By blurring the boundary between Ajax and RIA, Google has found a way to grow into the Mesh that Microsoft is close to delivering from IT outward. In many ways, this strategy is supportive of the new Microsoft as much as it is disruptive of the old. Just as Microsoft can’t be stopped from executing on its cloud strategy in the enterprise, neither can Google from its base in the user cloud. Where the two platforms meet in the middle looks a lot like a hybrid of iTunes and Office.
That is from Steve Gillmor as he compares video chat with Silverlite :)
You can look at this as some amazing plan, or maybe a Gmail chat team that thought video would be a natural progression?
One key aspect of the new Gmail chat is mentioned as part of the launch blog post:
We designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat.
Once again, standards lead the way for a Google team. This shows how this can be so much more than just an end user feature.
Let’s do a thought experiment: What if?
- This was not yet another plugin (a la Lively 3D), but rather just a Gear? Something that could be reused by developers right away so they could add video and audio in a way that reaches many end users, using standards
- And what if it used the audio and video HTML 5 tags? Chrome could implement them, and Gears could give us a shim to at least give us the APIs, if not more. Of course, other browsers have implementations too!
Google’s “Silverlite” is already here: Gears. If we all kept building on that we could do so much. Add the ability to load and update seperate Gears (modules) so in this case people would have gotten a video/audio module update to their existing plugin.
This is important
Video is huge, and is exploding. It is something that the Open Web doesn’t have a good answer for yet, and we need one. Right now you have to use Flash or Silverlight, and I would prefer more choice ;)
First we need to get players and codecs out there. The video/audio tags are fine, but what can they play? Apps such as Gmail video could deploy that technology. Then the next step is in tooling. How do we plug in to the current video development process? How do we reach the creative types? Without the toolchain, the technology won’t matter.
Can we get from here to there?
November 12th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Question: can a gear have a UI aspect? I though gears were faceless API/functionality. No?
November 12th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Edwin, you’re right, it just exposes an API. But maybe that API could have some function to attach a video source to a HTML element and make it behave like an Video tag. Actually I don’t know if Gears has enough access to browser internals to track the element position and show a video inside it.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Ah! Just remembered. It could continuously send image data to a Canvas tag context, after downloading and decoding it. Problem solved! =)
November 12th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Maybe they thought they could get better penetration with it being separate. Video (and on the Mac, audio) is something that I’ve wanted for some time. By having it a distinct service they don’t have to worry about people turning away when they are directed to Gears instead of THE Gmail video plugin.
That said, I totally agree that it would be better placed as a module inside Gears. I personally want less not more plugins.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Rafael,
You could use the video/audio support in new browsers, and even *shock horror* shim and have it work in Flash for those that don’t support that yet, but give the same programmatic API :)
Daniel,
They could brand it to look like the Gmail plugin and people wouldn’t even have to know (not in a bad way…).
Cheers,
Dion
November 12th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
See http://www.theora.org/
November 12th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
When downloading, I get this notice:
“Gmail voice and video chat incorporates Vidyo technology which is covered under pending U.S. and foreign patent applications.”
(http://mail.google.com/videochat/thankyou.html)
So I guess the plugin cannot be distributed with the open source Gears.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Rafael, Dion: you would still need to have a way to manage the contact list and online/video enabled status too no? Rebuilding that part of the UI as part of every application seems hard. But you are right: this is the types of integration that next generation mashups need to enable. May be with some tooling support from Dion :-)
November 14th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Ugh, patents. Let’s hope GOOG rethinks that issue. Open standards should be the way to go.. or can a patent be licensed as open source? Anyway, we need an API which can plug into as many apps as possible. Everyone benefits.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:12 am
“third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat. ” ….This is what I think is awesome feature.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
This is great! And video chat does not get any easier than that.
December 5th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Thanks for the great post, I started my career in nursing after finishing a associate degree in nursing from associate degree nursing schools
June 6th, 2009 at 7:28 am
thank you