Twitter's new geolocation support was supposed to launch for developers at today's Twitter Conference in LA (which I'm attending), but it wasn't quite ready yet. Still, Twitter's platform lead Ryan Sarver announced several details about how it will work, at least initially, in a developer session. In quickly-jotted bullet points:
Twitter will soon be able to store location data--that is, latitude and longitude coordinates--on a per-tweet basis, and for your user profile.
Including location information in your tweets will be opt-in only. You will have to visit your Twitter account's settings page on the web site to allow Twitter to store that data. It will not be enabled by default. Even if your Twitter client sends lat/log points along with your status update, if you didn't explicitly opt into including that information, Twitter will drop it at the point of entry and it will not be stored or published.
Users won't see any new features on the Twitter web site when geo launches except for the settings page where you opt in. Twitter is giving API developers a head start to display and transmit geo data in tweets in their apps first.
In practice, expect to see your Twitter client include a checkbox below the posting area labeled something like "include my location with this tweet." If you check the box when you send a tweet but you haven't given Twitter permission to store your location data, you'll have to visit your settings page on the web site to do so.
Interesting: Twitter will scrub geo-data stored in tweets more than 14 days old to avoid subpoenas about a user's location. They will outright delete the location information from their database, not just anonymize it.
After "countless hours" of work, the Google Wave team has thrown up their hands and decided not to make Wave work in Internet Explorer natively. Instead, they released Google Chrome Frame, an IE add-on that puts Chrome's backend inside Internet Explorer. Next week another batch of Google Wave invitations will go out, and IE users will have to install Chrome Frame or switch to Firefox or Safari to try Wave. (The screenshot is the prompt IE users will get when they try to log into Wave.) Google explains why Internet Explorer just doesn't have what it takes to run Wave:
Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology.
One of the smartest people I've ever met, Maciej Cegłowski, says you shouldn't self-host web-based software like WordPress or Fever or eventually, Google Wave, because it requires you to "devote half your life to learning and understanding [server] administration." Go with a hosted service or generate flat HTML files of your blog posts that you upload to your server automatically instead, he says. While Maciej's argument may apply to some (ok, most?) folks, I disagree: When it comes to a project you care passionately about, doing it yourself is much more educational and satisfying (and won't take half your life). Sure, most people should just buy instead of build, but they'll never get something that's exactly what they want and unlike any other.
On each new episode of This Week in Google (details) I’ll highlight a tip for using cloud/Google apps smarter, faster, and better. I’ll document those tips here.
If you've upgraded your Mac to Snow Leopard (10.6), it's now dead simple to synchronize iCal with your Google Calendar. While in Leopard you had to either know detailed CalDAV settings or install a helper application, in 10.6's iCal you can just open up the Preferences pane. Under Accounts, click the + button to add an account. Enter your full gmail address (you@gmail.com) and your Google Account password, and iCal will detect and configure the CalDAV settings for you. This is full two-way sync, so changes you make to events in iCal show up in GCal and vice versa.
Pro tip: Google Apps account users, iCal won't automatically detect you're using a Google Account. From the Account type drop-down, choose "Google" and then enter your full email address and password to get your GCal in iCal. This also works for Yahoo Calendar, Exchange 2007, and any other CalDAV server as well.
Android users with Facebook friends who list their phone number in their profiles will love this: Brad Fitzpatrick offers a Greasemonkey script that exports those phone numbers to AddressBookr and offers to add/merge them into your Google Contacts. Even though this was posted last November, I just gave it a test run and it worked like a charm. Thanks, Nick!
Cloud computing lets you store your data in web applications and access it from any browser, anywhere—but that doesn't mean you don't need a backup plan. Next time your favorite web site is down or you're locked out of an account, make sure you've got the crucial info you need where you can get to it: on your computer.
"But I don't need backup if my data's in the cloud," you say. "Big companies with lots of servers are better at backup than little old me could ever be." That's true, but cloud computing does come with risks. Depending on an external service to host, update, and maintain the software you love and the data you need is both the cloud's advantage and disadvantage: you're putting your stuff on computers you don't control at a single point of access (or failure). Companies get shut down or bought, accounts get locked up, servers (and you) go offline. If you store your email, photos, documents, contacts, bookmarks, and journal entries in the cloud, safeguard your data for when a storm's a-brewing with these handy tools.
Funny web series about two guys living with Google as a roommate. After you watch episode one above, move onto episode two and three. [via Asian Angel]
My tip on the latest episode of This Week in Google is how to enable real-time updates of your site's feed to FriendFeed (right now), and more services like Google Reader as they release support for PubSubHubbub in the future. If you missed the instructions on the podcast, here they are in bookmarkable text. It's very simple for blogs which use Feedburner for their feeds.
In Feedburner, click on the feed name you want to PSHB-enable. From the Publicize tab, click on PingShot in the left hand column of available services. Click on "activate" (see screenshot). Once this is done and your feed refreshes, you can view its source and see rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com" attributes. This means that when you publish a new post, Feedburner will let the hub know, which will in turn notify subscribers in real-time. Here are these same instructions from the horse's mouth. If Feedburner's not your thing, there's also a WordPress plug-in which will do this for you.
The idea of giving anyone my online banking usernames and passwords sends shivers up my spine. But my finances are more irregular than ever right now, so I've got to keep a close eye on them. For the last seven years, every month I dutifully fired up Microsoft Money (then later, Intuit's Quicken) on my computer to balance my accounts. Now that I'm freelancing, it's either feast or famine in my checking account, and that makes me want to jump off the roof instead of launch Quicken. When several months of personal finance denial went by without doing basic house-cleaning, I bounced a check. It was time to make keeping tabs on my money easier.
