Live Blogging Google I/O: Day 1 Keynote

It’s Google I/O, Google’s annual developers conference. The morning keynote gets underway at 9AM Pacific. Let’s see what surprises Google has in store for today. My liveblogging begins, below. For those at home, you can also watch along live — I/O sessions are being broadcast here on YouTube. Due to traffic, I arrived 15 minutes […]

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It’s Google I/O, Google’s annual developers conference. The morning keynote gets underway at 9AM Pacific. Let’s see what surprises Google has in store for today. My liveblogging begins, below.

For those at home, you can also watch along live — I/O sessions are being broadcast here on YouTube. Due to traffic, I arrived 15 minutes late to the keynote, so also check-out these other live blogging reports :

Also see Google’s official blog post about today’s keynote here (it has lots of links to more info about what’s live blogged below) and round-up coverage from Techmeme here.

Jim Lanzone is up, talking about Clicker.TV, guide to TV that on the web, the “TV Guide of the web”. Uses HTML 5 (Google’s big on anything HTML 5). He’s demoing how you can find content all over the web. I liked Clicker already, not quite sure how Clicker.TV is different, mainly I think that it’s all HTML 5.

Postscript: See related coverage on Techmeme.

OK, now Sundar Pichai from Google is on we’re taling about On2, video codec company that Google recently acquired. Announcing fully open sources VP8 codec, see WebM that’s being announced, an open web media project, https://webmproject.org

Postscript: See more about WebM in related coverage on Techmeme.

Now someone from Mozilla talking, sorry, didn’t catch the name. Here to talk about the importance of “universal” video. Video is “key” to the web experience. Bunch of tech like CSS and JavaScript that he spins off as open source, free to use. “We wouldn’t accept” if you had to license these things. So need open video standard. Open video is here, in high quality, and embedded as part of the stack (non-tech folks, he means that you can play good video “natively” in your browser without having to do those annoying download QuickTime, download Flash things).

Now Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera is up. It’s a fantastic day for the web … three years ago, published proposal for web element on the web and a manefesto. We had text, images but didn’t have video. We knew it wouldn’t be easy to define what would go in a <video> area. The great news here today is that WebM has joined the list to make it possibe (slide now says <video src=”webm”>.

He’s demoing Opera playing a celebration in Oslo, “we do this every year to celebrate the video tag,” he jokes. Brings up a page that looks all superdesigned but says none is images, using web fonts and CSS. IE, you can have nicely designed web pages using tools built into the web browser. “We will have very rich web pages in HTML and CSS3.” Figures we can get rid of half the images on the web.

See, it’s a conspiracy. First the call is to kill Flash, not it’s to kill images. What’s next, text. OK, I’m just joking. I like native stuff.

To Google, I’d like to say “thank you.” Very civil of them to get WebM off the ground. Oh, and please could you kill Chrome, cause it’s tough enough being Opera when you’re already up against Internet Explorer and Firefox. OK, he didn’t say that last part. Keeping you all awake.

Sundar is back, big image of logos from various people in the industry supporting this. Skype, Nvideo, Qualcomm, um, um, nope, no Apple. No Microsoft.

Now up is Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe. Hey, I was just backstage with him at Web 2.0 two weeks ago. Perhaps he’s stalking me. Or I, him…

New tech like this is fun to see (but please don’t kill Flash, you can hear him silently thinking). But he’s showing what Adobe is doing to support HTML 5. We’re getting Dreamweaver demo now, the most popular web authoring tool besides Notepad, he jokes. It looks cool, you can preview how things like navigation works, across various devices. I guess this has been hard to do.

While Kevin carries on with the demo, this is a good time to mention I’m not a developer. Nor a designer. I’m a writer, so lots of stuff at Google I/O that the dev/design folks next to me ooh and ahh about make me go, “Um, really, that’s cool?” The Google Wave last year. Which still hasn’t taken off despite all the developers last year oohing and aahing about it. Oh, so far, I haven’t heard a single ooh or ahh. Maybe that’ll happen when Google gives out free phones next year to everyone in the audience. Like they did last year. They loved that. But I don’t think that’ll happen here.

And the Dreamweaver demo is continuing. Mainly, he’s doing stuff like you’re used to seeing in Flash, lots of animation and things I find so annoying on movie and shopping sites. But he’s doing this all with CSS, rather than having to use Flash. So see, even if Flash dies, Adobe’s got really good design tools that don’t depend on Flash. The Steve Jobs campaign to kill Flash shouldn’t worry them (at least that the message I’m getting).

Postscript: That’s the deal, Adobe has new HTML 5 support for its design tools. See here on Techmeme for more.

That VP8 codec? Going to be embedded in Flash, and excited they can help bring it to people this way. (Um, but I’d say most of the people who already spoke don’t want people to have to install Flash to see video that plays using VP8 — they want it native). And will work with Google on many devices that can handle Flash, expect more to come on Day 2 he says.

Sundar is back, talking about how hard it is to find web applications. I can hear it coming. We need a web app store.

