Following on our recent launches of chat in Orkut and video chat in iGoogle, today we launched voice and video chat in Orkut. This makes Orkut the first social network with built-in voice and video chat, and significantly expands the reach of the Google video chat network.
Read more about this launch on the Orkut blog.
4 comments:
Hi Justin, I am in a developing country in Asia, and the world needs PROGRAMMABLE video+voice chat in the PLATFORM-INDEPENDENT browser far more than you may realize.
I am urging your team that it is in the EXTREMELY best interest of Google for you expose an API to this browser plugin, and urgently. I am also urging anyone reading this to get busy on creating an open source plugin, if Google drags their heels at all.
Google's income growth is directly correlated to the ability of the web to remain decentralized and grow exponentially in use, i.e. more diversity of interfaces targeting more markets than Google 1000s of employees can ever possibly understand and envision. I can tell you right now I know how to make use of your plugin to displace Yahoo Messenger in Asia, but you will never get there with your current strategy of trying to control access and control interfaces to your favored Google applications. You will be exponentially too slow and your interfaces will never be diverse enough. You are doing amazing work (and obviously extremely intelligent and talented) that is missing it's fully growth potential. For example, you haven't even integrated with Google Talk yet, which is crying shame, given that Talk can be embedded in a web page, but Gmail Video Chat can not (yet).
The biggest potential economic threat to Google is not losing control of the cookie or the user's id and databases (you will lose control of these any way in billions of person developing Asia, because most people share a computer in net cafes, and the ease of social engineering in these markets to steal logins...to large degree the concept of a firm login and password is not valid here as many people create multiple identities at any whim and do not care about losing an identity...just go study friendster or YM usage), BUT RATHER the highest potential threat is that Microsoft (and soon with Yahoo's help) could possibly co-opt your ability to innovate across all platforms and drive advertising revenue growth. For example, most net cafes in Asia do not realize that an OEM license per computer does not make them legal with Windows. MSFT looks the other way for now to build market share, and to hope to create so many platform dependencies (i.e. YM doesn't run in a browser, won't run on Linux, is #1 in Asia and will soon gain unbreakable market share inertia), that as developing world becomes more affluent they can begin to enforce licensing and/or Asians transistion to their own private computers.
It is not just about it being free to use, but it even exponentially more about the freedom to innovate on top of what Google does with it's limited resources and knowledge.
The interface is the key to customer loyalty, the (friend, etc) database will demand to be either open or the net growth will stagnate. Remember exponential growth requires nominally orders-of-magnitude more change as it progresses. This on the scale of mesh networks, instead of spokes and hubs. Many people forget that on the 30th day the Water Lily covers the remaining 50% of the pond! So interface diversity must increase, not be controlled in any way, for Google to reach it's ultimate exponential peak. The challenge of any large thing, in order to maintain rate of growth, is to maximize innovation and freedom. Google must not forget that it's revenue is directly correlated to the freedom and exponential diversity of growth of the internet, with a few more billions of people to come online in the next years.
(Part 2 to follow in next blog comment as this blog as 4,096 char limit)
(continuation from the prior comment in Part 1)
It is great the Google is providing server resources, but it would be exponentially faster correlated income growth for Google if they worked more on mesh networking the social processes, so that distributed databases could reside on the clients. But that is slightly longer-term, with the immediate big wins that can be made by exposing everything you do either as open source or APIs at every layer of the code you do. For example at the lowest layer, I should be able to point two of your plugin instances at each other and then be able to control the voice+video chat, not even have to use your play buttons or your friend network.
PLEASE OPEN THIS UP TO THE PROGRAMMERS OF THE WORLD. We will do thousands if not millions of things with it that you never could possibly have done with your own team and your own Google apps and services.
Obviously, you will need to either provide (for free) the Google server resources to work-around firewalls, or provide an API for the plugin that enables declaration of a server that provides the resources.
- Shelby Moore
(contributing or sole) programmer of some million user commercial software, e.g. CoolPage (.com) before friendster & mypsace existed, Corel Painter (formerly FDC Painter), WordUp, DownloadFAST.com, etc.
Subject: For exponential Google growth, expose APIs to your Voice+Video chat plugin
I tied my prior 2 comments on Justin's blog into more general economic concepts posted at following link:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1247&cpage=1#comment-240223
========copy of post at above link====
Pointing fingers and debating non-exponential growth paths is not so productive, as this is entirely natural cycle of exponential growth, peak, and decay:
http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Bell%20Curve%20Economics.html
Those who want to continue to economically grow (I am only 44!) versus decay, should understand the exponential function and thus the markets and strategy they need (I am trying this post into OPEN SOURCE in big way, let’s not forget this is Eric Raymond’s blog, the famous of author for Cathedral and Bazaar!), even imho Google needs to understand better the exponential function:
http://juberti.blogspot.com/2009/09/voice-and-video-chat-in-orkut.html#comments
As everybody know now inside gmail there is free chat and i hear there is free callings calls inside gmail now only in usa , Thats a great for us as google users , One big thing i don't like orkut.
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