Day two of the Google I/O developer conference unveiled a potential game changer for how we use the web to communicate and socialize. It’s called Google Wave, and it’s an open-source collaboration tool meant to replace our normal methods of sending emails, replying to threads and forums, and sharing information like photos, documents, videos and other media. Day 2 of Google I/O was all about Wave, and right now its a very much unfinished developer preview, but should be ready to launch to the public by the end of the year.

Wave was created by the same team who brought you Google Maps, and they hope that the same amount of developer involvement and community that built up around Maps will follow into Wave. I dare say that the API for Wave is nearly double that of Maps, and the extensibility is tenfold. Wave is your homepage, your main portal. Email has become too multipurpose and its use has become cluttered. Communicating with all your friends via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc, is hard. Sharing photos and videos, collaborating on documents, all of that is fragmented across the web and across dozens of unique userbases. Wave collides all of that into one place, while instantly (and I do mean instantly) routing and pushing all of your socialness to where you want it to go and to whoever you want to see it. Its really an intense new way of thinking, and I urge you to watch the Keynote for Wave that I’ve embedded below. The video is 90 minutes long but absolutely worth every minute.

Right now Google Wave is in a developers sandbox (launch to the public by the end of 2009), and I/O attendees were given early access to test and develop gadgets and extensions for the system. If the launch is timed and publicized correctly, I can see this becoming a major part of life on the web. I’m already sold, and I can see it integrating and replacing at least 40% of my daily social life on the web. And it works with Twitter. Enough said.

wave.google.com

googlewavedev.blogspot.com

I have dated John since February 2008, and I feel closer to him in more ways than I have with anybody else. I also live further away from him than anyone I have ever been with. How can I be so close, yet so far away?

Its the Internets baby.

My relationship with john was cultivated directly from social networking. We met on BearCiti, a friendly and well designed bear niche dating/hookup/oggling community. I oggled, he oggled back, “you’re My Type,” “OMG Woof!” From there we’d chit chat and IM, and bit by bit the urge grew to get on a plane to see a man I never met before, who’s mother thought I could be a crazy person (a valid fear I think). We met, fell in love, and then the realization hit that I would still have to live in Buffalo, and John (at the time) still had to live in Annapolis, and neither of us liked the idea of being apart. We had to give it a shot though. Luckily, with us both being geeks, we have a few tools that we use to build a relationship, 400 miles apart…

• Twitter – This is a lifestream spew of all my thoughts, rants, and aversions. John follows me on twitter and I follow him. We follow each others friends and have a comfortable network of people that share our thoughts. Twitter allows me to know whats going on with John, and vice versa. I know his thoughts in 140 characters. and he knows mine.
• IM – God we talk alot. Both of us use IM for work purposes, and all day we chitterchatter, rant and rabblerouse. Occasionally we get work done, but its good to know I have a link to him. IM is the good old standby.
• Blogs/podcasts - I blog (duh), and John does occasionally, but this is more than just our content. Its the content of the web. So many of my relationships have fizzled because we have ran out of things to talk about. The web is a series of tubes and they go on forever.  We share our web findings and our snark on a daily basis. From all this, I learn how John feels about things, his interests and opinions are a vital part of me feeling close to him.
• Flickr – This was something I wanted, whether together or apart. I wanted dinner parties and flickr sets. I get it all with John, and even though sometimes we quarrel over who gets upload rights, flickr archives it all. There has never been a trip with out a flickr set attached to it. Flickr doesn’t just benefit John and I, our friends and family see us in action (well, that set is private, actually) and provides a little validity, whether they need it or not.
• Phone Sex – This one’s a little bit archaic but Its the absolute most important thing besides physical contact: hearing your lover’s voice. John is the first person I talk to in the morning (I call and wake him up) and the last person I talk to at night. We have done this every day. I text a lot too, and with a smartphone I can manage and use all of the above social apps wherever I am. I admit to being a bit attached to my G1, but I’m also really attached to Scranto.  And as crude as it sounds, nothing is more fun than getting a dirty picture message out of the blue.
• Video Streaming – Here’s our most recent example: John and I aren’t spending christmas together due to logistics, but I still want to experience some bit of the Holiday Spirit with him. His present arrived a little early due to need, and he opened it last night over uStream. I watch and we talked as he unboxed it, smiled, and tried on his fancy new headphones. Sure it was a little weird, but you know what, it felt like I was with him. I got to see the look on his face, the joy of the gift, the appreciation. Thats what Christmas is all about right? That and spiked eggnog. I will admit we use video for other purposes, too… just not over uStream.

