Blogs @ Relative Progress

Last night I had beta-testing session with some fellow Google Buzzers of Wavelook. It’s a Microsoft Outlook plugin that bring the power of Google Wave to the inbox, something Google has yet to do in a meaningful way. Side note: I have been told via unofficial Google channels that my Holy Trinity (a Wave, Buzz and Gmail nexus) is in the works. In the meanwhile, the expandability of the API’s have given enterprising developers the ability to build a better Wave interface.

Wavelook is pretty easy to installed and while I hate Outlook I felt it was duty to endure for the sake of beta-testing. I was accompanied by @Tom Awtry and @Alfredo Abambres in this experiment and I have to say it was pretty phenomenal. Once installed simply add a Wave account as an inbox or as part of a unified inbox. Wavelook has the all to familiar Outlook look and fell. I found it actually not as easy to use at first as Wave (which is a testament to the learning curve) and waves with lots of blips looked just as messy and confusing as they do in the Google Wave client.

However, as new waves came in or as waves got updated I could see them go bold in the inbox. It felt very comfortable like how email should be. When at work, I get emails from people all the time and occasionally I would like to strike up a chat session. That use case became very apparent as I messed around with this. With the waves themselves I can see real-time typing as I interacted with all the participants. I could even see attachments other wave participants post, although I could not attach any files from Outlook. I have been promised by Wavelook’s developers themselves that the feature is coming soon.  And developer relations is top notch with someone named Matt promising to be at our beck and call if we have any issues.

Now for those of you that still hate wave this may not be a big deal, but for the rest of us wave fanatics this may start moving the use of wave to the main stream. There are still people that use desktop email clients (I know those people are weird). Lots of corporate IT enterprises use Outlook religiously. If wave federation starts becoming a reality this might be the familiar front end that boosts wave adoption, possibly in the enterprise. Or maybe I just a dreamer? Either way this blast from the past has me bullish again on wave.

Free writing today so bear with me because I wanted to write about the first thing to come to mind. What about? Facebook. Facebook hitting a half a billion people is a milestone to be admired and feared all at the same time. First, to the team at Facebbok congratulations. This is a hell of a achievement for such a short period of time and gives all aspiring internet entrepreneur hope that great companies that change the world can still be built in America. Hell in this economy can still be built at all. When you think of the shear size of Facebook being larger than the entire population of the U.S., one can’t help but to marvel. Facebook is poised to change the world when it starts to make serious moves into India, China and Africa. Ways even Google could only hope to do. On my trip to Nigeria, all my sisters and cousins asked if I was on Facebook. I have my reasons for not joining, but there is increasing social pressure to do so. And that is the power of Facebook (and to a certain extent Twitter) has had on the social norms of our modern digital age. A tectonic cultural shift that transcends tech. Now the hyperlinks that connect the worlds information are being augmented by the likes, dislikes and associations we share. We are now connected more meta-physically than physically.

For all the greatness of this achievement there is a dark side to one service being such a monolith. Facebook is not a truly open platform to begin with. It has played the pidepoiper to get a half-billion people and ogranizations to join up then share their data Search engines can’t crawl it. Its Javascript snippets pollute the web through open graph and likes. I understand the overall strategy for world dominations through the human powered algorithm of ‘likes’. But I am not one who has drunk the kool-aide that the future of search is this but perhaps a supplement to the future semantic dataspaces I envision. Then there are survey’s that customer satisfactions with Facebook ranks no higher than dealing with your cable company or the IRS. So what is Facebook planning on doing with 500 million citizens and counting? Sell ads and their data of course. What Facebook has relalized since its idealism phase is that there is more value in takings that closed network and opening it than keeping it some exclusive club for college grads. Besides that, what other value add is Facebook to mankind? Simply connecting people over a game of Farmville? Not exactly. See I believe Facebook is not only in the race to be the ID card of the web but that human crawlers of information will be the future of discovery. It’s relevancy based on personal relationships with your Dunbar circle of friends. This at best is a short term, if not short sighted, vision. For Facebooks next trick they had better start offering some utility to it huge user base. I mean what can Facebook do on a daily basis to make you productive? Friends and liesure are one thing, but most of our waking hours of the day are spent working, not playing games and sharing stories. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Apple do that for us. I use tools from three of the four everyday to get things done. These companies offer some social, but mostly utility. So Facebook needs to get into the game of offering the same things that we take for granted from these other services. Email (to the outside word), chat, docs, News and other essential services that make Facebook more than just a place to play, but to work.

This is only some friendly words of advice and by no means should they take it, I haven’t built a 500 million strong global community so I have no room to talk. I do believe that with this great power comes great opportunity to become more than just the heir apparent to MySpace. The next worry from Zuck and company is staying relevant in a fickle popularity contest that is everything “Social”. Remember Friendster.

Video when the car bomb exploded in Ciudad Juarez – Noti 5 JuarezHoy

On 16 July the deadly drug war in waging in Ciudad de Juarez took a disturbing turn as a car bomb was detonated as authorities were responding to a call that a police officer had been killed. As police and and EMT’s the approached the area, a car bomb exploded. The video clearly above illustrates this. These tactics, short of being dispecetable, are those used by terrorist attacks in places like Israel and Iraq. If this was the case this represents a dangerous turn in this drug war that has claimed over 5000 lives across the country this year alone. An officer and a EMT were killed in the blast. The slain officer was the third man killed and is believed to have been the decoy. Just think about this for one second. Less than 10 miles away from where my Aunt and cousin live in El Paso the cartels are employing terrorist tactics to maintain their hold on power. These are the tactics of Hamas, Hezbollah or you name the insurgent element.

For those whom live outside of the Southwest and hence have no skin in the game this is the prime reason that places like Arizona overreact with harsh alien resident laws. This is what we worry about, we are not xenophobes. But harsh immigration laws alone aren’t going to curb the violence in Mexico. Neither is blaming the US for our drug appetites and guns Mr. Calderón. This isn’t the first drug war in that part of the world. The Colombian Drug War of the 80’s and 90’s saw similar levels of violence and in a lot of cases still do. My belief is that we saw an increased level of illegal immigration last decade not only because of the economic opportunities here state side but people simply trying to escape the violence.  Employers here fragrantly breaking the labor laws don’t help matters either.

This is serious business down here in New Mexico, Arizona, California and Texas. This has been our reality for a better part of five years.  What this isn’t is a political mallet to club political opponents over the heads with. Instead of suing Arizona, we need to do what is necessary. We have done it before against the likes of Pablo Escobar. We need to side with the Mexican Government (or less than corrupt factions) and go to war with these bastards. It was unorthodox (and unethical tactics like employing Los Pepes) that brought down the Colombian cartels. It’s going to take evil to beget evil and that is what these animals are. As I was typing this up today yet another massacre was perpetrated at a birthday party. Activist and politicos need to get over themselves. This is for real.