Enter Mint.com, a web-based finance aggregator. Given your online banking credentials, Mint logs into your accounts, fetches your transactions and balances for you, and arranges them into a single, well-designed dashboard. Back in October of 2007, Adam gave Mint a rave review on Lifehacker. But in the editors' private chatroom I said I thought it looked great, but that I couldn't bring myself to give it my online banking passwords. Last month, thanks to that bounced check, I finally bit the bullet. I'm glad I did.
Anil Dash makes the compelling argument that small incremental upgrades using easily-hackable technologies is the most effective way to get new features deployed across the web--as opposed to installing monolithic, multi-requirement software like Google Wave. When it comes to realtime-enabling sites, the Pushbutton web uses "the web way," and Google Wave will go "the Wave way." Which will succeed? Only time will tell, but these days I'm just as (if not more) excited about Pushbutton technologies I can easily turn on on my web site than Wave.
There's no doubt in my mind that Anil Dash has a crystal ball stowed away somewhere at his place back in NYC. While his piece on the Pushbutton web almost two weeks ago was inspiring in concept, it's exhilarating to see it come to fruition.
Huh-wha? you ask. Yeah, I know. It's no Google Wave. But that's what makes this exciting. This kind of small Pushbutton implementation is how real web pages will easily use existing technology to notify one another of new updates. The Google Reader/FriendFeed integration is just the first tiny step in what will be a broad deployment of realtime-enabled sites. These sites and services will let one another know when they have new data to share without the sucky inefficiencies of polling. Check out how fast FriendFeed updates when you share an item in Google Reader in this video.
If you email photos to Flickr directly from your phone like I do, you probably don't always have a copy of the images you've published online on your computer. There are a few applications that back up your Flickr photos, but right now I'm digging Dan Benjamin's (admittedly geeky) Python script, FlickrTouchr.
FlickrTouchr doesn't support video uploads or grab any metadata about your photos (like tags, comments, favorites, etc). But it does arrange your backups by set name. In one command, you authorize FlickrTouchr to access our Flickr account, and it gets busy downloading your files. You'll need Python to run this and a folder to save your images. (Python comes in OS X, install it on Windows from here.) Here's what FlickrTouchr looks like in action.
Thrilled to announce that I'm co-hosting a new weekly podcast called This Week in Google (TWiG) with lovable tech guy Leo Laporte and journalist extraordinaire Jeff Jarvis. We'll cover cloud computing in general as well as Google-related news, products, and tips.
We recorded our first episode this past Saturday afternoon, and it's now available for download or subscription in your podcatcher of choice. You can watch the unedited video here. If you're at your computer on Saturdays at 2:15PM Pacific/5:15PM Eastern, watch us record episodes live with Skype video and IRC chat at TWiT Live. You can also comment on stories we'll cover each episode in the TWiG FriendFeed room. In our pilot episode one, "In Beta," we yakked about Google Voice and the iTunes App Store, Gmail Labs, Google Wave, the real-time web, and the future of journalism. Jeff and Leo are such knowledgeable and experienced co-hosts. I'm darn lucky to get to shoot the breeze and pick their brains about this stuff. I hope you'll join us.
Registering for an account at any web site almost always requires an email address, and some people like to use a secondary address they don't really care about instead of their real email address to avoid spam. If you do this, don't use a Hotmail (Update: or other free webmail) account.
Microsoft shuts down Hotmail accounts that haven't been logged into after nine months. So if you registered for your Gmail account two years ago and used your Hotmail address as your secondary email address and never logged back in, you've put your Gmail account at risk.
Here's how: If your Hotmail account gets shut down due to inactivity, someone else can open a new one using your Hotmail address. Then, if that someone else requests a password reset from Gmail, it goes to that address, and that someone can get into your primary email account. This is how Twitter employees' Gmail accounts got broken into last week.
Twitter's new geolocation support was supposed to launch for developers at today's Twitter Conference in LA (which I'm attending), but it wasn't quite ready yet. Still, Twitter's platform lead Ryan Sarver announced several details about how it will work, at least initially, in a developer session. In quickly-jotted bullet points:
After "countless hours" of work, the Google Wave team has thrown up their hands and decided not to make Wave work in Internet Explorer natively. Instead, they released 
Cloud computing lets you store your data in web applications and access it from any browser, anywhere—but that doesn't mean you don't need a backup plan. Next time your favorite web site is down or you're locked out of an account, make sure you've got the crucial info you need where you can get to it: on your computer.
The idea of giving anyone my online banking usernames and passwords sends shivers up my spine. But my finances are more irregular than ever right now, so I've got to keep a close eye on them. For the last seven years, every month I dutifully fired up Microsoft Money (then later, Intuit's Quicken) on my computer to balance my accounts. Now that I'm freelancing, it's either feast or famine in my checking account, and that makes me want to jump off the roof instead of launch Quicken. When several months of personal finance denial went by without doing basic house-cleaning, I bounced a check. It was time to make keeping tabs on my money easier.
There's no doubt in my mind that Anil Dash has a crystal ball stowed away somewhere at his place back in NYC. While his piece on 
If you email photos to Flickr directly from your phone like I do, you probably don't always have a copy of the images you've published online on your computer. There are a few applications that back up your Flickr photos, but right now I'm digging Dan Benjamin's (admittedly geeky) Python script, 
Thrilled to announce that I'm co-hosting a new weekly podcast called 
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