Recognizing the fact, startups all over have been setup to facilitate these discussions. Reddit and Digg are examples of websites that focus only on facilitating discussion of online articles. Disqus attempts to be an outsourced discussion engine designed to host the discussions while alleviating the need for the original website to do so. While not specifically targeted towards this end Google Buzz is another avenue for surfers to share an interesting URL with their friends and start a discussion around the article.

And there lies the problem: discussions are scattered throughout the web. Most of the time, it’s probable that the original authors of the article don’t even know such discussion exists. I, for one, am not too keen on running around trying to track down all the discussions circling what I’ve wrote. Alright, let me correct that. I’m very interested in reading the discussion, I’m just not too keen on the running around bit. It gets old, after a while.

It would be very convenient if there’s a way to aggregate these discussions together into one place, for example the URL where the article was originally posted. Technically, it seems possible. I think it’s already established that the most suitable format for pushing threads of information is via content syndication feeds. RSS or Atom feeds, to be specific. I know that Google uses Atom feeds in their Buzz API, where 3rd party applications can use the API to interact with the Buzz engine and content contained within. So, in theory, if parties such as Buzz, Digg and Reddit play nice, a blog may be able to pull in a feed of discussion from each of these sites, merge them and sort them in order to present an aggregated feed of all the discussion that has taken place on the article.

How does the blog know if discussions have been happening on other site, though? If the blog owner is required to manually hunt down these discussions, it would still be a time-consuming task. TrackBack is a framework that allows source blogs to be informed when another blog mentions one of the articles in the source blog. If we can piggyback on the TrackBack specification to add on metadata that gives enough information on how to pull the discussion feed, that would effectively automate the whole discovery process of discussions.

Obviously, this suggestion may be counter-productive to Reddit and Digg, which relies on eyeballs on their own site to monetize their efforts. However, they have to remember that they do not have original source content. They rely on 3rd party content to generate the eyeballs on their own sites. I think it’s fair enough that they allow some reciprocal exchange of data in exchange for the content that owners contribute.

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Now that we’ve cleared that up, what is Google Map Maker? According to the intro page:

Google Map Maker allows you to contribute, share and edit map information for certain regions around the world.

Sounds generic enough. There must be a hundred other services all around the world offering this service. But wait, what’s this “certain regions” thingie in that sentence? Turns out that this service is not available to all countries. For example, it’s not available to Singapore and US map users, but it is available to Malaysian users! “Wow”, you say, “finally something we have that they don’t!”. Well, don’t be too happy. If you look at the FAQ:

Question #1: I live in (MyCountryName) and am not able to add a place/road/point of interest in Google Map Maker. Why not?

Answer: At present, Google Map Maker is open for mapping in 174 countries and territories. These are mostly places that are not already well-mapped by commercial services, like those we use to provide data for Google Earth and Google Maps.

Whoah. Bit of reality check there. Turns out that they’re offering Google Map Maker to us (along with other “privileged” countries) because we’re f***ed up. Google is unable to get sufficient quality information about our terrain from the official channels to give us good maps. Unlike, for e.g. Singapore, where traffic information is already being fed from some government agency to Google live so they’re all prepared to re-route Google Nav users in case of jams and such. If you’re using Brut’s hacked version of Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation, you’ll notice that there’s a real lack of good POI information about our Malaysian roads. Petrol kiosks, banks etc etc. There’s nothing there.

Well, nothing that we don’t already know, that’s why MalSingMaps and MalFreeMaps are so popular here. The community has taken it into our own hands to make things better for us.

So here’s what Google has given to us for us to help ourselves get a good quality set of maps in the Google eco-system. In Map Maker, Google has provided us with a fairly (I use that term loosely here) recent set of satellite pictures and road maps that they have procured from their partners (I think it’s TeleAtlas, iirc). It is for the community to share POIs and provide road updates that Google may expose in the official Google Maps later on.

