Posts Filed Under ‘Webapps’
“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. · 23 hours ago, 4 comments
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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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.
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.
Copies of The Complete Guide to Google Wave have been selling like hotcakes, and unsurprisingly, the ebook has moved a lot faster than the print version. We've still got a stack of full-color, hold-in-your-hand paperback books just dying for a home, so we've got a special deal: if you buy the paperback book for $25, you'll get the ebook free, emailed to you on the spot for instant gratification while you wait for the softcover to arrive at your door.
The electronic version of the book is now available as both a PDF and an ePub file; you'll get both when you buy the paperback. We're also happy to announce that The Complete Guide to Google Wave is now officially available in the Kindle store, no awkward PDF-to-Kindle conversions required.
Best of all, thanks to a partnership with a local charity, when you buy a copy of the paperback book, you're helping to employ developmentally disabled adults here in San Diego. Meet the folks who will fulfill your order when you buy the book, thanks to NBC San Diego:
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Google Apps users who want access to all the same products that regular Google Accounts have won't have to wait much longer. An anonymous tipster tells me a Google Trusted Tester program is underway right now, which "transitions" Google Apps accounts to full access to all GOOG products, including Voice, Reader, Buzz, Analytics, and more. Here's the official Help page which includes a visualization of the transition, in the screenshot here. (Here's a PDF, in case they pull access to the link.)
On this week's episode of TWiG, Leo, Jeff, and I were hoping aloud that there would be some way to merge existing Google/Apps accounts into one. It doesn't look like that will be possible. However, if you have a Google account that "conflicts" with your Apps account because you've assigned the same email address to both, GOOG will resolve the conflict by adding a +personal to your regular account's sign-in address. Stay with me here.
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Yesterday's live wave coverage of the Google I/O keynote was so much fun we're doing it again today. The Day 2 keynote starts at 8:30am (in less than 20 minutes), and Adam Pash, Kevin Marks and I will be live-waving it. Watch the live video stream on YouTube and follow along in the live wave embedded below.
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Google kicks off its annual two-day developerfest Google I/O today in San Francisco, and no doubt there are goodies in store during the opening keynote this morning from 9 until 10:30am Pacific Time. Google TV? Google Storage? Android 2.2? A better Buzz, Wave, or Chrome? You can watch the live video stream on YouTube as it happens. I'll be in a seat in the audience at the Moscone Center, live-typing commentary in the wave embedded below, along with Adam Pash from Lifehacker, Leo Laporte from TWiT, and former Googler Kevin Marks of Ribbit. Open up a couple of side-by-side windows--one with the video stream, and one with the embedded wave--and come on in to follow along.
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Maintaining your privacy online isn't as simple as Pirillo puts it, but his tweet made me laugh, because it's such an important point. Awareness and prudence are more critical than any piece of software or privacy setting when it comes to protecting your personal data. Over at Fast Company this week, I took a stab at the most important things you can do to protect your privacy online. It's common sense, worthy of repetition.
Online Privacy: Check Yourself (Before You Wreck Yourself) [Fast Company]
From Facebook to Diaspora · Diaspora is a distributed, open source alternative to Facebook that a few NYU graduates want to spend this summer building. They set out to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter, and on the strength of all the backlash against Facebook's privacy problems, the project has raised over $175,000 as of writing. Good for them. There are a LOT of existing projects doing work in this area (like OneSocialWeb, DiSo, Activity Streams), but I'm ok with a new effort working both together and in parallel with existing ones--it increases the chances that something will hit the the target. Interestingly, a Facebook employee recommended to the Diaspora developers that the app exploit Facebook as a platform for third-party apps to host social data but make it accessible on Facebook. Clever. This reminds me of Postel's law: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." A lot of people have and will leave Facebook, but for now, the majority won't. Any social app that wants success should allow Facebook users to find and interact with its users seamlessly. · May 17th, 2010, 7 comments
The best use of Google Wave's new anonymous access feature is public group chats on a specific topic that anyone can watch or refer to on a vanilla web page, no Wave login required. Last week, in lieu of IRC, I started holding virtual "office hours" with the ThinkTank community, and it's been super fun and productive. Here's how I set things up.
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Spokeo is the new people search engine that's freaking users out, because when you "spokeo" yourself there's a good chance you'll find your home address, phone number, interests, gender, occupation, wealth level, marital status, photos, and more. The search engine compiles information from public records and public social media network pages to put together a pretty complete profile of individuals. My local news station ran a piece on Spokeo and profiled a user, and the lower third of the screen described her as "weirded out by web site" (which amused me enough to take a screenshot).
My Spokeo search results were mixed in the accuracy department. It listed a few old home addresses of mine, but not my current one; it also missed the mark on a few other details, like saying my occupation is "retired" and misidentifying my spouse's ethnicity.
Creepy people search engines aren't new. Back in 2005, ZabaSearch was the tool of choice for stalkers. There's also Pipl, Wink, ZoomInfo, and hell, Facebook and Google. But if you don't like the idea of people finding out how much your house is worth on Spokeo, just click on the Privacy link at the bottom of a page of Spokeo search results to request that the engine remove your listing. You will have to enter an email address to do so. How accurate are Spokeo results for your name?
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