As mentioned earlier, the initial concepts behind Google Wave appear to be too powerful to be ignored. As it could be a revolutionary technology that bridges the gaps between email, chat, forum, blog, etc, it might change into a resource that all of us will pay attention to.

If you are interested, you can also request for a sandbox account by signing up here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

Will provide more updates soon after I start playing around with the sandbox environment.

This is the first time that Google is taking Microsoft head on in its territory, ie the Operating Systems. Microsoft Windows currently holds 85% of the market share and this will surely create a dent in this share.

With this move, Google has also attempted to capitalize on the fact that most users who upgraded to Vista, the latest version of Microsoft’s OS, are quite disappointed with its poor performance. With no option for them to seamlessly downgrade to XP and with the next version not planned at least until October of this year, it appears that Google has given the right response to Microsoft.

It is interesting to note that Google started with its key area of focus ie. Search. Microsoft launched Bing earlier this year and it has emerged as a strong competitor to Google Search. Microsoft started with its key area of focus ie. Operating Systems. Now with Google’s Chrome announcement, it appears that they are trying the reverse of what Microsoft is trying.

So each one is trying to step into the strong hold of the other. While some believe that this competition will result in better technology, others believe that Google might start interfering with the privacy of the desktop. Eg. Will the users be forced to see sponsored links when they search for their documents in their machines?

One advantage might be that Chrome might really not be a PC based OS, but a variation with an extremely thin client sitting on the PC leveraging the distributed applications available online already. This way there will be a single sign on into the PC as well as mail, chat, documents, applications, phone, etc.

The news is that it will initially target Netbooks, the smaller version of the laptops. The plan appears to take into consideration that Windows OS is extremely huge in size and slow down the Netbooks which are already low in processing power. In addition another issue is that XP is the recommended operating system that ships with most netbooks today, but IE6 is the browser that comes with XP and IE6 browser has lots of issues with reference to CSS.

It will be very interesting to see this space, especially with reference to the fact that Google had announced their vision of Google Wave earlier this year.

All roads appear to lead to better technology for the future. We will do our best to keep up with the pace.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google launched the Google I/O 2009 in San Fransisco yesterday. As a part of this launch, Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering from Google gave some very interesting insights into his thoughts on where the future of the internet could be.

To begin with they were big on HTML 5.0, which is still yet to mature as a protocol. It is still in early stages – more on the current draft version of this at HTML5 on W3C Website .

The five main concepts of HTML 5.0 are:

- Canvas tags

- Video tags

- Geolocation

- Application caching and database

- Web Workers

I will soon write about each of these features and details about the same.

Btw, none of the leading browsers today have adopted HTML 5.0 yet. Mozilla might be the first one to be there with their Firefox 3.5 launch. Chrome, Safari and Firefox should be there very soon, while IE is expected to be the last to adopt HTML 5.0 due to its extensive dependency on corporate users to adopt this.

In the same conference, Vic also introduced Google Wave .

Google Wave is aimed at being a revolutionary concept that makes it easier for people to communicate – in other words, replace emails and IMs with Wave. ie. This will support both synchronous (IM) and asynchoronous (Email) communication within the same application.

Will try to provide more details about Google Wave in the near future, but I encourage everyone to sign up for a beta access into Google Wave as it might be the Web 3.0, if it blends well with the HTML 5 protocols.

One thing that was quite interesting after this presentation was the fact that Google was quite silent about the RDFa protocol. It has to be noted carefully that Google is pushing this protocol quite hard and is trying to tag everything available online, in order to have more meaningful meta data available.  Will try to come up with a separate blog that explains RDFa and its features.

If Google pushes Wave to be HTML5 ready, gets Chrome on time and integrates RDFa to be built into Wave, it might actually lead to privacy questions, but we have seen how people with money and power have handled that part easily in the past.

In anycase, it all sounds like good news for the future of technology on the internet.