked: YouTube, please use Ogg Theora for HTML 5

It's incredible how many people are sympathetic towards Google and Apple's opposition of Ogg Theora within the HTML 5 codec debate. Of course, nobody expected anything else from Apple, but Google, really? Outside of YouTube, Google seems to be very supportive. YouTube may still be somewhat separated from the rest of Google. The site still looks more like it did pre-aquisition than it looks like a Google project. The Google Chrome web browser, a "pure" Google project, supports Theora, and a blog post Google made on the Ogg Theora book sprint which specifically makes mention of HTML 5 leads me to wonder if they might actually be planning on supporting it. Then again, this claim by a Googler on the WhatWG mailing list makes me worry:

"If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet." --Chris DiBona

All right, it's time to fight back against this FUD and address every argument made against Ogg Theora for HTML 5 and YouTube. The whole point of the HTML 5 video tag is to eliminate the need for proprietary Flash plugins so are we really going to replace one proprietary piece of technology with yet another piece of proprietary technology? What would be the point of that? Have we not already seen enough of the problems posed by relying on proprietary standards? Then again, HTML 4 didn't mandate support for JPEG and PNG, so gaining support doesn't necessarily depend on becoming the official standard.

1. Video quality (and high definition)
• Firstly, even if Ogg Theora's video quality was less than ideal, this is a web standard we're discussing here. It isn't about the highest quality format of the moment. The purpose of a standard is to allow everyone to take part and rely on it. A patent encumbered format does no good for this. Freedom and transparency are essential for a standard. We wouldn't have the world wide web or TCP/IP networks if competing companies were in a constant battle trying to outdo each other's protocols and hardware. Nobody is forced to use the HTML 5 standard; if Apple is so afraid of Theora's success, they can go ahead and use their format of choice or continue to rely on Flash.
• Secondly, Theroa will continue improving, and will improve faster if it gains more support. Open formats like this can evolve for a reason. Video quality will improve, just like the HTML standard itself has grown and changed. Agreeing on an open format for a standard is done to promote mass adoption which allows for widespread use unencumbered by patents and without similar restrictions. If a proprietary format is used, who will improve upon it? Only the intellectual imaginary property "owners" will be able to, and that doesn't mean they ever will. Theora might not be the very best right now, but it will be.
• Finally, although Theora is not yet at the same level as H.264, claiming that its quality is so inferior is a lie. Not only is it not far behind, but it is already better than what YouTube currently uses. What about high definition, you ask? Although it is still not ideal for HD content, being slightly behind H.264, Theora roughly equals YouTube HD video quality already. Most of the problems it had were inherited from the codec it is based off of, and those problems are disappearing thanks to support from from the Mozilla and Wikimedia Foundations with the upcoming version 1.1 of Theora. This is the overhaul containing a major rewrite bringing big improvements and lots of new features like two-pass encoding and adaptive quantization. Theora has a balance between quality, performance, size, and simplicity which makes it ideal for web video.
2. Patents
• To refuse to implement a royalty free codec under the guise of "patent safety" is ridiculous. Apple wouldn't bundle Samba with OSX if they were that afraid of patents. Yes, submarine patents could possibly exist, but then again they are always a possibility, and not just for Theora, but for many formats. The algorithms Theora uses are not new. If, down the road, some patent-troll does in fact appear, whatever patent they hold would likely expire when brought to light.
3. Hardware Acceleration
• Yeah, yeah, Apple is understandably against using Theora becuse of this, but this isn't much of a reason against it becoming a standard. Again, keep in mind the most important thing is not the absolute best quality and performance, although Theora is already pretty good as it is, but rather freedom and independence from proprietary technologies.
• Most of the affordable portable media players, "MP4 Players", support Vorbis without advertising it. The sole manufacturer of all the chips simply included it. It might take a while, but hardware support for Theora will come, and we could see it sooner if it became more popular. There is already an open source VHDL code base for a hardware Theora decoder in development and it's worth mentioning that decoding Theora is less CPU intensive than decoding H.264.
4. Dirac, On2 and other Open Formats
• Dirac is for high definition video archiving, not streaming. Nothing is wrong with other open formats, but Theora is already the best candidate with the most support.
• Google did recently acquire On2, a company which owns more advanced codecs, and actually created the codec which Theora is based off of. There is speculation that Google will offer them as free formats, and as awesome as that would be, we can't really act on what they might do.
5. Everyone already has Flash
• This is probably the dumbest argument i've heard. Of course, Flash isn't going anywhere overnight, but online video will shift to use the HTML 5 video tag. A quarter of the world's web browsers already support Ogg Theora with no plugins required. YouTube and other sites won't just drop Flash support one day; like Dailymotion, they will begin by offering HTML 5 video in addition to Flash. From there, HTML 5 gives us so many possibilities: no additional software needed, easily created player skins, dynamic content injection, and the ability to manipulate videos, just to name a few.

YouTube already has an HTML 5 demo using MP4 and appears to be preparing to expand it to the entire site. Google could single-handedly make Theora the dominant format for online video distribution and pressure all browsers-- that includes Microsoft's Internet Explorer-- to support it. Hopefully, we can convince them to do so. It's now clear that there is no real reason for them to choose H.264 over Theora, but what reasons are there for them to actively support and push for Theora? Huge positive publicity in the short term and compatability in the long-term. Admittedly, not too much, but Google has always shown great commitment towards open source, and it is strange that the extent of their commitment would be cut short here. YouTube using Ogg Theora with HTML 5 on their site will truly have a huge impact. Come on Google, "Don't be evil".

So far, only one large video host, Dailymotion, supports HTML 5 with Theora, as well as The Video Bay. In addition, there is also Wikimedia Commons, The Internet Archive, and Tinyvid, but it doesn't end there. Ogg Thoera and Vorbis are also supported by big projects like OLPC, Jabber, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Wikimedia Foundation. Their support is vital in showing that these formats are a viable and good choice for multimedia, but we still need the big dogs with the big bucks.

Now, what can we do to push Youtube along with other large video hosts and advertising services to move towards full HTML5 and Theora support? If you use YouTube or another major video host that doesn't offer HTML 5 with Theora, post a video explaining your support. We need organized effective ways for people to convince these sites to publish in free formats. Please post additional ideas and feedback in the comments.