Android

Yes, Froyo is out. Android Gingerbread release currently planned for Q4, 2010. Froyo release includes major updates to these areas:

• Speed
• APIs and Services
• Browser
• Android Market

Three of the most striking changes there include over-the-air application installation, remote music streaming and the ability to turn your Android phone into a portable Wi-Fi hotspot.

Except for that, Android 2.2 aims towards improved overall performance that includes (and is not limited to):

• Performance of the browser that has been enhanced using the V8 engine, which enables faster loading of JavaScript-heavy pages.
• Dalvik VM performance boost: 2x-5x performance speedup for CPU-heavy code over Android 2.1 with Dalvik JIT.

Google TV

Google TV is the second big thing revealed on the second day at the Google I/O this year.

Google TV is a new experience made for television that combines the TV you know and love with the freedom and power of the Internet.

If you ask me, the closest thing to Google TV is Boxee box. Have you tried Boxee?

First and foremost, the VP8 codec. Last summer Google acquired On2 for its video compression technology. Today, Google announced VP8 codec as part of a new project named WebM. By the way, VP8 is now open-source.

The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.

One of the most important things about this is that the WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors! Read more here.

…including Microsoft!

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

What’s Great About WebM

• Very high quality video
• Great video playback performance, even on older computers
• 100% free and open to everyone
• Supported on popular video sites like YouTube

Later on, Adobe shared some HTML5 love on the stage.

The keynote continued with the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store opens later this year.

Users will be able to discover a broad range of amazing web apps while developers will be able to reach millions of new users.

Next was Wave. Google Wave has been opened up to everyone as of today (also part of Google Apps as of today).

The keynote ended with an extensive reference to App Engine, GWT and some great things coming from Google + VMWare.

VMWare has been working with Google to bring an open-source layer for the cloud

You can watch the Google I/O 2010 Keynote online here.

I am guessing Day 2 will be all about Android. Woo hoo!

P.S. By the time I am writing this Google Buzz APIs come into play. Take a look here.

xAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web.

Meaning that toolbar vendors, like Meebo, can now take advantage of this new open platform in order to provide a better user experience to the users. Specifically, users will be able to see social elements only from the social networks that they are actually on. This could lead to fewer HTTP requests that are usually necessary to recognize every potential online service. In addition, xAuth gives the users the option to decide which services pass data to sites through xAuth using the HTML5 methods window.postMessage and localStorage. In other words, the user has complete control of this exchange of data that takes place between the service and the site. This one strongly reminds me of a talk by Aza Raskin titled “You-Centric: The Future of Browsing” which I strongly suggest you see it. The whole idea of complete control of your data hovers around most of Mozilla’s projects like the latest Contacts.

As for the social toolbars, I personally am not very fond of, probably because I do not like the current implementation of these toolbars. Though I have used them one or two times -and they seemed quite handy- I never liked them. I don’t like the way they show up and I don’t like the way the look like.

However, xAuth seems that it grabbed my attention. I am wondering, now that developers can actually grab that information about your social networks how this could help make experiencing the web even better. I mean, why do I have to be bombarded with all these sharing/like buttons if I haven’t even joined each particular social network? And the same goes for all these commenting systems like Disqus.

Moreover, this would be very-very-very interesting for all the mobile platforms out there. Providing a faster and a better mobile experience happens to be one big fcuking reason to support xAuth.

More information on xAuth here and here.

Update: Don’t forget to watch Meebo’s CEO talk with Robert Scoble about xAuth here.

-”Just hold on a minute..”, you might say. “Isn’t that the new..?”
-Yes, it is.
-”But is this backwards compatible with my old-dusty-and-almost-gone-forever Internet Explorer 6?”

Nop, is the answer. Well, the truth is YouTube hasn’t switched over using the new <video> tag of HTML5 permanently, but you can have a sneak peek on what YouTube would look like riding the Horse 5 (==HTML5). You can opt in by visiting youtube.com/html5. You should give it a try.

Apart from that, YouTube is trying out an experimental re-design of the Video Page, which, in my opinion, was about time! Take a look at this example over here. How does it feel?

P.S. Check out this HTML5 Canvas Experiment by Sebastian Deutsch.