Finding things is hard, and developers also need ways to earn off those apps. It should be easy to create and sell a premium app on the web. Thnking about it, and now a preview of the “Chrome Web Store.”

Postscript: See related coverage for more depth on this via Techmeme.

Showing an app tab in Chrome (and I think this is the Chrome OS). Showing how the Tweetdeck app can play right in the browser. Also showed other apps like Clicker there. And I’m thinking, um, aren’t these what we used to call web sites. Are web sites the new web apps?

One click to buy an application and start using it right away.

Now talking games. Showing Lego Star Wars. Oh no, please don’t show my kids. Because I really don’t need Lego Star Wars for Wii, Xbox, Nintendo DS and now Chrome. OK, so I do. This version is to rescue R2D2, looks like all the versions of Lego Star Wars I’ve played before — same functionality.

Now editor of Sports Illustrated is coming up, to talk about what Chrome can do for publishing. He jokes he’s the oldest person in the room, and “that’s fine with me.”

Empowered engineers and developers are in turn empowering people like him to create new version of their publications. Now he’s going to show us a movie. Here it comes. Sports Illustrated covers over time. That was fast.

Now in the Chrome store, the magazine is being opened up. The current magazine, and it looks like you’re reading the actual print magazine. Are you getting this? Chrome is going to same publishing. Like the iPad was going to with apps. But hasn’t so far — Google “GQ ipad” and you’ll get an example of that.

Now we’re getting a live sports poll, which you could never have in a web page. Except these are web pages, just being loaded in Chrome. Now there’s a page with text and a video embedded that plays. You know, like a web page with embedded video. But cleaner looking. Cool, you can drag the video to the bottom of the browser and make a video playlist for later watching.

Typography is important, you came to read the story. OK, so what I can’t tell is if all this niceness is being done with HTML5 and CSS. If so, cool — but if so, how much work was it to translate the print publication into this? Ideally, you do once and you’re good. Reality is, that’s almost certainly not the case.

Oh, you’ll want to share this. You can do that with things like Google Buzz, he says. Don’t look over at those Facebook and Twitter things…

Postscript: TechCrunch has a screenshot here.

Now talking about last year when contemplated the idea of a magazine on a tablet, in a conference room in Mountain View, that this might not seem amazing to Mountain View but a big deal for future publishing. Say not just Build It, They Will Come. Has to be open, editable, sharable and a bunch of other things he rattled off. Needs shorter catch phrase.

Sundar back. Chrome has 70 million users, so if you build for the web store, you can build for all of these people. The store will also be in Chrome OS in addition to the Chrome browser. Will support free and paid apps. Coming to Chrome Developer Channel soon.

On to HTML 5, bringing up Lars Rasmussen, a main force behind Google Wave, to give an update on HTML 5.

Lars now talking about Wave. It’s a product people are starting to use to get real work done all over the world. Both of them. OK, I’m joking again. Say go to wave.google.com to get moving, to applause, which makes me think the URL is new or something.

Back to saying that they’ve found Wave is best for getting work done. [IE, for those who missed it last year, email for ordinary mortals isn’t dead. But if you need to collaborate on something, then maybe Wave is worth trying].

Today, making Wave as part of Google Apps as part of getting it out to schools and workplaces. [wow, so all confused about why you’d use Wave versus Google Apps, the answer is Google Apps one — Wave is just part of that suite now].

Always wanted Wave to be open, and happy SAP announced it will be part of their StreamWork tool. And to make it easier for others, they’re open source more of their wave code.

Postscript: See related coverage on Techmeme here.

David Glazer, Google engineering director, now up. In a hockey jersey that says HTML as the player name and the big number 5 below that. Heh.

He’s going to show how the web can make work better. Over the next 45 minutes he said. I hope he’s joking, because I’ve heard some groans.

Can’t imagine being tethered to one particular device to get his data. Everyone trying to figure out how they can shift to the cloud. But it’s still too hard to do that.

Takes too long to build apps. Apps need to run on a range of devices. Apps can be traps, lock you into something for a long time. Finally, apps are hard to manage for tech support / IT department.

Now we’re going to hear more, he says, over the next 40 minutes. So I guess we are going to spend the remainder of this keynote session on that — and run 15-30 minutes late.

Says working closely with VMware, and Paul Maritz, President of CEO of VMware is now coming up to talk more about that. And he did, and it was all beyond me. Sorry.

He’s gone, and now Google’s talking about something called Roo and Google Web Toolkit and sorry, it’s all developer to me. And even if you’re a developer, it might not be that gripping. I’ve watched about 10 people now walk past me heading out. But that’s like 0.000000001% of the hundreds in the audience. So don’t tweet that I said there’s a big walkout.

Phew — and we’re still going, and it’s all incredibly boring, and we’re now 15 minutes over the official end. A steady stream of walkouts continue, though the majority of the audience is still sitting.

And that’s it, over at 11:06am with a fizzle. Last year, the audience was ecstatic over the free phones handed out. This time, they’re just told thanks and check out demos on the second floor. Maybe they’ll like the t-shirts :)


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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