I don’t like long distance relationships, and neither does John. We do more than make it work, we thrive in it. All of it has to do with love, dedication, and a little web 3.o.

There a many other benefits of the web that can benefit long distance relationships. Think about finding cheap travel or job hunting. LDR’s used to get a bad rap because they were difficult to maintain and communication was limited to phone, or letters (something about paper, and stamps.. don’t know).  If you have hesitations about getting closer to that person who’s not so close, think long and hard about why you want to take the risk. Dating someone across the way can be heartwrenching, and no amount of twitter can help that. However, things have advanced in the ways of communication, and as long as you can maintain a strong connection, the miles don’t suck so much.

P.S – Its totally ok now to date someone you met on the internet. Don’t be a prude, update your snobbery book. kthx.

I don’t have anything against TwitPic (or any other of those mobile photo to twitter apps), but I already use flickr to store my photos. If I use TwitPic, I’ll have to re-upload my photo to flickr or just lose out. With all the social networks, your intellectual property can get spread out and lost, so I like to keep flickr as a basecamp for all my photos.

However, Flickr doesn’t allow me to directly tweet pictures. Though I have streamlined the process of blogging from my phone using email-to-flickr, I wanted a way to tweet my snaps without having to send anything twice, and without using another photo hosting service. And by god I think I found it. Enter Switch-A-Bit.

Switch-A-Bit is a switchboard/router/thing-of-magic for your social networking needs. Sign up and connect it to your accounts, and switch-a-bit monitors your activity, routing content back and forth along the channels you set up.

Switch-A-Bit lets you set trigger words to activate the channels preventing you from overloading your social networks with a lot of useless data, like what happens with the inadvertent blog spammers on twitter. For example, on my flickr-to-twitter channel, when I’m posting from my phone, I append (#snap) to my post. It uploads to flickr then on to my blog, like normal. Switch-A-Bit catches the “#snap” and posts a tweet with a link to my photo.

Switch-A-Bit is as simple to set up as dragging and dropping. In fact, I was a little confused at first that it was working because there wasn’t a lot of set up or even options. Links are processed for twitter by a new sister service called bit.ly. As the service progresses (its still in beta), You can be sure to see a bunch more social network added. Right now they offer connections to blogger, facebook, flick, jaiku, tumblr, twitter, and your wordpress blog.

Switch-A-Bit

I’ve got a bit of a potty mouth. In fact, a quick search in my blog reveals about 11 pages of choice worded posts. Alright, so I curse like a sailor, and I’ll never stop. I do tone it down a bit around the old folk, children under 2, and clergy that i haven’t slept with, but pretty much I’m a foul mouthed jerk. Deal with it.

My tweets are also a bit vulgar at times, and thats understandable, its my venting machine. I’ve noticed that a lot of my other twitter pals tend to do this as well. and there is a new site called Twittertale that rats us out, reposting the foul tweets.  It’s not suprising I found myself on the naughty list a few times, like today…

If you twitter and you tend to be a bit sassy, you might wanna search to see if you made the list. Regardless, if you enjoy the foul mouth rants of others, subscribe to the feed. Now fuck off.

• Twittertale

The email you send to your boss because you want to go to that awesome party that your stupid job would otherwise obstruct your attendance of:

The picture you upload to Facebook, because Facebook rules your life and demands that you do so:

Then, because Facebook also rules the life of your coworkers, someone notices it and figures out that you really didn’t have a family emergency. He shows your boss, who chuckles and sends you this reply, with condemning photo attached, and bcc’d to the entire office:

Your coworker then, realizes that this is a blogging goldmine, sends this to valleywag, which results in the entire blogosphere reposting it and making you an example of how social networking destroys your privacy and the once foolproof “family emergency email.”

• Via – Joe.My.God.
• From – Valleywag