No Facebook in Ping After All · Yesterday on TWiG, Leo and Jeff and I discussed Facebook integration in Ping--Leo didn't know it was there, but looking at the screenshots on Apple's site, before I got the iTunes 10 download, I said it was there. But even though the Ping web page reads "Find even more music fans...by connecting to your Facebook account" right now, Kara Swisher reports that Steve Jobs told her there's no Facebook in Ping because they wanted "onerous terms that we could not agree to." So, I stand corrected. Ping is a completely walled garden. · 6 hours ago, 6 comments
The second season of my Work Smart video series at FastCompany.com premiered yesterday, with a question from Suhasini Kotcherlakota about how to take better meeting notes, and some answers from me and Brad Isaac, who wrote a great piece on mind-mapping meetings at Lifehacker a few years back.
Despite the fact that I still can't watch and listen to myself on film without cringing, I am so pleased with the results. Adam Barenblat at FastCompany did an amazing job on the art and design, which is based on a fun new webapp: Popplet.
Check out the finished clip.
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“We’re sorry. You have reached a number that is disconnected or that is no longer in service.” · Been getting harassed via telephone by some vacation telemarketing place in Las Vegas. At first I set my phone to send calls from that one number directly to voicemail. Then, tonight, I re-discovered you can block callers in Google Voce and automatically give them the official "this number is no longer in service message." Yes. Here's what my blocked call log looks like now. · 22 hours ago, 4 comments
Google Code University · One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, "How can I learn how to code?" Today fluorescentinca showed me Google Code University, a collection of tutorials on Googly languages (like Python, Java and Go) for relative beginners. Some good stuff there. (I also wrote a more general Lifehacker piece last year that can help you decide what language to start in.)
· 1 day ago
Just completed my first email sweep with Gmail's new "Priority Inbox" feature enabled, and it's a keeper. Over time, if this mechanism proves to be as good as Gmail's top-notch spam filtering, it could be the reason why you only check Gmail in the browser. (Well-played, GOOG.)
Priority Inbox adds an "important messages" section above your inbox. Initially, Priority Inbox decides what messages are important based on your email and chat patterns--a message from someone you often email with will get marked as important automatically. Like the spam filter, you can train it by manually marking messages as important and unimportant as well.
You can also add up to 3 other sections to your inbox. By default it's Priority Inbox, Starred items, and then "everything else." But you can define what's in each section using rules based on read/unread status, stars, and labels. For example, I keep all my unread stuff in the second section. Trusted Trio users could add a section of just items labeled "Followup." I don't love the idea of using my inbox as a to-do list, so I'm still experimenting with what works best for me.
Here's what the Priority Inbox settings look like in my Google Apps account.
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My greatest hope for the hotly-rumored, might-launch-any-day-now social networking app "Google Me" is that it will not merely clone Facebook in a weak attempt at parity, but that it will innovate and solve problems that plague existing social networks.
Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled "The Real Life Social Network." The 224 slides, embedded below, describe some of the problems and common user behavior on existing social web sites, and suggest how to better design that experience. While the presentation is targeted towards businesses who want to use social media to get their message out, it also serves as a roadmap for what Google will attempt to do with Google Me.
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Thrilled to announce I'm prepping to shoot a new Q&A video series for Fast Company. Work Smart 2 will be a question and answer consultation with viewers and readers like you. If you've got a burning question to ask me about tech and productivity, this is your chance.
Here's how it works:
1. Email me at worksmart@fastcompany.com or leave a comment here on this post with your question. Topics might include things like email overload, mobile apps, cloud computing, productivity, or anything related to working and living saner, smarter and more efficiently with tech tools.
2. If we choose your submission, you and I will schedule a video Skype consultation where we record your question and my advice. I'll even call in some of my best tech-savvy expert friends for help.
3. We'll edit together the clip and run it on FastCompany.com and right here on Smarterware.
Interested in getting a little video Skype Q&A going? Here are the details. Can't wait to talk to you.
Yesterday while I was on the air with Jeff and Leo recording TWiG, Google announced that they are halting development on Wave. The webapp will be available till the end of the year--with mechanisms to export your current wave data--and the code will remain open source.
As the author of the first user guide on Wave, I spent this morning doing interviews with tech journalists about what this all means. Here are some questions I got asked, and answers I offered.
What do you think about Google killing Wave?
I'm really disappointed. Wave is a tool I love and use daily, and this announcement makes Adam's and my user guide essentially a history book, an homage to a product that I believe was simply ahead of its time.
What did you love so much about Wave?
I loved Wave's ambition. From a purely technical perspective, Wave pushed the edge of what was possible in a browser; it promised a new federated communication system; it's open source and uses an open protocol; it's a platform that developers could customize and extend with gadgets and robots. From a user perspective, it had the guts to try to introduce a whole new paradigm of communication, one that combined document collaboration and messaging into a single interface. It demonstrated real-time collaboration in a browser the way no other webapp had yet. It made group discussions/brainstorming/decisions much, much easier.
I respect any product that aims as high as Wave did, even if it misses the mark.
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Naming products is hard. After weeks of brainstorming, teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, trademark searching, late-night strikes of inspiration followed by crushing morning realizations that the idea sucked, I'm thrilled to announce that ThinkTank has been renamed to ThinkUp. It's our Firebird-to-Firefox moment. Rebranding is difficult, but the most heartening part of this process was that the ThinkUp idea came to us via the app. @markwallace responded to Anil's call for ideas on the name change in this thread, captured by ThinkUp.
