Seems like the web is abuzz with new, big & strong, “next-things” getting revealed. First it was Wolfram Alpha – the Computational Knowledge Engine. Then came the apparent rival to it, the Goole Squared (in labs now). And now we’ve got Bing from Microsoft and Google Wave. What more can a person with web in blood ask for,  from a long and sunny month of May!

Google Wave

This one is the latest (or is it the Bing?). Google Wave is far far higher than the tag line ‘just another web app’. It is aimed at transforming the web. It is “what if email and IM was invented today”. Techcrunch says:

“Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.”

Developed by two brothers at Google, “Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff.”

This ’set of tough questions’ is, from where, the two brothers at Google developed Wave.

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

No one can say more about Wave than Google & TechCrunch! Here’s the official post from Google and here is the  Techcrunch post. You’ll know it’s REAL BIG. Below is the full video on Google Wave, uploaded by TechCrunch.

Bing

Code-named “kumo”, this one from Microsoft was unveiled just one day back. It will become available over the next few days, and be fully launched by June 3. While it’s generally regarded as another search-engine, it seems that “it is designed to be “more of a decision engine”. Read the following excerpts.

“Each search result page is customized according to what type of search you do (health, travel, shopping, news, sports). The algorithms determine not only the order of results on the page, but the layout of the page itself, concluding what sections appear. These sections can include anything from guided refinements and a list of related searches in the left-hand pane to images, videos, and local results.
Bing tries to alleviate problem by offering up different experiences depending on the search. It also acts more like a destination site for certain searches. Travel and product searches bring in comparison pricing, reviews, images, and more. Hulu videos can be played within the video search results. Bing pulls in data from other Web services when it can so that you often don’t have to leave to get the information you want.”

Read more about Bing and see the screenshots at TC.

Wolfram Alpha

Chronologically, it was Wolfram Alpha the first to create waves, coming up with charts, graphs, tables and statistics for your search queries. The following excerpts are real interesting.

“In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.

Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.” – Nova Spivack in his really long and explanatory post about WolframAlpha at TC.

Take this screenshot tour of WolframAlpha and go, play with it to really understand what it’s all about. And yes, this looks big.

Google Squared

“As the sheer volume of stuff on the Web keeps growing, keyword search keeps getting closer to its breaking point. Adding structure to the Web is one way to make sense of all that data, and Google is starting the tackle the problem with a Google Labs project called Google Squared.
Google Squared extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet.” (Source: TC)

Though not entirely similar to WA, Google Squared is more or less analogous to WA by displaying searh results in a structured and organised manner. But, as of now, it isn’t capable (better to say, Google is developing) of realtime computational power as WA boasts off. Still, this one is from Google and is to be watched for sure.

Here’s an exclusive video of Google Squared from TechCrunch.

Conclusion

It is crystal clear that things are progressing very fast and neat. With the rate at which information is created and the rate at which it is transformed into knowledge, all these developments are timely and needed. I presume, we’re nearing the point where, web will play a perfect and important role in everyday life. Let the party begin!