I think I might have to warn that this post is a little critical. I do not doubt that Raoul Vera is a very competent and highly dedicated Google employee with a lot of great ideas. However, I do doubt that it was a smart move to let him make this presentation. He admitted himself right from the start that he didn’t know much about all the Google products, as he had only been working there for two months. And whenever he did know something, he said that he was told not to disclose anything. Problem is of course that these little bits of info would be the really interesting things.
What we as attendees were left with was a mix of pointing out handy mashups, and going through really basic Javascript code to put those mashups on pages. It was clearly a techie session, but even for me without a strong coding background, the coding shown was really simple, and would have been very easy to look up on Google’s help pages.
Anyway, Raoul talked about the idea Google Maps and possible mashups. In a nutshell, mashups use several datasources and try to achieve an increase in information content. He showed 4 examples:
1.) The New York subway system
2.) The London subway system
3.) Race distribution in the USA
4.) Australian electorates
He then talked about Google’s commitment to KML, whch stands for Keyhole Markup Language. This language is specialised on geographical data, and is absolutely fixed.
Raoul’s passion definitely was the closing gap between constructs in cyberspace (like web sites) and in the real world. One might think of data that is being sent to your mobile depending on where you are in a city… however, I found he failed to portray these ideas as a monumental change that I seem them as, because of the way it will change our perception of the web. Just imagine that you surf the web, and you get a sense of place because you have certain markers that you could connect with in the place you live. And with the latest products of Nokia, with integrated GPS, it’s not so hard to imagine that people can locate other people in the real world, by checking their position on something like Google Maps. Again, he didn’t really say that… it was left to everybody’s imagination what to do with this.
I apologize for not getting more out of this.
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