What is it? Google’s answer to Twitter? Email and IM replacement? Personal communications and collaboration platform? These were questions and characterizations that emerged as Google announced Wave at the company’s May developer event in San Francisco. (Here’s a bit more context from my related post at the press conference.)

It’s a shapeshifter, a new species and something of a rorschach test for people because it crosses boundaries and isn’t easily defined.

Google Wave’s API has recently become available to developers. And now some first “hands on” impressions are out. Ben Rometsch wrote about his initial experience with Wave — “real-time email. On crack”:

Trying to describe it to my wife last night I came out with “It’s a cross between Messenger, Email and Facebook”. I still think that’s accurate, but it didn’t really help her! Once you start actually using it things slowly fall into place in your mind, but until you do so, it’s pretty hard to explain or understand.

I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s a bunch of shared IM conversations that are organised like email messages and stored on the server for time immemorial. The upshot of all this is that you can use it in a variety of different ways depending on what you want to achieve. It serves as an IM, IRC and Email server, but you can also do things that you might not necessarily first think of, such as using it as a simple Wiki with shared editing and history . . .

This is probably the most advanced ‘application in a browser’ that I’ve seen. It really does feel like a little operating system living in your browser tab. Using it suddenly makes Chrome and Chrome OS make a whole lot of sense. If you listen carefully you can hear Ballmer’s chairs flying around in the background.

I won’t make any grandiose predictions or snarky remarks. From what I’ve seen, however, at a distance it seems pretty interesting.

City Tours is a new addition to Google Labs that puts Google squarely in the tourism business: Give it a city name, and Google not only suggests sites to see, but it also maps out a multi-day itinerary and proposes a minute-by-minute travel schedule for you to follow.

And what’s really impressive is that City Tours doesn’t only cover the standard travel hot spots like New York, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. You’ve probably never heard of Kennewick, Washington, but Google has a three-day tour in mind if you ever want to visit my neck of the woods.

Whoa. That noise you hear is the sound of tour guides across the U.S. updating their resumés and scanning the classifieds for a new career.

Okay, not so fast. I’m getting ahead of things here.

In reality, City Tours is very much a labs project at this point with plenty of room for growth and improvement. After the “wow” factor wears off, you’ll notice that the Kennewick tour above suggests that I walk from sight to sight … even though two of those walks are estimated at 83 and 88 minutes. On day two of the itinerary, the city tour includes a 148-minute walk. No thanks. Walking tours may work well in San Francisco or New York, but not so much out here in Small Town, USA.

Despite that problem, City Tours is a fun tool with a lot of potential. You can give it specific dates and add or remove sights. Imagine Google pulling in the public transit information that it already has for many cities. Imagine it pulling in event listings like concerts and sports. Imagine local businesses being able to write their own suggested city tours that include a stop at the business’s own location, and being able to embed those tour maps on their web sites.

This seems like an interesting experiment to watch.

(via Steve Rubel)

I’m in the Google Wave press conference, following a dizzying keynote — dizzying, at least, after a night of little sleep. As he did yesterday Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined the discussion and similarly apologized for arriving late.

Danny live blogged the keynote earlier this morning. He jokingly compared Wave to Lotus Notes. In some respects that’s not an entirely inappropriate comparison, given the scope of the product and the emphasis on collaboration — though the Google folks would probably disagree.

Wave seems to be conceived as a total communication and collaboration tool and therefore a successor and replacement for IM and email. In some respects then this is as ambitious as Android, perhaps even more so. It also encompasses mobile communication between users and mobile to PC communications in theory. The keynote presenters demo’d Wave on the iPhone and Android running in the browser.

One of the reporters in the in the room asked the panel about how they thought they were going to get people to change their behavior and abandon email for this new tool. Google responded that what they showed was an early “developer preview” and that there was still lots of work to do and a longish time horizon for the product. What wasn’t discussed was the way that social networks (and Twitter to a lesser degree) are taking the place of email in many instances. So it may not be such a huge problem to shift behavior in the end, provided the user experience is compelling to people.

Wave does seem to me to be a bit bulky and complex, from the blur of screens and demos I saw this morning sitting on the floor in a hall with more than 1,000 people. But the real-time aspect of it — the fact that you can actually see the other person typing — is pretty compelling.

