Peter S Magnusson

Some 4000 Google I/O attendees gave a standing ovation at the end of this morning’s keynote pre-launch of “Google Wave”. Google I/O attracts a reasonably savvy crowd, and this was not a Reality Distortion effect. What Google announced this morning is significant. It is the first candidate killer application for the Fourth Wave of Computing.

Google Wave is a smooth hybrid of email, instant messaging, photo sharing, discussion forums, wiki, and document management. It is best described in the words of the brother of its lead developer, who also delivered the bulk of the keynote:

In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content – it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Lars Rasmussen, The Official Google Blog, 5/28/2009

The features are impressive, and the demonstration was awe-inspiring. We were treated to a symphony of technologies. What Google is cooking up is a blend of technologies and trends, and is not entirely simple to dissect.

First, let us relate this to the cloud computing revolution. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, Google may have upwards a million servers in their datacenters. They are part of a trend towards the world having just a handful of “computers” – controlled by a handful of (for-profit, privately controlled, loosely regulated) corporations. Besides Google, the contenders are Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

The above figure is how I see it. We have gone from big-box, to big-box-with-terminals, to boxes-of-all-sizes, to the cloud. The cloud is new and a little harder to summarize, but I think the essential part is that it’s lots of snippets of code, talking to huge data sets (where reads are cheap and writes are expensive), and lots (and lots) of clients.

The notion of “massive distributed” is still being anachronistically bandied about, but this will be phased out, and we’re not likely to refer to these systems in any of these terms in the future. Since we’re only talking about a handful of systems (probably just three), and they will all have slightly different behaviors, and they’re not likely to happily play with each other, we will end up referring to them by individual proper nouns – analogous to how we today think of “Windows”, “Mac”, and “Linux”. Individuals, companies, and institutions will have to chose which system they primarily align themselves with.

Google App Engine shows the way most clearly for this future. There are many ways that GAE is different from some flavor of hosted computing, but to me one of the most striking is ramp-up time. GAE essentially limits you to the top of the abstraction layers. Think of it this way:

A traditional server (e.g. a LAMP setup) is shown on the left. Everything that needs to start in some way is in red. If I’m running on a virtual server in the “cloud”, and I need a new server, I need to boot it up. That takes about 5 minutes, give or take.

Now consider the stack on the right. Here I’ve restricted you to using just one flavor of application code – say, Python, talking to the Google GAE API. The only thing that needs to be “started” is to load some data into the interpreter. And odds are good that that data is already in the cache. The response time for this is about 0.05 seconds, give or take.

The difference in response time is thus about a factor of 5000. In other words, the GAE-style “cloud” ramps up (and down) compute service upwards of four magnitudes faster than a traditional server approach. That is not a quantitative difference, that is a qualitative difference.

This is the key behind Google Wave working. The real-time communication and scalable usage model presupposes a GAE-style cloud.

There’s a lot more to say about this topic. In particular the increase in performance in Javascript to the point where it can be compiled to as if it were a VM comes to mind.

But I need some sleep. Let me close for the night with a shout-out to my Nordic brethren: the Rasmussen brothers join the list of highly distinguished technology innovators who originally come from Denmark. The list includes Bjarne Stroustrup (developed C++ while at Bell labs), Anders Hejlsberg (was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead on the team that developed C#), Janus Friis (co-founded KaZaA and Skype), and Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP). So not only did most of Wave 2 code relate to Danish innovation (C++), and Wave 3 (C# and PHP), but now also Wave 4!

My club cancelled indoor soccer pickup at the last minute – so much for a much-needed blow-off-steam opportunity and some beers with a soccer buddy afterwards.

So, fresh from listening to keynotes at Web 2.0 in SF, I found myself settling for a nice beer and catching up on the latest 1 trillion initiative with a NYT at a bar, ordering some too-many-carbs food.

A gentleman had settled down on my left. He made some comments about the food I had ordered and that there was too much food. Well, of course there was. This is America. There’s always too much food. He asked if maybe he could have some – or at least that’s what I thought he asked. I smiled and said “no I don’t think so”, and went back to my NYT.

Shortly after there was some debacle. The man was trying to communicate with the bartender, who in turn was quietly laying down the law.

“What’s the problem,” I asked. “I think he’s on drugs or something,” the bartender answered. I looked at the man again and thought some suitable variation of “there but for the grace of God …” and told the bartender, “don’t worry, I’ll pick up his tab.”

The bartender took a second look at me and asked if I was sure, and I said Yeah, I got you covered.

The man thanked me profusely and we started talking.

He was black, and heavily accented. We started talking a bit about how tough things are in the world. I pointed to the cover of the NYT article I was reading, and made the typical whitey comment about how great it was that a black was in charge. Half Nigerian, I said.

My new friend glared at me. Half Kenyan, he said. I’m related to him. (Distant relation I would assume, but I didn’t ask.)

