@morbiuswilters said:
WTF is it?
Google Wave is like "hosted" email, combined with chat and a bunch of other tools. It's HTML/Js with inline editing and real time character-by-character transmission, with an API flexible enough to embed the entire UI in webpages and such. The video is a lot cooler than anything I have to say, but anyway... Googling it would bring up a feature list.
@morbiuswilters said:
Can't use it so I can't say, but the page you linked makes it look, uh, unoriginal.
Google Voice gives me the ability to have a completely free phone service. (Which I now have as of last Tuesday... saving me around $100/month) Whenever someone leaves a voicemail, it can also transcribe the message and email and/or SMS the message to you immediately. It has a couple other relatively original features.
@morbiuswilters said:
Code seems to exist solely to host shitty, shitty projects.
Any open code repository will have garbage, by its very nature. The point is that its nice to have a hosted code service available which is better than sf. If the content sucks, that's because people are making bad content, it doesn't mean the service is bad. Besides, I have found a few projects there which have been useful.
@morbiuswilters said:
How does it differ from tagging in any of a zillion other photo album apps?
It matches similar faces -- so if I tag my friend "John" in a picture, it'll pick him out of every other picture I have hosted and automatically tag him there too. It's better at it than one might expect.
@morbiuswilters said:
I was unimpressed with site creator.
I only mention it because it's infinitely better than any other option I've seen for non programmers to create a site. Embedding widgets (like a blog, calendar, etc) is awesome. Nothing else does that well, is at all usable, and not horrendously ugly (not to mention free). Maybe "cool" is a stretch for the actual functionality, but I do think it's cool they provide such a service since no other decent ones exist.
@morbiuswilters said:
Never used Google Earth but the flight simulator looks a lot lamer than a real one.
It is. But it works with the *actual* globe, not some unrealistic simulation. It's not one of their "real" products, but I'd say it's a bit cool. At least for some people. I don't like it much myself...
@morbiuswilters said:
I've seen, like, a few useful OSS projects come out of Google. The summer of code stuff just seems retarded.
A couple good things have come out of summer of code. I can't give examples off the top of my head, and I don't care enough to look them up. But there have been a few occasions I've used something developed in that program. Anyway, giving essentially interns the funds and opportunity to develop open source programs of their choice is a pretty cool thing to do. And Google Wave is open source, BTW. They also do wonders to promote open source, which IMO is a big deal.
@morbiuswilters said:
As noted, Google is an ad company
Obviously I know that. But not all their products are innundated with ads, and the ones which do have them are tasteful. Remember the web back in the day -- with those stupid flashing, moving, popup nightmares... I like that google (an ad company) doesn't do that, and frankly I'd rather have minimal, unobtrusive (and sometimes even helpful!) ads funding products I use rather than attaching a pricetag.
@morbiuswilters said:
Beer, the sound of my own voice, lasers, big explosions, fast cars, boobs.
None of those are original in the slightest, and anyway, I definitely wouldn't use "cool" to describe them.
Of course, cutting edge science is cool, as are theoretical physics. Those don't really intersect with computing much, at least not in fields any of us will be handling any time soon. Computing, as a whole, is frankly pretty dull. "Cool" industry stuff for me constitutes anything original, amazingly useful, or profoundly better than all the alternatives. IMO, Google makes stuff like that a lot. I mean, compare them to every other major IT corporation on the planet.