Google announced last week that it will discontinue support for Wave, and I’m not surprised. At launch, the hype was huge and everyone was excited to bother their friends for Wave invites. But when I finally got mine, I opened Wave and thought, “What’s this? What am I supposed to do with this?”

The Wave interface is not as intuitive as what I had hoped for in a Google product. When I’m conversing in a wave, I’m never sure where I’m supposed to click or what I’m supposed to select. Judging by popularity, I don’t think I was the only one who thought so.

It’s not that Wave doesn’t have great features. Real-time playback of conversations looks cool.  Google pushed Wave’s spellcheck that checks based on context in addition to spelling. Once you get over the learning curve, Wave is pretty cool. But for some reason, not enough people found Wave useful enough to warrant continuing support for it.

There’s a simple thing I think Google could have done to increase adoption rates for Wave, and that is to have chosen a better name.

One of Google’s product strategies, it seems to me, is to pick a service you can describe in one word and do it really really well. A well-named, simple, straightforward product minimizes the learning curve, so people know right away what they can expect to use the product for. Search, Gmail, Calendar, and Maps all exemplify this strategy. You know Latitude will deal with location. Even Picasa suggests it has something to do with pictures. Wave, on the other hand, tries to do a lot without priming the user with what to expect by using a good name. (Buzz is another example of a Google product that tries to do a lot with a vague name.)

I can hear the disagreement now: “But if Google comes out with a new, innovative service, it can’t help but pick a new name for it.” Yes, that’s true. It’s not that I think Google should stick to improving existing services and forget innovation. My point is that with an innovative product with a steep learning curve, a descriptive name will go the furthest to help customers figure out how they are expected to use it.

There are two websites in particular that I think do this really well (though they take the strategy to the extreme). The first is a to-do list tool at NowDoThis.com. The page is incredibly simple. All you see is a command, a button labeled ‘done,’ and a link to edit the list of commands. When you click the ‘done’ button, it shows you the next item on the list. There isn’t even a title on the page; the title is implied in the url. The site does exactly one thing very well, with no fuss and no frills.

The other site is DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com. Like NowDoThis, it features a plain white screen with one simple tool, in this case one that checks if a given site is down. This is simplicity to an extreme, without even a button to submit the form (instead, “or just me?” is a link to submit the form). I love the way they incorporate the tool and instructions to use it into one sentence.

One of the benefits to designing products this way is that once you have a simple tool, you can incorporate it into other services. I can put a small Google Maps widget on my business site to highlight my location. I can open NowDoThis in the bookmarks sidebar in Firefox for an in-browser to-do list. To Google’s credit, it is possible to embed a Wave in another site; I just haven’t seen it done more than once or twice.

I predict that Google will integrate Wave’s best features into Talk in the near future. Unlike Wave, Talk is simple and well-named; even before you open it, you know what you can do with it. I think Talk will benefit from Wave features like context-sensitive spellcheck and easy media sharing.

The ironic part is that I’ve used Wave this summer more than I did all of last year. My friends and I found it was a great way to share data in our Skyped Dungeons and Dragons campaign. We used it to share initiative rolls, HP and pictures of the monsters we faced. We could have also incorporated dice-rolling widgets. However, we could have done the same with a shared Google Doc, which is probably what we will have to do when Wave support is lost for good.

Oh well. I’m not crushed.

I’ve been using a Mac for the past three years, so when the slick Windows 7 Snap feature came out, I admit, I was a little sad I wasn’t in the market for a new Windows OS. Enter ShiftIt, a utility for Mac which replicates the behavior of Snap. The Shiftit dropdown menu sits in my menu bar, and I can resize windows using either the dropdown menu or shortcuts. I use it primarily when I’m writing outlines for papers, so I can have my outline, notes, and research windows sized well together.

Admittedly, you don’t need this app to resize windows such that you can see more than one at once, but it makes the process much more zippy, accurate, and convenient.

(ShiftIt works with Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6.)