Note that this is not the only way POIs can be created in Google Maps. Businesses should always be encouraged to add their business listings in Google Places and information submitted there will naturally show up on Google Maps too (and if you’re a business owner or know any, you really should tell them about this). But that mee rebus stall that’s still being run by a septuagenarian at the 5 foot corner of OCBC down in Uptown? Fat hope getting him to use a calculator, much less a computer hooked up to the Internet.

That’s where we (the community) come in. We can easily add on information to Google Maps and we can also actively moderate the information that has been submitted by others. The moderation bit is important: I had personally fell victim to misinformation that was posted via Google Map Maker. Some idiot created a POI called “Kuala Lumpur International Airport” right next to Jalan Kuchai Lama and I almost went off on a wild goose chase into the heart of KL when I should have been headed to the airport. After that, I went on to Map Maker and requested for the POI to be deleted and it was, after a few days.

Why should we support Google Maps?

I know that some of you prefer to have offline maps rather than using Google Maps/Navigation. But IMHO, online maps are the future. I really don’t buy the reason that you fear your data usage going over the top if you use Google Navigation to drive around town. Most of us using Android already have data plans (for me, Android is useless without data). And I have driven the entire day using GPRS/EDGE to feed Google Navigation, it was loading smoothly the whole day and I didn’t even notice a spike in data usage when checking against 3G Watchdog.

And yes, there’re other competing options too. I personally know that Waze, for example, is a competing service that relies on community-driven data. But I’ve used Waze and I’m extremely pessimistic about it being able to get off the ground. It relies on user to contribute basic things such as roads and paths and when I tried to edit the data I collected while driving back to Batu Gajah (hometown), I found myself staring at a huge path of barren land without even a reference point as to where I can start from. Whereas, Google Map Maker has a solid starting point with the commercial maps that they licensed. Building structures, roads, they’re all there.

I’ve started using Map Maker actively to populate POIs in my own neighborhood. It’s an impossible task to do alone so I hope I’ve done a good enough job of selling the rest of y’all on this as well. And get this: you don’t have to be an Android user to take an interest in this. Google Maps is available for iPhone, BB, Symbian and yes, even Window Mobile. It’s relevant to all smartphone platforms available in Malaysia! So please, spread the word. Adding POIs and doing some moderating in an area you’re familiar with is really not too much trouble. With enough contributions, we might even take over some “1st world countries” right south of us

Some links:

Google Map Maker
Map Maker Forums
Map Maker Forums for Malaysia!!
Tutorials on using Map Maker

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Glancing through my feeds, some comments seem to be centered around the theme “you’re just a web application peddler, what makes you think you can handle the complexity of maintaining a full-fledged OS?” (Sorry, I tried looking for references to where I read these comments but I can’t find ‘em right now).

Well, a husband and wife outfit can do it. Any other questions?

But still, the question of how would Google design its OS is a pretty interesting question. I kind of agree to this statement in their announcement:

However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era wheren there was no web.

Some may see it as a targeted broadside at Windows, but I see it more as a reflection of every single desktop system I’ve used thus far. Integration to the web from the desktop gets as far as a browser window running on your desktop and a few plasmoids/widgets/gadgets drawing on public APIs on social networking sites. At the end of the day, the mentality is still “I’m a standalone desktop, connected to the net”.

So here’s my interpretation and some pure conjecture about how Chrome OS would be designed, based on the clues they’ve left behind:

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

Nice to see that the kernel itself is still a sacred cow. Means that Google wants to remain abstracted from the hardware, for the most part. The new windowing system was a cause for concern for people seeking congruence with the status quo in Linux. Yes, if Google were to come up with it’s own “ChromeX”, it’d probably break compatibility with every single windowing toolkit in town.

It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; unless they really have no use for “windows” in its current state. Remember, Google is “just” a web application peddler. Practically every single one of their current application assets is a web application. So my guess here is that the new windowing system would be a drawing engine running on a bare metal kernel doing nothing but to render web pages as fast as any desktop system renders applications right now.

