Yesterday, I spent much of my day playing with new technology in the pipeline as well as some older technology that is new to me, and it looks like today may be a bit similar. With that, I want to share some views from the geek trenches.

Google Wave

I am now on Goggle Wave. You can find me as aldon dot hynes at googlewave dot com. It is still in early testing and I’m only slowly finding friends and waves there. However, it does have a lot of interesting potential. I like the ability to have a real time discussion and still have it end up like an email thread. I like the idea of having these discussions publicly, like on a mailing list. I like the idea of being able to insert comments in the middle of someone else’s comment. I like the idea of having gadgets, and I’m glad they now have tags.

I’m disappointed that a good permissioning system isn’t in place yet, and I’ve been frustrated at times when a wave can get really slow with a lot of people on it.

On the usage side, I’m very interested in how people are using it for community gathering, political discussions and potentially journalism. It will be interesting to track usage and how usage changes, and I sure hope there are some good academics looking at this from various academic frameworks.

For the technology, I’m very interested in what can be done with gadgets, and I’m hoping to play with creating some gadgets. I’m interested in what can be done with gadgets and Shindig, and especially with the Drupal Shindig OpenSocial Integrator. Ultimately, I’m interested in how this will fit Open Handset, or Android.

Over on StatusNet there has been a discussion about Google Wave Federation and how Google Wave could interact with a system like StatusNet. This is another area I want to explore.

So, as an early adopter geek, I’m really enjoying Google Wave, and I’m hoping to explore it much more.

Sidewiki

On the Thursday #socialmaketing discussion, @ckieff asked people what they thought about Google Sidewiki. I hadn’t played with Sidewiki, but I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about it, so I figured it would be a good idea to kick it around a little. My first comment was about my surprise that you couldn’t use it with Google Chrome. Several people shared this comment, and then @googlesidewiki responded that Google Sidewiki has just come to Chrome. Actually, it only partially came and there is more work to do, but it is a step in the right direction.

Over on Firefox, I installed the Sidewiki addon. So far, it doesn’t seem to do a lot that I couldn’t already do with StumbleUpon and a host of other sites. In addition, for some reason, I often have problems with Google authenticating from Firefox. It seems like Google frequently gags on my Firefox cookies. Maybe when Sidebar gets connected up to a Google Gadget and from their into a Google Wave, it will be more interesting. If you’re doing anything interesting with Google Sidewiki, let me know.

FlashBlock

One of the things that I’ve found more and more annoying are Flash programs in browsers. They suck up CPU time, play annoying music, and generally don’t add much of value. So, I was please to find FlashBlock as a Firefox addon yesterday. I’ve added it and things seem to run much more quickly and nicely without Flash. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything similar for Chrome.

This does present interesting new issues for advertisers using Flash.

Twitter Lists

I’ve also started playing with Twitter Lists. I’ve set up a few different lists and I look forward to when they can be accessible via the API. It seems like group functionality is one of the next great frontiers and I’m especially interested in how the group information can get shared. For example, some of the information that I entered in my Twitter Lists has already been entered in FriendFeed, PeopleBrowser, Facebook, and probably half a dozen other areas. Perhaps group information is something that needs to be added to Portable Contacts and sites like DandyID

Joomla

As I believe I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m starting to play a little bit with Joomla. Don’t worry, I’m not abandoning Drupal. Meanwhile, I’m listening to a friend on Facebook talk about a Drupal versus Wordpress smackdown going on at her office. You need to use whichever tool meets the needs.

Ubuntu 9.10

Next on the list is upgrading some machines to Ubuntu 9.10 I'm hearing good stuff, but just don't have the time yet.

Anyway, I keep getting distracted by a shiny new tool, so I’d probably better post this entry and get back to everything else that has piled up.