It’s the age of criticizing PowerPoint, and everybody’s doing it. Last November I wrote a wildly popular post on why I have trouble learning from Powerpoint presentations in college classes. This week, the New York Times published an article dramatizing the problem, writing how Powerpoint is hurting the United States’ war in Iraq. Officers’ time is too tied up in making bullet-pointed storyboards, to the extent that some of them spend more time on Powerpoint than anything else. I think the NYT chose the example of armed forces to make this story especially dramatic, and it goes a little over the top. The article even mentions that Obama was briefed with PowerPoint slides in last fall’s Afghan Strategy Review, as if to say that because the President sees it, PowerPoint is a scourge that has penetrated our deepest levels of government. Still, the article says out loud what many of us are afraid to: everyone is bored by Powerpoint presentations, and yet everyone expects them to be used.

I try to avoid the cursed Office product as much as possible. Sadly, a few of my professors actually require Powerpoint decks for class presentations. Having pity on my classmates, I try to make my presentations as interesting as possible. I have a rule of thumb, and it goes like this: when I consider what I need to include in each slide, I ask myself, if I were making this presentation without the aid of a projector, which visuals would I print out in hard copy because they’re that necessary to understanding the topic? These images, along with a caption or two, are the only things I’ll allow in my slide decks. If it’s not worth spending money to print out, it’s not worth wasting my audience’s time on. If there is something important to say, I think the best thing to do is just say it, and reserve the projector for images that aid understanding.

I think most people do not understand that their slide decks do not have to stand on their own. Instead, they copy half their speech into their slide deck, as though hearing it and reading it at the same time will increase the audience’s attention. This not only takes up more of the audience’s time, but the speaker also wastes more time making the presentation, as the officers quoted in the NYT article did. I think we’d save a lot of time in meetings if people would learn to just say what they wanted to say, instead of writing a storyboard about it.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when friends say, “I don’t know anything about computers.”

This sentence irks me for a couple reasons. The first is that it is blatantly not true. I’ve met folks who have never touched anything more complicated than a solar-powered calculator. Compared to them, my friends — who use their computers constantly for schoolwork and practically live on Facebook — have considerable technical experience. It is disheartening to hear how little they value their knowledge.

Moreover, the context in which I typically hear friends say, “I don’t know anything about computers,” is as an excuse when their computer does something unexpected, they don’t know what to do, and they would rather back off and let someone else fix it than try to solve the problem on their own. My friends are afraid of their own machines. I think this sentiment is a symptom of ongoing trends in the industry towards a closed-box style of consumer computer design.

Cory Doctorow explains it better than I can in his iPad rant on BoingBoing:

The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

[...] Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

While Apple’s closed-box style contributes to the ease of use which is the hallmark of Apple’s products, I’m afraid that it is changing consumer attitudes in a negative way. Apple wants to keep the inner workings of their products a secret to the point that they want to make it illegal for consumers to alter the software running on their own property. Preventing users from controlling the software on their own devices is dangerous for several reasons, but it scares me most because it discourages users from learning about their devices. In effect, Apple is profiting from its customers’ ignorance, and the consequence is that more of my friends profess, “I don’t know anything about computers.”

Apple’s products are a timely example, but other manufacturers are guilty too, and I think it’s the generation just now learning about technology that will suffer most for it. Curious kids will never be able to tinker with the insides of their iPads as they could with the Apple][+. I think we as technophiles have a responsibility to kids to pick up the slack. Get your kids a garage sale computer to take apart together. Find out if your teenager’s high school offers programming classes. Donate to or volunteer with groups such as TechBridge, which offers after-school programs in technology and engineering for underprivileged girls in Oakland, CA. But most importantly, make sure kids are not afraid of tinkering with technology. How else can they hope to make it better?

Here’s my latest computer animation project: Cage Puzzle. The assignment was to “create a unique world with its own rules: A world where what is possible, though seemingly impossible, is possible.” I chose the world of a little caged creature, with props in his cage with new rules he has to learn in order to get an award. This was animated in Autodesk Maya.

Here’s my third computer animation project. The assignment was to animate two walking figures such that they describe a particular kind of space. I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out, and I’d appreciate any comments or criticism.

I’m taking a computer animation course using Maya this semester, and our second project was due today. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I thought it was worth sharing here. The assignment was pretty vague; the professor basically wanted us to experiment with pushing and pulling, using the methods we’d used in the labs. I decided to go with a corkscrew.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions for improvement, I’d love to hear them. I will probably have to modify this animation anyway before I turn in my whole portfolio at the end of the semester.

