Google Wave launched - with the potential to replace email, blogging and more

Google Wave

Last week Google announced at their 'Google IO' developers conference something I'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot more over the next year, Google Wave.

How do I describe Google Wave?

It's basically a reinvention of how to electronically interact with other people and documents, done afresh from the ground up. It combines collaboration tools and document sharing and editing in what could well be the replacement for email, twittering, blogging, wiki's, teamsites, instant messaging and many other forms of disjointed communication.

You have to go and watch the Google Wave launch video, and although it runs to an hour and twenty minutes you'll soon realise why this could be the "next big thing".



Google have apparently been working on this for the last two years, and although the software is still in a pre-beta state it's still a fairly impressive demo.

Google say they will launch Google Wave later on this year but the Wave APIs and interface protocol have already been made freely available under an open source licence.

One to watch methinks ...

(and I'm not the only one to think this, I just noticed that there's already 3,200 RSS subscribers to the Google Wave Developer Blog)

OnOneMap - a great Google mashup if you're looking to buy a house

OnOneMap

Here's a great site that I came across recently if you're looking for a new home, it's a mashup of Google maps with estate agency data to show you all* the houses for sale in a selected area.

It's really been well implemented with lots of Ajax popups, you can zoom in and out and pan the map, restrict the houses shown according to number of bedrooms, price, etc; show overlays of mobile phone masts, supermarkets, secondary schools and (as at about a week ago) flood plain information.

One of the really neat features I like is that at any page you can subscribe to an RSS feed (see earlier explanation I wrote on 'what is RSS and how can I use it') of all properties on your current map page and price range. So here for example is a view of properties for sale in our home village of Wrestlingworth and here's the corresponding RSS feed.

I only have a couple of minor gripes that the mobile phone database seems a bit patchy (there's a mast on the edge of our village that's not shown) and that there seems to be a problem with secondary schools not being displayed in Bedfordshire (which is probably due to Bedfordshire having a 3-tier infant/middle/senior school system not the normal 2-tier arrangement).

* Although I say "all properties" in your area for sale, in reality there's some time lag as to when properties appear on the site.
Running the same address search for properties for sale in my village on the better known rightmove.co.uk I found two more properties that haven't appeared on ononemap, and conversely one on onemap that wasn't on rightmove - so pays your money, take your choice I guess.

Unfortunately ononemap doesn't yet show overseas houses so you can't use it to look for your 'dream home in the sun' !

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Categories: CoolWebsites, Google, Map, Web2

With ReviewMe you get paid for blogging (or not as the case may be)

Review Me - Bloggers paid to write reviews

I came across an interesting new Blogging community site tonight, Review Me where Bloggers are paid by advertisers to write about their article or site.

Here's there explanation of how it works:

1. Submit your site for inclusion into the ReviewMe publisher network. Begin by creating a free account


2. If approved, your site will enter the ReviewMe marketplace and clients will purchase reviews from you.


3. You decide to accept the review or not.


4. You will be paid $20.00 to $200.00 for each completed review that you post on your site.

It's an interesting idea and I can see how it's trying to capture another different aspect of web social networking so I decided to create an account and give it a go and register the Blog with keywords such as Brittany, Gite, France, etc and a nice snappy description that might entice advertisers to send me the odd dollar or two.

Unfortunately the blog was not accepted and the rather terse FAQ answer as to why simply said

To be accepted into ReviewMe, a blog must meet a minimum number of citations, subscribers, and traffic. If your blog is rejected, you may want to return in a few months' time and submit again.

So instant fortune has escaped me again ...

Be interesting to see if it actually catches or is just another here today, gone tomorrow concept.