Archived

The other day I posted a link to my friend’s blog “The Sundry Blogger” That apparently is his secondary, secular blog. He has another called Pop Goes the Preacher which seems to be similar to my efforts here (if not a bit more focused.) The premise is that since Jesus used parables – stories about the culture in that time – to teach heavenly concepts, we can, and probably should do the same. And that is what Brent tries to do on his blog.

I must admit, however, that he has far surpassed me on the DiscipleGeek meter with his latest blog entry: The Worship of the Cybermen by combining Doctor Who with the Bible. I am definitely impressed and felt the need to give him the props he deserves.

:: Pop Goes the Preacher ::

This is the blog of a friend of mine from college. I’ve always admired his dedication to the faith, as well as his knowledge of the Bible. He is currently undergoing chemo treatments to battle colon cancer. Despite the toll these treatments are taking on him, he retains a positive outlook and upbeat attitude. He also keeps his blog updated regularly, which, obviously, is something I still struggle to do.

Please remember to keep him in your prayers as he fights this disease.

::The Sundry Blogger::

This is completely disappointing. Wave was an awesome system and the only reason it didn’t get user adoption was because it didn’t integrate fully into anything that was currently in use. If they’d made it work with email or had it replace the interface for gmail, they would’ve seen a greater adoption rate. Expecting people to abandon something simple that they already know for something complex that they’ll have to learn that only a few other people use is just a recipe for failure.

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

:: Update on Google Wave ::

The elders at our congregation are really great. They give the men of the church plenty of opportunities to preach the word in front of the assembly. Brother Vinson and his wife recently identified with our congregation and the elders eagerly put him to work Sunday night. He did an excellent job speaking, and one of his anecdotes really struck home with me. Here it is:

Two brothers, both in Christ and in the flesh died of the same genetic disease. One said that if he was diagnosed with the disease he didn’t want to know if he had it so he could die in blissful ignorance. The other said he wanted to know the second it was found out so he could get everything In order, because he knew it would take a lot of time to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. We’ve all been diagnosed with a deadly disease — sin. Which type of person are you? Do you want to know about your sins so you can do something about it, or would you rather stay ignorant and be lost?