Google Sites - Hiding Site Activity Links

Whenever anyone asks me how they can easily create a web site - guess what I say...

"Get lost freak!" (no, not really, but give me an excuse to use a quote from a kids movie, and I take it)... anyway, I say Google Sites! It really is an easy way to get content up on the web quickly - so while I may be biased, I think Sites is the most accessible tool with the right balance of features and simplicity for the average web user.

There's one thing still about our current version of Sites that I've encountered enough times that I felt I should just post about it and point people here the next 5 times I'm asked:

"How do I get rid of that Recent Site Activity link at the bottom of every page?!"

It's not the intention of most Site authors to give people a link to all the "recent activity" on a site - they just want viewers to see the current version in most cases.

Well, it's not the most obvious thing to find... Here's how to change that:

1. Sign in to Google Sites and open your site
2. Click the Gear/Flower ("More Actions") button on the upper right corner and select "Manage Site" option in the menu.
3. On the left side under Site Settings, click the "General" Option.
4. The 8th option down (or so) is called "Access Settings" - which has 2 selectors, labelled:
• Users who can access site activity:       and
• Users who can access revision history: 
5. Set BOTH of those options to "COLLABORATORS ONLY"
6. Click SAVE CHANGES (at the top or bottom of the page)

Hope that's helpful... ping me here if not (and I promise not to use a silly line from a kids movie to dissuade you).

Is Twitter today's CB Radio? so what...

If you were born after 1975-ish (younger than 35-ish), chances are you won't get this post - but if you were a kid (or a trucker) during the 1960's and 1970's, you might relate. It struck me that the CB radio was basically Twitter - just on a different channel (quite literally) - using audio airwaves rather than the character-based internet. "Citizen Band" (CB) Radios were primarily used by truckers to keep in touch with each other and with a base station - maybe a dispatcher. The CB was their practical tool to communicate. Then, kids and geek hobbyists got a hold of them. I got one as a kid - probably in 1973 - when my dad finally gave in to my persistent begging. My dad certainly made me pay for it - but he risked his life on the ladder to install the antenna... I clearly remember him dropping the antenna once as he almost fell off the ladder. But, even bent, the antenna hooked me up to a world of tweets... voices of other people and truckers with whom I purposelessly interacted (that sound too familiar?).

Then, on a long car ride to Florida, the value of the CB became clear. We took the CB in the car and formed several temporal voice relationships with some truckers on the same route - down i95. On more than one occasion, we were warned of trouble, radar traps, accidents - and the previously useless banter became useful - almost necessary in hindsight.

Some other characteristics of the CB which seem analogous:

• We had "handles" - names that represented who we wanted to be... sometimes fun, sometimes close to our real personas. The only one I remember was my uncle's: StoneMan. You figure it out.
• We had our own language, which I think follows police radio language... like 10:4 ("ok") or 10:20 ("location") or "smokey" (policeman). wow... tricky.
• We had Channels - similar in my mind to #hashtags - but much less traceable.
• Short Tweets... after all, you could only hold that little button on the side of the mic for so long...
• CB's were trendy! (tweet tweet!) There was even a hit song by CW McCall called "Convoy"

This loose analogy between Twitter and the CB radio is not very enlightening, unless you want to believe that Twitter will face the same fate. So what was that fate? I'm guessing that hobbyists found more interesting and extendable platforms (not to mention the Internets ;) and truckers still use the CB in it's original form. If it were searchable, linkable, with more traceable social structures and usage patterns and without any locational limitations, maybe CB radios would have kept growing.... or maybe they did keep growing, right out of that stupid box in my room as a kid and into a chat room, then into that phone in my pocket and then into Twitter.

Maybe someone reading this post will take a hint and help those truckers still using CBs by launching a product that has the familiar, voice-based interface of the CB, but with the added the practical advances of Twitter! Traceable, linkable, bit.ly-able, followable CB Radios! ...
Hmmm.  Maybe not.
10:4 good buddy.

Amazon and Rice - an unexpectedly good recipe

I know Amazon is not just for books, but even I was surprised at this recent purchase made by my "use the web for practical things", non-geek, wife. I came home to find two seemingly unrelated things... First, there were six boxes of our favorite Rice on the counter - previously though to be extinct in this hemisphere due to the fact that our local grocer stopped stocking it. Nice surprise, but where did they come from? Second, there was a medium-sized Amazon box on the floor (you know, in that spot where husband might eventually remove it, but often takes much longer than necessary to do so). "What'd you get?" I innocently asked. "The Rice". The Rice? The Rice came from Amazon.com? whoa.

I know this doesn't constitute a "whoa" if this was a toy or a camera or even a pair of shoes... but Rice?