I noticed today that as I frantically scribbled to keep up with my philosophy professor’s lecture, there was an audible hum of typing in the classroom. It was the first time I noticed that I could count more students using netbooks than notebooks to take notes in class.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to take notes with a pen and paper. As I’ve discussed previously, the act of writing helps cement the lecture material in my mind better than passive listening does, and studies have shown that it’s not just me [pdf]. Still, I know that my old-fashioned ways are quickly going out of style.

I don’t know if typing notes aids memory as well as taking notes on paper does, but I do know that it does not work for me. I decided at the beginning of last year that it would be nice to bring my laptop to class so that my notes would be neatly organized (and actually legible for once), and changed my mind after only one or two classes. I could never type fast enough to keep up with the professor, and every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board. It was a relief to have my Five Stars and Pentel R.S.V.P.s back at the end of that little experiment. Considering my negative experience, I wonder how my classmates can keep up. I know that not everyone learns the same way I do; maybe my peers don’t need notes as copious as mine in order to do well.

If notes are going digital soon anyway, maybe there is a technology that will make up for my ineptitude with typed notes. Tablet computers have been around for years, but I know only one person who uses one in class, and even then she types rather than using the stylus to take written notes. (Maybe Apple’s soon-to-be-announced tablet will bring tablet computers into more common use, the same way the iPhone has with smartphones.) There are also electronic pens which record your written notes for later uploading. I was able to test-write one such pen at MacWorld Expo last year, and it was all right. It would probably mesh well with my way of learning, but I don’t trust myself either to bring one pen to every class or to keep it charged. I’m also not sure if my busy schedule can accommodate the extra step of uploading the notes from the pen to my computer.

Of course, I’m making the assumption that my classmates are actually using their computers to take notes rather than goof off online, which is a huge leap of faith and a different rant entirely. But even though I’m not keeping up with the latest tech trends in note-taking, I’m doing what works best for my learning style, and I’m okay with that.

Cloud computing, with services such as Salesforce and Google Mail and Docs, is easily my favorite internet technology. The potential for scalable, affordable services online really excites me, and I definitely plan to enter that sector of industry when I get my degree. But cloud computing is fraught with pitfalls, too, as a few recent data disasters have shown.

Upsides:

• When my data is in the cloud, I can access it from everywhere. This becomes increasingly important the more devices you have. When I want to see my email from my personal computer, my iPod Touch, netbook, my lab computer, my eReader, and my phone, it’s a lot more convenient to keep that data in the cloud, rather than having to manually sync each device. This property has saved me more than once, too. When I took a train to New York City last spring and found that I had forgotten my ticket confirmation number in the rush to get out the door, I was able to pull it up on a public internet terminal and still catch my train.
• Cloud data is more secure than local data because it is backed up on someone else’s servers. If my office burns down, I’m still going to be able to access my email, and if the server goes down, there will be a dedicated team to fix the problem.
• Cloud computing is necessary for software as a service (SAAS) products, which can be very scalable and very profitable. When Salesforce gains a new client, they don’t have to come out and do a complicated database installation or train local IT on how to implement their product on local servers, or even make sure all the users’ terminals have the same operating system. The software is in the cloud and ready to go; all the local users need is a browser to access the database.
• The cloud has also ushered in an era of free applications such as Google Docs, which not only competes with expensive office suites but also enables easy document sharing: you don’t have to upload your presentation to send to your coworkers if your presentation already exists online. These programs are easy to use because there is no installation, and they’re compatible with almost all computers because they work through a browser.

Downsides:

