Microsoft Outlook Social Connector · With Google's plans to include Buzz in Google Apps for enterprise customers, Microsoft needs a way to get social media into Outlook, and the Outlook Social Connector add-on seems to be it. When Office 2010 ships--in the first half of this year--it will have support for Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, but--oddly--not Twitter. Here's my review of the current version, which integrates LinkedIn contacts and news feeds with Outlook 2003 and 2007 now: Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Is No Buzz (But Maybe That's a Good Thing) [Fast Company] · 3 weeks ago, 1 comment
I am thrilled to announce I've landed a pinch-me dream job: I'm now a Project Director at Expert Labs, the new non-profit headed up by Anil Dash. I'll be in charge of developing ThinkTank. Here's what happened.
Last March I was thinking about buying a netbook, and asked my Twitter followers a question: Do you have a netbook? What do you love or hate about it?
When I got back 243 informed opinions by savvy netbook owners, I knew I needed a way to easily parse and share the most useful replies--and ThinkTank was born. ThinkTank is a work-in-progress web application that archives your conversations and social graph on Twitter (and eventually beyond). As you tweet, ThinkTank captures, filters, and ranks responses to those tweets so you can see the most useful responses first.
In other words, ThinkTank makes it easy to ask your contacts a question and find meaning in a high volume of responses. That's what makes it a perfect fit for Expert Labs. Expert Labs' goal is to make government run better by helping policy makers take advantage of the same kinds of crowdsourcing tools that the rest of us take for granted. Expert Labs is also part of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the world's largest general scientific community. While you and I can use social networks to figure out what kind of netbook to buy, policy makers can use social networks to tap the expertise of scientists and technologists and inform decisions on how to govern. ThinkTank's goal is to facilitate that.
The most amazing part of this whole thing? The first project that will be putting ThinkTank to use is for the White House itself. The President has identified a series of scientific and technical challenges that are as important to the future as the moon landing was. And we want to help drive feedback on that list, and even suggest what other items should be on there that haven't been included. Here's more on the Grand Challenges initiative from the White House.
Read the rest »
Iterating Buzz · Last week I gave Google a small pass for launching Buzz with serious privacy problems and a too-hard-to-find "off" button, saying that at least they were iterating quickly and openly, correcting their mistakes. Today I'm happy to see they continued to do so this weekend, even after I wondered if I spoke too soon. Significant changes to how Buzz works will be rolling out which address most of the problems it has. Would you see this kind of quick and apologetic about-face from an Apple or a Facebook? I don't think so. · 3 weeks ago, 17 comments
Closing the Feedback Loop · Matt Haughey says Google Buzz doesn't offer an easy way for publishers to see what people are saying about their stuff. He's right; as in Google Reader and Facebook, much of the liking and commenting and sharing that goes on in Buzz happens out of earshot of the creator. I think Buzz is a fine product--a pretty predictable FriendFeed clone, really--but it does suffer from this same broken loop problem that Google Reader creates. Also of interest to other publishers, Matt's related piece on what feedback loops he pays attention to in order to learn how to make better stuff online. · February 10th, 2010, 10 comments
My latest FastCompany.com video segment, shot several weeks ago, is about managing your social media updates, partly by funneling them all into one place (like your email inbox).
Then Google Buzz launched.
So, here's my social media productivity two-punch: first the video, then a walk through Google Buzz's more advanced features.
Read the rest »
Google announced the all-new Google Buzz today, a Gmail "inbox" of sorts that aggregates all your contacts' social network activity across the web. Lifehacker's got the full rundown.
A few quickly-jotted first impressions of the service:
- This ain't no Orkut. Buzz demonstrates that Google is VERY serious about social media, and just threw down the gauntlet in an attempt to take on Facebook and Twitter.
- However, they're doing it by embracing existing networks and consuming their feeds, instead of building Yet Another Island. Openness: walking the talk.
- That said, while Buzz does include Twitter status updates --which Google already integrates into search results--Facebook status updates are conspicuously absent. When questioned about Facebook Connect support, Gmail/Buzz product manager Todd Jackson said, "We have nothing to announce about that at this time."
- Instead of limiting Buzz's photo support to Google's own product, Picasa Web Albums, Buzz supports their competitor's (arguably superior) photo-sharing service, Flickr. Once again, Openness with a capital O.
Read the rest »
Last year's trashy GoDaddy SuperBowl commercials annoyed me enough to switch domain registrars; this year's just confirmed I made the right decision. If you want out, here's what I posted about it last year:
Yes, I knew that popular, cheap domain registrar GoDaddy always used sex to sell their services, and yes, their bullying upsells always bugged me, but yesterday’s Super Bowl ad shot my “Stop doing business with GoDaddy” to-do to the top of my list. But where to transfer to? I polled my Twitter friends on which registrars were the best alternatives. Here’s a spreadsheet of the full vote tally; turns out the least expensive, top vote-getter was Namecheap.com.
