plzkthxbai

I was originally planning to do a post about Google Buzz this weekend, but then something reminded me about  Google Wave. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard anything about Wave in weeks. It occurred to me that one of the most hyped products of 2009 might have fallen completely on it’s face. Ever since Wave was announced at Google I/O last May, there was non-stop hype surrounding the product on Twitter and tech blogs. The hype continued up to the end of September when Google opened up Wave to over 100,000 people, and then for another few weeks while people begged for invites on Twitter and other sites. By the end of October, I had over 25 contacts on Wave and managed to get the bulk of my web-savvy friends using the service. By the middle of November, it seemed like everyone who was remotely interested in Wave had received an invite. Google Wave finally dropped off the trending topics on Twitter and it seemed like the invite hype was effectively dead. It’s been over 2 months since the last activity in my Wave inbox and I can’t help but wonder, what happened?

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As some of you know, I am the web developer behind the Penn State Snowboard Club (PSSC) website. I built the site from the ground up 3 years ago when I was attending Penn State. The website has evolved a lot since then and has signed up over 1,200 users. The past couple months I have been working on a complete redesign of the site. The goal was to make the site more useful for club members (and officers) and to add some design flare to spice things up a bit. After lots of hard work, I was able to finally launch the new site last weekend. The site seems to have generated a lot of positive buzz so far and I wanted to take some time to highlight a few new features.

The new homepage of the Penn State Snowboard Club.

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If there was any doubt about Apple’s stance on Adobe Flash before Wednesday’s keynote, you can kiss that goodbye. During the keynote, Steve Jobs was casually browsing the web (it was a bit awkward, actually) and he spent a few minutes on the New York Times site. As he scrolled down the page, there was a large box with the all-too-familiar blue cube signifying that the Flash plugin was missing. The audience chuckled and Steve paused for a while, leaving the “Flash failure” on the big screen. Although he never mentioned anything about it, it was very clear that Steve was not trying to hide anything. It’s almost as if he wanted everyone to know that the iPad will not support Flash. For the last 3 years, critics have complained about the lack of Flash on the iPhone and it appears as though Apple is still unwilling to budge on the issue. I believe that Apple is trying to send a clear message: “You think you need Flash, but you really don’t. Try it.”

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Just over 4 weeks ago I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. I’ve had an account since freshman year of college (5+ years ago) and this was the first time I ever deactivated it. I used to be an avid user of Facebook. In fact, up until about 12 months ago, I would spend probably an hour a day on the site. I added photos, updated status messages, and tracked events using the service. I had some gripes here and there, but overall it was good for what I needed. Also, it provides an endless stream of content (“stalking”) for people who have too much time on their hands. Luckily, I can say that I rarely browsed Facebook to kill time. So what happened 12 months ago that changed my usage patterns? Two things: I graduated college and I became an avid user of Twitter.

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For the past few months I’ve been casually working on a new website for my friend, Ben Birk. He is a snowboard photographer who I met a couple years ago during my involvement in the Pennsylvania ski/snowboard scene. He spent this past winter in Lake Tahoe, snowboarding and shooting photos every day. Ahhh, the life! He has had many photos featured in popular magazines such as Transworld Snowboarding, Snowboard, Playboard, and East Coast Snowboarding. Almost 3 years ago I built Ben his first website to showcase his photos. Since then, Ben’s photography skills have grown immensely and my web design skills have also improved (claim?). We decided it was time to release a fresh, new site to showcase his work in the best possible way.

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On Thursday Google announced a project they have been working on called Google Public DNS . The Domain Name System, or DNS for short, is something that we use hundreds of times each day but hardly ever think about. DNS is used to translate easy-to-remember hostnames, such as www.google.com, into the actual IP address for the server handling the requests. It is absolutely essential to the way today’s internet works. By default, most of the DNS servers that we use are hosted by our ISP. The ISP has a set of DNS servers and each website request we make goes to these servers which sort everything out and find the server that we’re requesting. Google’s Public DNS will join existing services such as OpenDNS to provide an alternative to the DNS servers hosted by ISPs all over the world.

