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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Now perhaps, eventually, we’d get to know each other a little better and want to correspond with each other using emails. This is where I’ve stumbled upon a troublesome little catch.

When you follow a stranger’s Buzz stream, you don’t get to see his email address unless he opens it up to public view (improbable and not advisable). There doesn’t seem to be any Direct Message (ala Twitter) capabilities, so there’s no way for us to privately message each other to exchange non-public information such as email addresses. It’s rather dumb as well to ask for this information in a public Buzz message as everybody else can see it.

I can understand that Google folks may think that a DM feature may be redundant, as it duplicates what emails are supposed to achieve. But yet, this particular use case remains unfulfilled.

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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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Some of the comments surprise me, however. There seems to be this presumption that having something that’s OpenSource means you must “work with the community”. The GPL or any other OpenSource license defines the usage of the code. As long as you abide by the terms set in the licenses, you’re safe. Nowhere in the licenses do I see that you have to be part of a particular community to be OpenSource. The nature of OpenSource licenses are such that they encourage community-building (share and share alike) and a community is about the most efficient distribution model as well (especially with the lack of an official sales distribution channel). But it sure ain’t a prerequisite to join the club.

And there’s that word “community”. The word sounds warm and fuzzy, like everybody lives in a nudist colony and exchange kisses and hugs every time we meet. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a brutal world out there. I’ve been tracking flame wars between KDE and Gnome since someone decided that GPL wasn’t a liberal enough license for them and started writing a new widget library (corrected by Rahul on this). RMS poking his nose the Linux mailing lists every once in a while correcting everyone on the actual name “GNU/Linux” was pretty nice flame fodder for a while, and then it got old. Recently, there’s this whole tempest about including Mono into Linux distros by default. Debate is good, and coming to blows after a pint too many build stronger bonds, but it sure doesn’t mean that one has to take part in it.

Google has plenty of money / resources and may think that it can go solo with this one. And they are free to do so if they wish. They will still need to release the source code when they release regardless. Fine, they may decide to create a permanent fork of certain components or even use their own versioning system, making it hard for the rest of the “community” to take advantage of improvements. That goes both ways; it’ll be difficult for them to gain improvements from the other contributors as well. Apple did that with their WebKit fork of KHTML, where they did a periodic code dump into the original KDE source tree making it difficult for anybody to comprehend what enhancements were made. Yeah, it was grating on the rest of the KDE developers, but completely legal. But let’s take a step back now. Has Google been pulling a lot of this shit often? I really don’t think so. They maintain Google Code, which is being used for exactly what the “community” wants: community-based development. They announced Google Wave, and the next thing you know the Wave Protocol site is up for all to see. As far as being part of the community for development purposes is concerned, I think they’ve been doing that all this while and doing it better than most large companies.

So, what else do these communities want from Google?

It’s disappointing that they’ve chosen to go it alone this far rather than working with the existing communities – Joe Brockmeier

I think Intel made the right call with Moblin to put the effort in the hands of the Linux Foundation and try to work with the larger community – Joe BrockMeier

So, they want Google to work with “existing communities”. Well, it’s an OS they’re working on, and unless they start a complete new branch of the Linux kernel, I’m pretty sure they’d be working with the kernel team and submitting patches and all that. What other “existing communities” does Joe want them to work with? Ubuntu? His own Novell / OpenSuSE? As in, ride on your own product and endorse your product as “the preferred distro for Google’s OS”?

So let me get this straight: It’s not enough that you get the direct results of Google’s development effort, you want them to park themselves behind you and help you market your product as well?

Wake up, guys, this is competition. The distro stakeholders might be all pally when it comes to talking down the competition (Microsoft, in this case) and sharing code, but apart from that, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Chrome OS, as another Linux distro, would be operating at the same level with Red Hat/Ubuntu/Debian/Slackware/ad infinitum. And apart from the common code that they share with each other, the only other thing that they should share is the common desire to rip each other to pieces.

Now that’s capitalism.

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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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Edit 2009-07-12: Chromium now supports Flash plugins.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Mozilla and Firefox. Firefox effectively paved the way for competition in the browser monopoly scenario we had a few years back. Without it, I doubt web applications development would have advanced the way it did.