Been very happy with NameCheap ever since, and their "Not happy with your current registrar's advertising methods?" switching coupon code, SWITCH2NC, still works. Sorry, Danica: I like looking at beautiful people, just not at Hooters.
A week ago I asked readers to tell me how they're using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of "ha! no one's using Wave!" snarking on the Twitter, I got lots of interesting responses. Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don't work for Google are using Wave to get things done--with screenshots.
Read the rest »
Must-Know Browser Tricks · My latest at FastCompany.com dives into your browser's options dialog and keyboard shortcuts: Five Browser Secrets of Power Web Surfers · February 8th, 2010
It’s the Software, Stupid · "In hardware you can't build a computer that's twice as good as anyone else's anymore. But you can do it in software." —Steve Jobs in a 1994 Rolling Stone interview [via] · February 3rd, 2010, 4 comments
I'm thrilled to announce a new series of weekly videos and blog posts that I'll be publishing at FastCompany.com called "Work Smart," which will cover personal productivity in a digital world. Long-time Lifehacker readers will recognize much of the material, but some fantastic editing and animation make each 2-4 minute video segment a whole new, fun format. The debut Work Smart video segment takes on the age old digital productivity problem: email overload.
In this 2 minute, 45 second segment, I describe my three-folder system for emptying your email inbox on a day-to-day basis, and keeping on top of everything you have to do, are waiting for, or want to keep on hand for reference.
Read the rest »
Once you're active in Google Wave, you want to know if something new is happening there--even if you don't have Wave open in your web browser. Several Wave notifier applications and browser add-ons can do the work of checking your Wave inbox for you, and letting you know you've got new and changed waves.
The following is an excerpt from the all-new Chapter 9 of The Complete Guide to Google Wave. Got feedback? Let me know in the comments and help write the first book on Wave!
Read the rest »
Just like it isn't on the iPhone and iPod touch, Adobe's Flash browser plug-in will not be on the iPad, and there are a whole lot of opinions about that decision. Predictably, Steve's apostles are smug, Adobe's pouting, and the rest of us will have to field questions from our relatives about why they keep seeing a blue lego piece. Flash usage has been declining over the years anyway, and a few web publishers have shared numbers to prove the point. 32% of visitors to John Gruber's Mac blog Daring Fireball, which has a large percentage of visitors from the Flashless-by-default iPhone/iPod touch, did not have Flash enabled. Andy Baio says 16% of Waxy.org visitors don't have Flash enabled, up from 4% a year ago. This site wasn't around a year ago, but about 16% of Smarterware visitors don't have Flash enabled either.
Because its readership represents a mixed group of both Mac and Windows users--albeit more tech-savvy ones than your average web surfer--I ran the numbers for Lifehacker, which currently gets about 39 million visitsors a month. As you can see in the chart above, the number of Lifehacker visitors without Flash installed enabled nearly tripled from 2.32% in 2006, to 6.07% in 2009.*
My attitude about Flash? Thanks for all the video, but it's time to go. I welcome HTML5 and the browsers that support it. For an even-handed discussion about the realities of Flash from a current Adobe employee who doesn't work on Flash but does have lots of experience with standards, check out John Nack's post, called "Sympathy for the Devil."
* Update: These numbers do not include the majority of iPhone/iPod touch traffic to Lifehacker because a partner manages Lifehacker's mobile site and as far as I know, we're not using the Google Analytics tracking tag for the main site on the mobile site.
Mark Pilgrim's excellent exposition on the "tinkerer's sunset" (an idea Alex Payne put forth in his iPad piece I linked earlier) got me thinking about the nature of tinkerers, and whether the iPad really represents a sunset for them. The optimist in me thinks it couldn't even if it tried.
First, know that I fundamentally agree with Alex and Mark: the closed nature of the iPad turns me off, and I wouldn't give one to my kid if I were encouraging her to learn about how computers work. But, Apple's rightly betting that most people don't want to know about the inner workings of a computer,* and regardless of the fact that Apple runs the App Store with an iron fist, dedicated hackers have still figured out ways to run whatever software they want on the iPhone/iPod touch. They'll do the same with the iPad, and this led me to muse that the open versus closed debate, which has geeks like me in a tizzy, may be 99% a philosophical discussion. Because while we're all ranting about how closed the iPad will be, the jailbreak community is planning competitions to see who can crack it first. The sun isn't setting on tinkerers; their desire to crack things open intensifies when faced with something that's closed by design. The challenge is part of the appeal.
Read the rest »
Alex Payne on the iPad · "The iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home." al3x on the iPad. Read it. · January 28th, 2010, 12 comments
Subscribe
Follow
27 comments »
I am thrilled to announce I've landed a pinch-me dream job: I'm now a Project Director at Expert Labs, the new non-profit headed up by Anil Dash. I'll be in charge of developing ThinkTank. Here's what happened.
I'm 