When I first saw the announcement flow into my Twitter stream, I was pretty confused. DNS isn’t really something I think about on a daily basis and it seemed like an unusual project for Google to be working on. I was eager to dig into the documentation and see what Google’s motivation was. They must have expected this type of reaction because the first section on the Introduction page is “Why Google Public DNS?”. Google explains that webpages are getting more complex and the sheer magnitude of DNS lookups each day is starting to put major pressure on the existing DNS infrastructure. Since they already crawl most of these sites on a regular basis for their search indexing, it makes sense to cache the information and use the knowledge to help speed up DNS lookups. They claim that they just want to make the web a faster and more secure place. While I believe this is a valid motivation, I think that there’s more to it. How does this really fit into Google’s business plan?

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Often the lunch conversation at work turns to books. Many of my coworkers are avid readers. I, on the other hand, NEVER read books! I can’t remember the last time I’ve read an actual book. I spend most of my “reading time” reading blog post after blog post on a quest to learn as much as possible. It’s actually turning into quite a time-consuming hobby of mine. According to Google Reader Trends, I read approximately 600 blog posts each month. While that might seem like a lot (it is), only a fraction of the blogs I track are even read in Google Reader. I also use Apple Mail, Twitter, and the good ol’ website approach to keep up with the news.

The major topics that I follow are general technology news, mobile news, web/internet news, and Apple news. This includes blogs like TechCrunch, AppleInsider, Daring Fireball, The Google Blog, and Twitter news sources. I’m fascinated with technology and absolutely love to read about the future and how the web is evolving. I think this is a testament to the fact that I picked the perfect career. Not only am I learning a ridiculous amount of stuff about technology, but I’ve also noticed that my writing has been improving as a result of all this reading. I’m always looking to streamline my method for consuming all this news, and I’ve found a few tools that work great.

Some of my feeds are in Apple Mail. This used to be my primary reader.

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On Thursday Google hosted an event for it’s much anticipated new operating system dubbed Chrome OS. This is a very ambitious project that looks to create a lightweight operating system focused on streamlining the average user’s computer experience. Chrome OS consists of ONLY the Google Chrome browser running on a small linux kernel and some device drivers. The idea is that you will start your PC and within seconds you will be able to start browsing the web. Chrome OS will contain support for USB devices like cameras and printers, but the laptops will not contain any local storage for a user’s files. All of the files that we typically store on our laptops will now be stored in the cloud in places like Google Docs or Gmail. Google is positioning Chrome OS as the perfect operating system for netbooks and other ultra-portable secondary PCs.

Chrome OS is a drastic change from the way we normally think of operating systems and personal computers. For as long as I can remember, computers have always had a hard drive and were fully capable machines without the internet. However, as the internet continues to evolve, we are starting to see more and more reliance on cloud applications and storage. Music streaming services like Pandora are starting to gain major traction, photos are all stored on Facebook or Fickr, and it seems like everyone has a Gmail account. We are spending less time using traditional desktop applications to access our content. And Google knows this. (Google knows everything…) As you might expect, a change this drastic has the potential to really shake up the industry, specifically the netbook market. Let’s take a look at some of the potential winners and losers if Chrome OS becomes widely adopted.

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I’ve been spending a lot of time during the past two weeks watching baseball. This is pretty unusual for me since I’m not typically a baseball fan. There’s just something about the playoffs that gets my attention. Since I’m not a huge fan, there are still a lot of things about the sport that are new to me. I’ve even learned about a couple rules this week that I never even knew existed! There’s a lot more to baseball than just running around the bags it seems. Anyway, my quest for baseball knowledge has (obviously) led me to Google. Tonight I was trying to find out why baseball players use wooden bats instead of metal ones. As I started to type my question, Google Suggest provided a bunch of other questions that people have asked. Ironically, many of these same questions have crossed my mind while watching the game. It’s amazing what you can learn from Google Suggest!

How many of you have wondered the same things?