But I seriously abhor using Firefox right now. On my Kubuntu Jaunty laptop, my CPU utilization bottom-lines at 5-10% on average before firing up Firefox and shoots up to 30-40% after. Its memory issues are well-documented. Typing a URL in the address bar the first time after starting up causes the entire browser to freeze while it pulls up the address history. There have been experiments that show the Windows version of Firefox running faster on Wine than the native Linux versions.

Sad to say, what I have to put up with while using Firefox detracts way too much from the positives that it represents. I want out. I want a browser I can use without having to keep a timer on so that I know when to restart it 2-3 times a day. I want a browser I can middle-click 20 RSS entries in Google Reader in rapid-fire fashion without having it lock up on me.

There are many alternatives. Not many of them work too well. Konqueror has issues rendering sites, especially Google Apps which I use 50% of my online time. Arora slows down when I have more than 5 tabs open, for some reason. Rekonq doesn’t really show the speed that WebKit advertises. I have difficulty setting proxy settings in Midori, which I assume must be set in the global Gnome settings panel, which I don’t have due to me using KDE.

I’ve been hearing many good things about Google Chrome from my partner in work. It’s supposed to be blazing fast running Google Apps (duh, being developed by Google). I’ve been waiting eagerly waiting for the Linux version but no dice so far. Until the announcement on the Chromium blog came out. Alpha warnings be damned, I want it. And right now, I’m typing this blog entry on it.

Responses on the ‘net have been mixed. Practical usability is limited, according to some. For example, a blog commenter said “Honestly…. what can you do with a browser that supports no Flash?“. Well, I guess I don’t spend 90% of my time on YouTube and Yahoo flash games, so I don’t really share his views. I’ve got 15 tabs of various contents open in Chromium running right now and I’m happy with each and one of them. I use it on a daily basis to check mail, edit Google documents, read blogs and basically perform about 90% of the things I’d use a browser for.

Here’s a list of what Chromium in its current state is suited for:

1. Practically everything related to Google web applications. GMail, Reader, Calendar, Docs etc all work very well. Video chats on GTalk doesn’t work yet.
2. General surfing as long as you don’t need to view Flash videos. I read a ton of Linux and politics related blogs every day. It’s definitely good enough.
3. In general, it’s fine for Facebook and all the social networking sites I visit. Just not the Flash bits (which I don’t use anyway).

I wouldn’t use Chromium for:

1. Obviously, anything that relies on external plugins, as there’s no support for a plugin architecture yet.
2. Any site that requires HTTP authentication. Auth dialog boxes don’t work yet. The issue has been documented here, help vote for it to be solved, please!
3. Complicated bookmark management, it’s rather kludgy right now. Importing bookmarks from Firefox works though.
4. Going through proxies that are authentiated using HTTP auth dialog boxes. I get by this by using Firefox to authenticate against the proxy and then continuing to browser using Chromium. Ugly hack.
5. Sites authenticated using SSL certificates are defnitely out.

Update: As of 22 June 2009, the daily builds has been supporting HTTP authentication. W00t!

Don’t expect it to be too stable. However, a particular tab crashing due to any issue would just manifest itself in a “Oh Snap!” error message in that particular tab and not bring down your entire browser due to its 1 process per tab architecture, which mitigates the impact of any bugs an awful lot.

So do I still use Firefox now? Well, I still need it for various tasks. Firebug is still essential for web development work. My Trac installations are authenticated using SSL certificates so I have to fallback to Firefox. Yes, I do unwind after work by watching some documentaries on YouTube so I’d need it for that as well. But in general, Firefox has been relegated to serving only 10% of my web browsing needs. I completely understand the fact that Firefox has a superset of features compared to Chrome/Chromium and that contributes significantly to the difference in experience. However, Firefox just doesn’t have a configuration that suits me right now and that’s why I need to shop around for alternatives.

Firefox will continue to be relevant to most of the web browsing world for a long time yet. I don’t expect Chrome to attain larger market share than Firefox in the near term. But it’s seriously looking more and more like its predecessor the Mozilla suite, which was evolved out of existence due to its bloat.

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