Think about it: your current desktop view as a web page? That’s already been done to death by now. Click on the shortcut to mail? A new <div> tag pops up with Gmail embedded within. The same happens for Facebook, Twitter and any other web-based app you care to remember. The thing to remember is, all these will happen beyond the confines of a browser window. The web app is your window to the world in Chrome OS.

Yeah, that’ll alienate all the traditional window-based GUI developers for sure. But think a while: is the population of web developers any smaller than that of desktop application developers? You’re swapping one developer community for another, and I can tell you a HTML “Hello World” app is a helluva lot easier than a QT one. Complex concepts such as IPC would no longer exist as we know it, replaced by a rather familiar (to a web developer) Javascript cross-domain eventing model.

And however screwed the web is right now in terms of web standards currently, is it any worse than what we have in the traditional desktop world? We’ve got Windows and Linux. And within Linux, we’ve got KDE, Gnome, XFCE ad infinitum. And none of them even look nice when you cross ‘em, if you can at all.

Some people accuse of Google of randomly throwing out toys everytime you get a haircut and not really having a strategy or focus on the bottom line besides AdSense. But if you care to look at Google’s activities recently, it does show a marked effort to push towards a common direction:

1. Google is making a huge push for the browser community to move towards HTML 5. To the extent where some are accusing them of manipulating the standards process to get what they want in. With HTML 5, multimedia capabilities would be built right into the browser engine, removing one huge blocker for having the browser as your desktop.

2. Total reliance on the Internet is all fun and games until that connection is lost. Then what?

   Says Mike Elgan. True. Then again, the last few times I was without internet access, I didn’t really see the point turning on the computer at all. In any case, Google has the beginnings of having that covered as well. Presenting Google Gears. Gears, in essence, is a caching application engine that allows you to run your apps offline (amongst other things). It even has its own embedded database.

3. Sounds like all these web applications are gonna take up a quite a bit of bandwidth. But Google is even tackling the social engineering bit now, actively encouraging web developers to make the web go faster. After all, it needs more web applications being able to run as fast as native desktop apps if it’s going to make this work.
4. Many were surprised when Google released Chrome the web browser. However, many of us quickly came to appreciate the minimalist UI, the raw speed of rendering and Javascript, and most of all the quiet elegance of it all. Even more surprises came when Google started actively pushing it to IE6 users, reminding them that they’re using an obsolete browser and they really should consider upgrading. Perhaps the powers-that-be in Google are growing impatient waiting for the old weezer to die a natural death, knowing that its continued preponderance would just delay the groundwork for it to roll out its pièce de résistance?

Now, it’s not that Google has gotten all the pieces of the puzzle in place yet, if they’re really trying for something as audacious as this. Apart from GMail and Maps, none of the other Google apps really cut it as a complete replacement for its desktop counterparts. And there’s a pretty significant percentage of the general populace who’d rather let their social security number get indexed on Bing than to allow Google to have access to all the data currently sitting on their desktops. Myself, I don’t think I’d use it either, I’m too much in love with my KDE setup right now. But it was just technically stimulating to try to visualize how the PhDs in Google would strategize something like this.

Oh. And what about games on Chrome OS? Hmmm. I don’t know, actually. Maybe Google’d just buy up Nintendo: “Here. Your Wii stick. Now go wank on it somewhere far away while we concentrate on our world domination.”

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One wonders though, what advantages would it bring for Google to be able to index every single online event in real time. Personally, I’d rather that Google spends its R&D dollars continuously improving contextual searches over being able to cover more stuff by the second. It’s good that Bing is getting increased market share (even if it seem to be at Yahoo’s expense); increased competition only brings about more innovation.

And as for expectations that Google (and all other search engines for that matter) should in fact be able to index by the second to be “good enough” for users, the ideal response would be this little rant by Louis CK:

My favorite comment: “How long does it take for the world to owe him something he didn’t know exist 30 seconds ago?”. Touche.

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