I was sure Obama’s dad was Nigerian so I whipped out my trusty iPhone.

Sure enough, more fool me. Obama’s Dad was a Luo, from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province.

“40 miles from my village,” my friend told me and pointed at himself.

Well it so happens I’ve travelled in Kenya and love the place. I told my friend about my favorite places – the markets in Nairobi, the amazing fruit stands, the beaches south of Mombassa, the Maasai – whom I was so amazed and impressed by.

My friend grinned so wide it must have hurt. “I am Maasai,” he said, and pointed to his ear, which had been partly cut off in a ritual when he was six.

“Have you killed a lion?” I asked. He turned serious, and said “yes.” “Were you scared?” He laughed – “very!”, and then laughed again.

“That is totally cool,” I said. “I’ve never had a beer in a bar in San Jose with somebody who has killed a lion with his bare hands.”

He turned serious. “I lied, I have never killed a lion.”

“I know,” I said, and smiled. “But it’s a good story.”

We talked about how he got here. He was hard on his luck. His father had been educated and he was sent to the US to go to college. As best as I could figure, things had gone reasonably well, graduating from college with degrees in both Mathematics and, as I understood it, Materials Science. Seems like it went well until about 10 years ago, and now he had been out of work for a few years, and running out of options.

“Have you thought of going back to Kenya?” I asked, but he clearly didn’t want to do that. “What will you do?” I asked him. He gestured at the floor – “I can clean.”

“What? You have college degrees. You’re a Maasai!”

He was overcome with emotion. He excused himself and walked away for a while. When he got back I told him I would stop asking so many hard questions. Let’s talk about Kenya. So we did.

Then we talked about the state of the world.

He gestured to me, himself, and others at the bar. “America is strong.” He said. “We are strong. America will survive.”

Amen, brother. Amen.

Google may have lost the debate on whether they are violating their “do no evil” motto, but they’re still a friend of the small guy in other areas.

Today they announced their Measurement Lab, an effort to make more data available for research on Internet performance issues.

Hidden in this set of announcements is Glasnost, an effort to estimate how much your ISP is interfering with your Bittorrent traffic. Of course, the US has no laws on the books to prevent your ISP from pretty much doing what they want with your traffic. The article on their initial results notably shows that the US is the least free country in the world in this regard – at least as far as data is available.

Furthermore, they demonstrate quantitatively that when Comcast testified before congress on the matter and claimed they needed to do this for performance reasons, the lack of variability between low-audience and high-audience periods demonstrates that (gasp!) the cable companies were flat out lying.

They had published much of these results in October at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2008, but the Google announcement gives their result much higher visibility.

Which, no doubt, is very much Google’s intent.

[UPDATE] The Reuters story made no mention of the fact that the researchers had disproved the notion that the Cable companies needed to do this. Imagine that.

I go hunting for truly free, yet decent, antivirus software for Windows, and I find four reasonable alternatives
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I’ll be attending the Program for the Future events on Monday and Tuesday, and blogging a bit about the events, as well as being on one of the panels. The conference is prompted by the anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s “mother of all demos” which took place on December 9th, 1968.

The event itself is mostly remembered as being a huge leap forward in not just what the concept of a computer is, but a manifest demonstration of how one might go about building it. Doug demonstrated early incarnations of the first computer mouse, tele- and video-conferencing, e-mail, hypertext, and shared-screen collaboration, as well as more geeky firsts such as object addressing and dynamic file linking. And that’s just the highlights. (The phrase “mother of all demos” was first used by Steven Levy in 1994 when documenting the history of the Macintosh.)

What is generally forgotten is the context for the work. As expressed in the original flier for the event: “The system is being used as an experimental laboratory for investigating principles by which interactive computer aids can augment intellectual capability.”

Collective Intelligence (”CI”), or Collective IQ, is when the behavior of a group of individuals exceeds the cognitive abilities of any single individual – at least that’s one way to try to define it. Exactly what CI means remains a key topic of CI. Today the discussion is part of the “wisdom of the crowds” thoughtbase as well as (more vaguely) the rise of global social media.

Lord knows I have opinions about the topic. But let’s first see how the talks and discussions unfold. There is a very impressive line-up of smart and thoughtful people in the program, spanning locations at Stanford, SRI, and the SJ Tech Museum. Speakers include Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Malone, Peter Friess, Paul Resnick, Andy van Dam, and Robert Taylor.

This will be fun.

World of Warcraft shows a new blend of the classical narrative – a mix of the linear personal viewpoint and the communal persistent world. It portends new forms of entertainment.
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The day before the election, online odds-making markets peg Obama’s chances at 90%. But what’s more interesting is how correlated those odds have been with the stock market over the past year. If the market had not crashed, would Obama have won? (Update: McCain agrees: he pointed out in an interview today (12/14) that his poll numbers dropped with the Dow.)
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Two days before the election, yours truly correctly predicts that it will be over very early in the evening
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