With name changes come URL changes: we're now @thinkupapp on Twitter and at ThinkUpApp.com.
I've been busybusy shepherding this project along this summer, and loving every minute of it. Between our two excellent Google Summer of Code students and a community of volunteers, the project has been growing and evolving in leaps and bounds. Late August/early September we're on track to have a web-based installer in place as well as some neat data visualizations that will make capturing your tweets and Facebook updates even more easy and fun to do. Interested in hearing more? Join the ThinkUp mailing list.
Email, IM and the web is a huge distraction, especially for those with short attention spans. My new friend Clay Johnson uses interval training techniques to lengthen his attention span the same way he trained his body to run a marathon. Clay writes:
Paying attention, for long periods of time, is a form of endurance athleticism. Like running a marathon, it requires practice and training to get the most out of it. It is as much Twitter’s fault that you have a short attention span as it is your closet’s fault it doesn’t have any running shoes in it. If you want the ability to focus on things for a long period of time, you need attention fitness.
Clay raises his attention fitness level several ways: by using a timer for work sprints (this works; I do it), by ditching his second monitor and stashing apps like Twitter and email in a separate virtual desktop that he hides while he works, by keeping his browser tab count down to a minimum, and by listening to lyric-free music. He's also looking into a standing desk. Test out your attention fitness level by seeing if you can read his post in its entirety--it's lengthy but full of interesting material that supports his approach.
How to Focus [InfoVegan.com]
The muscle soreness I'm experiencing today after walking around Comic-Con all weekend made me realize: I've got to incorporate more standing and walking into my daily routine. Maybe a treadmill desk? There are some expensive desks made to fit over a treadmill (sold separately), but someone on Hacker News modified an IKEA Jerker desk to do the job. The discontinued but beloved model of desk, which I already own, plus one of those utilitarian wire shelving units gives you a wide monitor stand with plenty of component/wire storage and keyboard and mouse room. Click on the image to see the whole setup. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but it looks really tempting to try. The owner says:
Coding while walking works fine for me. As far as the mechanics, it's not hard to walk and type at the same time. 2MPH isn't very fast. I can't draw with the mouse while walking, so the occasional graphics work has to be done standing. Mentally, the consistent motion sometimes helps with flow, sometimes not. It's hard to tell, but switching between walking and standing seems to be enough for me to support the various required mental states. I've been doing this for about two months now, and while I have no hard data, I've done what I consider to be some of my best and most creative work ever in the last two weeks, so worst-case the walking isn't too great an obstacle to my coding. And this is indeed a huge improvement for my back over both sitting and standing.
I pace while I think, so this whole walking-while-typing thing is something I'd love to try. For now, I may just adjust my Jerker tabletop to standing position, and try that for awhile, before making the treadmill investment.
My Treadmill Desk [Hacker News]
The “Only If We’re Offline Friends” Rule · I'm active on a LOT of social/sharing webapps: Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, Tumblr, and to a lesser degree, FriendFeed, Delicious and Buzz. While most of my posts are public and open to everyone, on Foursquare and Facebook*, I only accept friend requests from people who I know and hang out with offline. Still, I feel bad refusing friend requests from people who listen to TWiG or read Lifehacker or this blog simply because I don't know them. What I really want, on every social network, is an optional friend request auto-responder, so that I could make it read, "You seem nice and I'm glad you want to be friends with me, but I only accept friend requests/follow back people I know offline. Sorry." (My Facebook page is open to the public, it's my personal profile that's offline-friends-only.) · July 20th, 2010, 12 comments
Update: Google Voice product manager Craig Walker confirms that the Apps transfer is NOT supported right now, and that it was only done for a small group of testers. Sorry, all. The good news? He says there will be a way to transfer your Voice account to Google Apps once the new GApps features that are being tested right now launch. In the meantime, I'm removing the link to the request form from this post.
Update: After I published this post, Google added very strong language to that form insisting that transfers to GApps accounts are NOT SUPPORTED (caps theirs). I'm not sure why it worked for Dustin and myself. Your mileage may vary.
Even though this request form says it doesn't work for Google Apps accounts, I can confirm that Google is transferring Google Voice from regular Google accounts to Google Apps accounts right now. Thanks to a comment by reader Dustin Boston, I gave it a try this afternoon and within the hour, my Google Voice number, texts, and voicemail was ported to my Google Apps account. If you try this, a couple of things to know:
- You'll have to enter your 4-digit PIN into the request form. I forgot mine, had to reset it, got it wrong the first time, got a message saying so, reset it again, and then all worked. Write down your PIN. It's only 4 digits.
- You'll have to re-record your Google Voice name and greeting(s). They don't get ported.
- I maintain an Apps contact list, so this didn't really affect me, but Dustin recommends exporting your Google account contacts before the transfer so you can import them into your Voice account.
Here's the form to request the transfer [removed]. Even though it does say it doesn't work for Google Apps accounts, it did work for Dustin and myself.
This Week in Google, Episode 51 ·
Leo, Jeff and I jawed about the new Android App Inventor, Picnik in Picasa, mobile local search, my 23andme results, and iPhone 4 in this week's episode. My tip of the week: setting up a rich text signature in Gmail. · July 15th, 2010, 2 comments
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The second season of my Work Smart video series at FastCompany.com premiered yesterday, with a question from Suhasini Kotcherlakota about how to take better meeting notes, and some answers from me and Brad Isaac, who wrote a great piece on mind-mapping meetings at Lifehacker a few years back. 
I'm 
