It’s difficult to write a profile of someone who you’ve never met in person - much less someone who lives on the other side of the world, on a continent you've never visited. With the help of technology, though, it’s getting easier.

In today's CNN.com profile of Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the brothers behind a new Web product called Google Wave, I used some tech tools to get a sense of the brothers’ personalities, their relationship and their creative process without traveling to their office in Sydney, Australia, for a face-to-face interview.

I asked Jens and Lars to shoot a video of the day they released Wave to 100,000 test subjects in the public. They graciously agreed, and the video they sent back increased my understanding of their personalities and work environment. Before calling up Jens and Lars for lengthy interviews, I watched some of their presentations and product demos online to get a sense of their public personas. These videos - which wouldn’t have been available before the YouTube age - led me to questions I wouldn’t have known to ask otherwise.  Another video of Jens and Lars’ joint presentation at the Google I/O conference this year served as the narrative backbone for my profile.

It was my best chance to see the brothers in action - at a pivotal and stressful moment in their deployment of their ambitious Web application.