This is a project that unfolded in Australia with 100 Google engineers and began in 2007. It was based on a general concept pitch to Brin by the developers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who had previously built Google Maps. Based on that track record Brin said he approved the project and associated resources (not unlike a movie studio approves a pitch by a trusted director or producer). It sounds like Google has spent a bunch of money on this (no figures were discussed) and is pretty invested in its success.

There is no apparent business model (though one could imagine enterprise licensing) and Google intends to open-source it, which is probably smart from an adoption standpoint. Yet stepping back Wave is consistent with Google’s larger effort to move software and applications development into the browser and the cloud.

Knowing where a searcher is when s/he conducts a search is one of the big promises and opportunities in mobile search. Advertisers want the precise targeting, and it’s also a convenience for the user who doesn’t need to indicate a location when looking for products and services. There are already several tools and services that include location as part of the mobile search experience, but Google has added location-based web searching on the desktop via a new, beta version of the Google Toolbar.

The new toolbar includes Google’s “My Location” technology, which was introduced in 2007 for mobile searching. Using the toolbar, users can search for a generic term like “pizza” and get local results:

Google describes how this works:

Google Toolbar with My Location uses information about surrounding Wi-Fi access points to estimate your location. Naturally, this means it won’t work if you’re on a computer that doesn’t have Wi-Fi (or has Wi-Fi turned off).

Hmmmm. You might be thinking that this sounds familiar. Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote about Google’s expansion of local search results on non-local searches — you can type “pizza” on Google.com and now get local results. But that targeting is based on the IP address of the searcher’s ISP, and is often not nearly as precise as what the new toolbar offers.

That’s why this announcement is important — it’s a big step toward more precise local targeting on the desktop, the kind of targeting usually reserved only for mobile devices.

Google also announced a new, simplified Chinese-language Google Toolbar, both of which are available in the also-new Google Toolbar Labs.

Google is almost uniquely situated among tech companies in that it can reveal very little about an event or announcement and be all but guaranteed that most of the journalists and bloggers on the tech beat in Northern California will show up to cover it. That’s what happened today. Google brought bloggers and journalists into its San Francisco offices, on a beautiful 80+ degree day, to hear about ongoing innovation at Google Labs, together with a couple of related announcements. The two announcements were covered earlier by Chris Sherman and Matt McGee:

• Google Adds Search By Similarity To Image Search
• Google News Timeline Offers Powerful Search Options

The similar image search and News Timeline were both interesting. Of the two, however, News Timeline was more impressive to me. A third announcement was the redesign of Google Labs itself:

The general idea here is to make Labs (and its engineers) more accessible and to encourage greater participation and feedback. Google Director of Product Management RJ Pittman (the former co-founder and CEO of Groxis) acted as a kind of MC for the event. He said the Labs redesign was intended to provide more direct communication between engineers and end users (early adopters). He added that the new Labs would feature a “rapidly expanding carousel of innovation” and would explose more people to things earlier in the cycle.

Indeed, “innovation” was the theme of the day, which seemed intended to show those who cover Google that innovation was still very much happening in Mountain View. Pittman stressed that innovation at Google was even more important today than in the past. “Scarcity breeds clarity,” he offered.

Pittman’s comments about innovation despite scarcity struck me as similar to remarks made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and CFO Patrick Pichette on Google’s earnings call last week. Both stressed that despite cutbacks and the recession Google was continuing to “fully fund” strategic and growth initiatives.

After it was over one of the journalists asked me whether the announcements were significant enough to justify a get together like this. It’s true that none of the announcements individually were major. But the organizers obviously felt that there would a greater impact in bundling them under the umbrella concept of “innovation” — to show them that despite cutbacks it’s still alive and well at Google.

In addition to the new similar image search, Google has also announced the addition of Google News Timeline as a Google Labs experimental service.

