The idea has been batted around before, but now it looks like Google is ready to throw some effort in the direction of creating a Google Wave powered forum.
According to a post on the Google Wave Developer Blog, the Google Wave team already open-sourced Forum Botty, a Google Wave extension that creates a forum-like experience inside Wave, and now it wants to "continue developing this code base into a powerful and generic extension for running forums in wave, and we're hoping that other developers like you will join us in this project."
Update: The previous version can still be accessed at news.google.ca (Thanks Bob!).
Earlier in this week we covered the new version of Google News. It's normal to see a backlash against a redesign (see the reaction to Facebook redesigns for instance), but reaction to Google News' new layout has been resoundingly harsh. So far, Google isn't offering an option to revert back to the old version, unlike it did with its last major Gmail update. It seems Google's attempt to balance personalization and serendipity left fans of both unhappy.
Much like Google's Suggest feature, Yahoo offers suggestions, as you type, for popular search queries with a feature called "Search Assist". Today, Yahoo announced that it is trying to make its own feature that much more useful by offering near real-time suggestions when you enter a phrase into the search box.
Unlike Google, however, it looks like Yahoo gives time relevance a higher priority in its suggestion algorithm, separating the two suggestion services.
Real-time alerts and notifications are a powerful feature being added to more applications every day; the addition of real-time notifications can make a big difference in user experience and peoples' work performance when using apps.
Unfortunately, there's not one standard way to easily code these notifications across platforms and there's very little support for web apps seeking to send notifications to users. It's been one of the advantages that desktop apps have had over the web. That could be about to change.
Google News today announced it is rolling out a new layout with new features designed to bring readers a more personalized, local and social news experience. While still highlighting top stories and adding a list of trending topics similar to Twitter's, Google is now giving the reader additional customization options and adding a section for local news and weather, among other features. As Megan Garber at The Neiman Journalism Lab puts it: "The new site is trying to balance two major, and often conflicting, goals of news consumption: personalization and serendipity."
Just because the new iPhone arrived in stores today doesn't mean the rest of the technology world shut down. In fact, today in San Francisco the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference continued its week-long series of talks and sessions about the semantic Web - the ability to understand and intelligently interpret content from the Web. A fascinating example of how the semantic Web is colliding with the real-time Web is through Twitter and the impending release of annotations - and Ph.D student Joshua Shinavier provided some fascinating semantic scenarios for their use.
As important as memorizing vocabulary, conjugating verbs, and declining nouns are, nothing beats speaking practice when it comes to learning a foreign language. The German company Babbel helps make that a lot less intimidating for online learners today with integration of a speech recognition tool into its language learning system.
In the wake of the BP oil disaster, real-time mapping technologies have been recruited to improve communication and promote collaboration between people in local communities, as well as federal, state and local responders. Last week NOAA released GeoPlatform.gov to provide near-real-time mapping data to those connected to the crisis.
The site lets you track everything from daily spill positions to the locations of ships responding to the crisis. State and non-governmental organizations are also collecting and mapping real-time information. In some instances the efforts include citizen-generated data from iPhone apps and photos mapped on sites like Flickr.
Two of our favorite topics to geek out over here at ReadWriteWeb are the real-time Web and the Internet of Things. Today, we (like everyone else across the Internet, it seems) ran into a rather nifty looking website that merges those two realms rather successfully using open data from the London and U.K. train systems.
The live train map for the London Underground is a nearly real-time Google Maps mashup that shows the various trains of the London Underground as they move about their subterranean travels.
The 2010 FIFA World Cup is now the most popular event in Web history. Record usage began last Friday before the wins and losses. Not since Obama's election day victory has the Web swayed under a greater burden of Internet-connected hope.
