If you have lots of Google Reader feed subscriptions, you’ve probably found that it’s sometimes tedious to locate a specific feed.  Organizing feeds into folders helps, but Google just added a new feature that lets you display the “favicon” along with each feed.  This adds an additional bit of variety among feeds that makes it just a little bit easier to recognize each feed.

This new feature is not enabled by default, but you can easily turn it on by selecting “Use favicons” on the subscription menu.

I’m a big fan of disruptive technologies.  It’s fun to try to identify which new technologies will turn out to be disruptive before the disruption happens.  It’s the technology geek’s version of picking stocks, or Super Bowl winners.

I’ve gone on the record many times suggesting that Google Chrome, and more recently Chrome OS, are up and coming disruptors.  So today, as I read the No Jitter article by Tom Nolle, A New "World Turned Upside-Down?" , I found myself very much in agreement. The post opens with:

Google isn't shy about doing novel, controversial, and occasionally even quixotic things, and there’s a chance that its latest venture, Chrome OS, will turn out to be all of these things. Chrome OS may turn out to be a failure, but if that happens it's probably only because it's ahead of its time, and Chrome OS may well change computing forever. Not because of what it is but because of what it represents.

As the article explains, the very notion of a personal computer is fading from relevancy.  Computing is becoming more social, more shared, and less “personal”—in the “this is my own computing island” sense of personal.  Hardware costs and connectivity costs are plummeting, drastically changing the nature of computing devices.  Cell phones have become computing platforms, laptops have gotten smaller and lighter, applications are moving toward the clouds.

Of course, these fundamental changes have a significant impact on operating system requirements.  Connectivity, collaboration, and effective user interfaces are becoming key success factors for computing devices.  Operating systems that exceed in these areas will have an advantage.

Mr. Nolle’s concluding remarks, to me, sound spot on:

Whether Google is trying to drive this, sees it as a kind of primal market force, or simply sees it as a convenient path to greater ad revenue is impossible to say. They are aware of all of this. Because Google was born in the online world—unlike IBM or Microsoft—it's not committed to defend a legacy of personal computer evolution. Since all it takes is one attacker to create a war, Google's awareness of the future is already forcing its competitors to take another look at their own strategies, and that will only accelerate the network-centralization of our world.

Sometimes you can get so tied up in evolution that you miss the revolution completely, but not for long. It looks to me like 2010 is going to be a very interesting year.

The blog post Wave Bot: Annoty includes short demonstrations videos of two wave robots that annotate blips as you type.  The basic idea is useful--augment wave conversations with relevant information. This is the basic idea behind smart tags, intellisense, code sense, and various other text augmentation technologies.

But there is a fundamental weakness with wave robots due to a limitation of the wave API.  At least for the time being, a wave robot has no way to traverse the entire blip hierarchy within a wave.  Instead, it must rely on robot event notifications for visibility into wave metadata.  Since event notifications contain details only about the blip that triggered the notification event (typically a blip being edited), the robot can only augment blips as they are updated by users.

This limitation means that, in order to be maximally useful, a robot must be added very early in the life of a new wave, otherwise it misses the opportunity to augment blips created before the robot is added.

Taken together, the top two articles this morning in my Google Wave news reader folder produce a bit of cognitive dissonance.

First, from Ireland’s SiliconRepublic.com, Has Salesforce.com just unveiled a rival to Google Wave?:

“Cloud-computing player Salesforce.com has introduced a platform that will act as a "Facebook for the Enterprise" that it claims will revolutionise the workplace by leveraging the social-networking revolution.

“The new technology, called Salesforce Chatter, however, sounds eerily close to what Google is trying to achieve with Wave, which it claims is going to replace email as a work tool.”

Then, from The Register in the UK, Google Wave relies on kindness of strangers:

“Dreamforce 09 Google has been stumping for its Wave real-time collaboration system among the Salesforce.com faithful.

“Wave lead business development manager Jeff Eddies told Dreamforce the search behemoth needs their support for Wave to succeed.”

Salesforce.com has just introduced a new platform technology for developing social applications for enterprises, and is boasting that all 135,000 native Force.com applications will instantly become social.  At the same time, Google is asking Salesforce.com community for commitment to and investment in Google Wave as a platform for building social applications for the enterprise.

How’s this going to play out?  Can the Salesforce.com community embrace both initiatives?  Or will they end up singing, “Don't hang around 'cause two's a crowd / On my cloud, baby?”

As I was reading Garet Rogers’s article, Google Image Swirl: Looks neat, but useless, I was struck initially by how strongly I disagreed.  But after spending a few minutes thinking about it, I realized we are looking at it from different directions.

Google Image Swirl is an experimental project focused on image categorization.  It really has nothing to do with "swirling" images around.  Google could have presented related images in some other UI, but the animated swirl is visually appealing and, yes, fun.  But that's not the point.

The point is that they are categorizing images based on image content.  Not just images that are related because they look similar--but because they represent ideas that are similar.

Imagine a photo of Mt. Rainier and a pencil sketch of Mt. Rainier.  If a computer could match those up as related images, that would be impressive.  Or a photo of Jay Leno and a hand-drawn caricature of Jay Leno... that would be impressive.

Google labs is a petri dish for innovation.  You shouldn’t look at experimental applications of new ideas and judge them against a mainstream application's business requirements. To do so is missing the point.

Years ago, my wife worked on a team at Bell Labs that built the first "object oriented" telephone switching system using an experimental programming language they called "C++".  That first system supported three telephone numbers.  That first prototype application would fail miserably as a commercial phone system.  But that wasn’t the point.

When an innovator looks at experimental research, she sees beyond the prototype to the possibilities the prototype inspires.

I've believed for a long time that Google Chrome is an example of disruptive technology.  Fourteen months ago, the news (and not only the techie news) was buzzing about Google's foray into the browser wars.  At that time, I was a little surprised that Google did not announce a Mac version, but not for long—it looks like Google Chrome for Mac is set to launch next month.

And while Google Chrome for Mac is big news, its not the really big news.  The really big news is that it looks like Google is going to enter the biggest software war of all—OS Wars.

Back in July Google leaked its intention to release a new, open source operating system, Chrome OS, that would initially target small systems such as netbooks.  An now, Reuters, TechCrunch, and others are speculating that Chrome OS source code could be revealed this week.

By Google's own admissions, the initial version is far from complete.  But does that mean it's not a threat to the incredibly well established Windows OS?  Hardly.

Disruptive technologies generally begin life as vastly inferior alternatives to established, mainstream solutions.  But if a disruptive technology can gain traction in a specialty, niche market (e.g., small systems such as netbooks), the vendor can continue to improve the new technology, expanding its competency to other areas.  If the new technology's improvement trajectory is steeper than that of the established solutions, it may one day equal, and then surpass the established solutions in their primary market segments.  That's disruption.

Is Chrome OS ready to knock off Windows.  Nope.  And a decade ago, digital television was not ready to knock off analog broadcast.  But today?  Analog broadcast is gone.