Google News Timeline is what it sounds like — a tool that lets you see news coverage over a period of time. A search for “somali pirates” showing weekly coverage looks like this:

But it’s also more than a simple news timeline, because Google has added a number of user controls that lets you customize the tool in several different ways. You can:

• choose from a variety of news types, such as newspapers, magazines, blogs, videos, images, and more
• see content from multiple sources at the same time
• see daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or even a decade-by-decade timeline for your query
• change the display size to see more or less results
• include or avoid content from data sources like Wikipedia and TIME magazine, or certain newspapers and blogs

On the flip side, I’m seeing something I’d like to be fixed or added — when trying to include Seattle newspapers in my search, the West Seattle Herald is the only option available. No Seattle Times and no Seattle P-I; I don’t know if that’s a bug, or if that content is simply unavailable. It would be interesting to be able to see a timeline of Microsoft news, for example, from the primary Seattle newspapers. (The Seattle P-I recently shut down, however.)

This is a Google Labs service so bugs and improvements are to be expected, but the Google News Timeline is already a very powerful research tool.

Google has introduced a new experimental refinement tool that lets you click a “similar images” link beneath image search results and see a new screen of images with similar color, shape and other visual elements. The new tool has been released in Google Labs and isn’t yet available in standard image search results.

The similar images refinement is the latest in a series of tools Google has introduced to make image searching easier and more precise. These refinements include an a face filter, “exact size” filter, search suggestions and a color picker.

Image search is “harder” than text search, because true computer vision isn’t anywhere near as developed as text-based search and retrieval. The new search by similarity feature combines both analysis of images for things like color, shape, texture and so on with tagging and other techniques.

Google’s not the first to launch a similar images feature. In December last year, Microsoft added a “show similar images” capability to Live search.

Some other sites that let you search based on image similarity include Like.com, a shopping site that lets you visually compare products, Polar Rose, which detects and matches the faces in your Flickr photos and Tin Eye, a site that lets you upload an image as your query rather than typing in search terms.

Want to know more about computer based image retrieval? See my Teaching Google To See Images from April of last year.

Barry spotted this via Twitter: Google has, somewhat quietly, launched a Product Ideas Blog. A related effort is the company’s solicitation of ideas and their prioritization from users in a voting area. The first focus is on mobile.

Users first must be registered but then can review, propose and vote on different ideas. The object is to generate and surface the top ideas and then, presumably, build them out. There are already lots of ideas there to peruse.

Here are a few chosen at random (unedited):

• “Products Search in google maps. gmaps should show for every shop: the price, the location, the distance, the way of payment and opinions of other users.”
• “Ability to use voice search in mobile app to search and dial contacts”
• “A feature to update route in Mobile Maps upon taking wrong exit or different route than displayed on application.”
• “i want to be able to see my friends on maps on my phone”

The launch of the Product Ideas Blog and related voting probably isn’t a coincidence as Google reportedly cuts back on under-performing products and its “20 percent time” initiatives, which generated many Google products in the past. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted in the WSJ not long ago:

The company will curtail the “dark matter,” he says, projects that “haven’t really caught on” and “aren’t really that exciting.” He says the company is “not going to give” an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. “When the cycle comes back,” he says, “we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.”

Accordingly, user-generated product ideas and voting may help substitute for curtailed 20 percent time efforts. And voting provides the added benefit of indicating the ideas that have “legs” vs. those that are less compelling — though such a system isn’t foolproof. Participants and voters are likely to be “geeks” and “early adopters” rather than mainstream users.

Yahoo’s long-standing Suggestion Boards serve a similar purpose.

Google has launched a new labs project named In Quotes. In Quotes allows you to compare quotes between the two US Presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama.

For example, if Net neutrality is an important topic for you, just type in “neutrality” and up comes quotes from each candidate that you can scan through:

This can be a fun tool to use in the upcoming elections but you should also be careful when using such a tool. Google themselves has a clear disclaimer at the bottom of the page that reads:

Quotes and their speakers are determined automatically by a computer program and we don’t guarantee the completeness or accuracy of the information you may see. The dates you see represent when the article in which the quote appears was added to Google News.

I am curious why searching for net neutrality does not return the same results. Maybe a bug?

The Google Like/Don’t Like feature, where you can move up results, hide search results, or remove search results, seems to have been expanded to a group of test searchers.

We have reports from TechCrunch, Google Operating System, and Justin Hileman, with reports of users seeing this feature in the main search results. Justin does an excellent job taking us through each feature with screen shots.

I personally have never seen an implementation of this on any of my searches. But I know Google has been testing this over the course of the year.