First Impressions of Google Wave

I’ve been playing with the preview of Google Wave for a few days now and overall I’m quite impressed. It’s still a little rough around the edges but I think that by the time it’s launched in 2010 it’ll be much better. And as developers start to build extensions it’ll become even more useful. I’m already pretty happy to use it for collaborating with friends on small projects and as a replacement for email and IM as Google intend. The only downsides are that it clearly uses a lot of Javascript and users with older machines may not be entirely happy with its speed and that it’s a bit more complicated than regular email and instant messaging.

Incidentally, I have a number of invites to give away, so if I know you and you’d like one, drop me a line.

Prime Minister Breaches Copyright

It’s all very well to be bashed repeatedly over the head by adverts about copyright infringement relating to music and movies, but it seems that the Prime Minister’s new website apparently does a fine job of ignoring copyright and, specifically, the Creative Commons license on the WordPress theme it uses. Why am I not surprised that the government feels it can ignore the law when it suits it to?

Update: More on this, and other stuff relating to the site, from the Register.

Location, Location, Location

I’ve been playing with a number of location-based web services recently, thanks in large part to the joy that is Fire Eagle, and the most interesting so far has to be Rummble. As well as locating people you know it allows users to add places of interest, tag them and rate them on a sliding scale. And not just pubs, clubs and shops, either, but any sort of places. I’ve added mediaeval buildings of interest, for example.

The real fun comes when you’ve added enough places for Rummble to be able to figure out the kind of thing you’re interested in. At that point, it start colour-coding places depending on whether it thinks you’ll like them or not. Find people whose taste you trust and the system takes their opinions into account, too.

I should point out that Rummble is still under development but I think it shows real promise. The interface is, perhaps, a little cluttered but that’s fixable and it’s far from unusable. If this kind of thing floats your boat, give it a try. Oh, and try not to worry about the privacy issues – you don’t have to be too specific about where you are, you can set privacy options on the site and, of course, you can always lie about where you are.