“The Groove transceiver ? the “space” in which a user works ? includes capabilities that lend themselves to natural and intuitive group interactivity. These include voice communications, instant messaging, text-based chat, and threaded discussion. There are also tools for sharing files, sharing pictures, sharing contacts, and for shared activities such as drawing and Web browsing. After Groove is launched, a user creates a secure shared space to which he can invite others to conduct business or personal affairs. Each Groove shared space is stored locally on the computers of each of the members of the shared space. A change to one member’s shared space is reflected on everyone’s machine, so their work remains completely synchronized with other members.”

“…Groove does not address trust metrics. For now it’s an infrastructure play that leaves aside how people collaborate.

These days it is a lot harder than in the early days of Notes to chooses likely collaborative partners when creating ad hoc groups as there is much more information media to choose from. Who’s smart, and who’s a clown? Working this out should be transparent, and the science is evolving pretty rapidly. Whether Groove intends to swallow such trust metric logic into the platform, or leave it for third parties, will be its next test.

And finally, and this is a question to which all P2P brainstormers should have a some kind of answer, is whether you’ll really be able trust the data you’re working with.”

“This is nuts. We ought to enjoy some basic guarantees — that our messages come from authenticated sources, are confidential, and haven’t been tampered with — as a matter of course. And Groove makes those guarantees. Crypto is always on, period. You can’t even turn it off if you want to. There’s nothing to configure, and this was a key design constraint. What Ozzie observed with Notes, over many years, is that security failures almost invariably boiled down to human error. There were too many choices, too many knobs. Groove does away with the knobs.”

“Overall, Groove is very promising. The fact that it is simple to use and that it is de-centralized are hugely empowering to peer groups that will use it. The sense of personal control and the simplicity of initiating collaboration are appealing. As en e-learning tool, we just have to wait and see if interesting and innovative applications are built that specifically target learning & KM issues. Most of my students described Groove as an interesting tool. Whether it will evolve beyond being just an interesting tool will largely depend on how learning solution providers react to Groove and what Groove Networks can offer to them in return.”

“As much hype as it’s gotten, it has a steep road ahead. It’s rather obviously missing the elusive “killer app” to get enough people to download it for it to be ubiquitous enough to get people to write apps to
get people to download it — and, even more importantly, use it.”

“Hotjabber.com is a free Instant Messaging service for anyone who need to communicate on the Internet. It resembles ICQ and AIM but is far more flexible. With a single client/account you can communicate with ICQ, AIM, Microsoft Messenger and YAHOO Messenger.”

“If you’ve used the infamous file-sharing program
Napster, you know that while it’s very cool, you still have to
wait for the song to download before you can listen to it. A
new Silicon Valley start-up called Friskit has come up with
something way cooler than file-sharing: stream-sharing. Go
to Friskit.com, type in the name of the artist, genre or song
that you want to hear, and a few seconds later your chosen
music starts playing. How? Friskit searches the Internet for
Web sites that stream music (in RealAudio, Windows
Media or MP3 formats), then serves them up to you one
after the other with very little wait (and no hard-drive
clutter, since there’s no downloading). Even better, the
interface is so simple and elegant that anyone can use
it—something the major record labels with their
billion-dollar revenues haven’t been able to manage.”

“Undermining Darwin, humiliating one of the most popular science authors alive in Gould, relegating mathematics to the bargain counter – Wolfram knows the scientific community may savage him. He has, he says, intentionally tackled each scientific discipline only enough to pique the interest of its members but not enough “to spoil everybody’s fun.” Still, he predicts, “People in specialties will be convinced I missed the point.” That’s why, he says, he’s included in the book “a complete history of their field” – as if that’s going to do anything but infuriate them more.

For all of his scientific brilliance and real-world success, there is something shockingly naive about Wolfram. He honestly thinks that he can attack the foundation of the modern world, the life’s work of millions of scientists, and the heart and soul of academia?and not suffer more than a brief, grumpy backlash before he is lauded as the new King of Science. He also is convinced that his New Science is so simple and so self-evident that he will be invited on talk radio shows all around the country – no doubt explaining the nuances of cellular automata to Howard Stern and his fans.”