• Your data might not be as safe as it sounds. Last month, as Microsoft performed an update on the servers that host data for T-Mobile Sidekick users, something went horribly wrong and all data in the cloud was lost. I don’t own a Sidekick, but I would have been outraged if this happened to me. The worst part is that there really wasn’t anything Sidekick users could do about it. While Microsoft “worked round the clock” to restore the lost information, they couldn’t possibly restore everything. Backups can fail. No server is 100% safe. So while your data might stand a better chance in the cloud, the more backups you have, including local backups, the safer you are.
• If the company you trust with your data goes down, you might lose it. Yahoo announced in April that it would close its free web-hosting site, Geocities. Last week every Geocities site officially became unavailable. While Yahoo gave plenty of warning in advance, it still hurts to find out that your website, something you consider your property, is going to be shut down no matter what you do. I’m sure plenty of Geocities users never had the chance to save their data. Whenever you upload content to 3rd party servers, you put your data in their hands, and there is always a danger that they will delete it without your permission.
• The flip side to the argument that 3rd parties will ignore your data is that they will pay attention to your data. Online banking is a form of cloud computing, because the bank offers a virtualized resource as a service over the internet. That’s great, but there is huge pressure on the bank to make  sure I’m the only one who can see that data and manipulate it. Likewise, if I send confidential email, I trust Google Mail not to let its employees or anyone else read it without my permission, but neither I nor they can absolutely guarantee it will never happen. There is always a danger of unsecured data with cloud computing.
• Cloud applications are primarily accessed through browsers, but browsers vary in terms of what technologies they support. While modern browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome adhere to web standards, the browser that dominates the market, Internet Explorer, sometimes makes its own rules, which web developers spend lots of time and money trying to stay ahead of. SAAS companies take a risk because they cannot guarantee the browser their client uses will be compatible with their software. Even scarier is the idea that Microsoft might decide that it doesn’t like the idea of Google Docs competing with its office suite and makes Internet Explorer incompatible with Google’s product.

So while cloud computing is exciting because of its scalability and versatility, it is also dangerous because it puts personal data into the hands of 3rd parties. I still think, however, that as people start using more and more devices in addition to personal computers on a regular basis, companies that utilize a cloud architecture to deliver their products will be the most successful.

Twitter is one of those double-edged swords of the internet community. While it can be a powerful tool for good, such when Iranian protesters tweeted their unrest in June, it can also be a tool for evil, judging by the amount of spam Twitter sends out. Still, I think one of the worst crimes Twitter and its users have committed is the way they butcher the English language with spinoffs and spoofs of the word twitter in terms for its users and companies who utilize it. I shall attempt to catalogue the some of the worst offenders:

Words that describe the Twitter service and those who use it: I swear I did not coin any of these terms:

It all started out very innocently. There was a website called Twitter, on which tweeters could post a tweet. Then the service expanded enough that it became a twittersphere, on which twitterites posted their twitworthy musings. When power-users entered the scene, they became the twitterati whose twitticism reached twitical mass. Now if you desire to be a twittizen of the twitterspace, you must follow proper twittiquette, lest you be deemed a twittiot.

It’s getting to the point where the vocabulary of social networking overlaps with that of Elmer Fudd. I’ll admit it was funny when Stephen Colbert made Meredith Vieira lol on the Today Show when she asked him if he used Twitter. He answered, “I have twatted” on national television; I’m sure the NBC producers loved that. And I’m sure if Randall Munroe had drawn XKCD #181 “Interblag” in 2009 instead of 2006, he would have included “tweeto” in his column of internet nickname prefixes. (I blog on the tweetotubes, myself.)

Companies that use Twitter for advertising or part of their service: This was really bad in the days when people didn’t know what Twitter was, and companies had to include plays on tweet or twitter in their names to denote that they utilized the website. There are still some bad ones out there:

• Best Buy’s @Twelpforce: Best Buy rolled out this service in July of this year when users like @ComcastCares were starting to become popular. They even put out a couple of corny videos to advertise it. No matter how useful they may be, I just can’t forgive them for their name.
• Twaitter: Twaitter.com is a service that times your tweets for you so that advertisers can reach the widest audience. I keep thinking it has to be a group for out-of-work busboys.
• Twinester: Twinester.com organizes groups and communities of Twitter users. You wouldn’t know it from their name, though. My first thought was that it was a club for fans of a strong thread or string composed of two or more smaller strands or yarns twisted together. Their logo’s coloring suggests that they intend their name to be pronounced “twi-nest-er,” rather than “twine-ster,” unfortunately.
• Twetris: Despite the corny title, this flash game turned out to be a decent representation of Tetris, using recent updates organized into blocks of varying sizes and colors. I approve of the game, though not the name.

What Twitter-related names make you cringe? Leave a comment, or (heaven forbid), tweet me about it.