Logistics and partnerships have quickly made Amazon purchasing one of the most powerful forces in the product distribution space. Any product - even Rice - has a place in Amazon's warehouses and, optionally, on their website. It's been going on for a while - but now that it impacts my grocery list - I'm way impressed. Who cares if my grocer stops carrying stuff? I bet I can just scan all my groceries at home already and... well... you know...
By the way - you MUST try this rice.

TweeterScore: a Tweeter report card

I made some enhancements to that original Tweetquency spreadsheet I posted, and turned it into something a bit more useful (an overstatement, for sure). While it's fun to look at the profiles of tweeters on Twitter, to see how many people they follow or follow them, it might be more interesting to understand their tweeting habits. How often do they tweet? How often do they reply or include a link? I created this "Tweeter report card" to help do this easily for any Twitter screen name.

We can't use the typical subjects seen in school report cards (thank goodness), so I had to make up some of our own. Here's what you'll see on the TweeterScore report card which spans the past n tweets (which you can set between 5 and 500):

• Tweetquency, viewed as a chart (this version, btw, lets you change the charting buckets, in case you want more detail for those tweeters who are too concentrated in the long or short end of the duration curve (sorry - sounds like wall st.).
  
• Follow factor - which is a simple measure of the "cost of getting a follower". It's just a ratio the number of followers one has for each person they follow. A super high number here usually represents a celebrity of sorts.
  
  
  
• Quietness - which rates high for the less tweety of us in the crowd (included, quite simply, to make me feel better about my tweetlessness), an inverse measure of the next one...
  
• Chattiness - which is the average number of tweets per day. These inversely represent the same data which is in the tweetquency chart, but on average. The most chatty will have numbers above 20 or more (hi Tara!)
  
• Link-i-ness rates the percentage of recent tweets which contained a link
  
• @Reply-ness shows the percentage of recent tweets which contained at least one @reply.

Beyond pure fun, the usefulness of these measures might arise when, for example, a small business wants to know the habits of another tweeter whom they feel is doing things "right" on twitter. See some examples included here - such as CNN Breaking News - which hardly ever includes a link, has huge followfactor (they don't need to follow others to get people to follow them) and they only tweet on average about once per day (rounded, but still surprised me). Then look at Orli Yakuel, who is constantly pointing people to great products and sites, including links in 62% of her recent tweets. Matt Cutts and Tara Hunt (missrogue) just have huge followings, but one doesn't follow many people and the other does - so their followfactors are quite different. I have some ideas for how the trends seen across types of tweeters would make an interesting thesis either in business or social research... for example, Techcrunch (not shown here) had a Linkiness score of 100% over the 250 tweets I collected. Sounds like a Blogging business trend we might have predicted. I also bet the general shape of a tweeter's Tweetquency chart can be indicative of...(yawn)... ok - I'm boring myself now... on to the next project ;) I'll write more about how this was all done in a future post - and then describe a more useful way to use these mechanics.... but for now, if you want to score a few tweeters you know - Get your own copy of TweeterScore... and find me on the first day of 140tc or at GoogleIO next week if you have questions about all this sheet ;)

Finding the most popular tweeter tools

I've become a little more interested in Twitter lately - and finally started looking for something to use for tweeting and searching beyond what's on twitter.com. Of course, I began by starting a list (yes, a spreadsheet) of the tweeter tools available - but that list too quickly grew to well beyond 100 choices. So, while interesting, it was too daunting to analyze or try each tool in detail.

Then I realized that I could see what tools people use for tweeting pretty easily - so, if I trust that popularity might be some indication of value, I could at least find a narrow set of popular tools for tweeting (won't help me with search, but hey...)

So - on three separate days this past week, I took a sample of 1,000 tweets - that's 3,000 in total - and counted which tools were used. Not necessarily a statistically significant methodology, but not bad. See my results in the spreadsheet embedded here. I left most of the collection and math to another post - but figured other people might want the results sans all the formula rigor anyway. The "Follower Score" takes into consideration the number of followers of each tweeter - so that a tool used by a heavily followed Tweeter will rank higher. For now the chart just uses the pure Tweet Count to tell me that I should use TweetDeck, TwitterFeed or TwitterFon, if I just want to follow the pack.


I'm starting to collect a few interesting spreadsheets related to twitter these days... more to come on this...

Chart your Twitter Tweetquency

I follow a few people on Twitter who pretty much make me feel like I'm with them every step of their day... and I follow some who tweet so infrequently, that I feel lucky if I catch what they say between all the other blabber. That made me think that it might be interesting to see a chart of how frequently we tweet - our Tweetquency. As many of you know, I just can't help myself sometimes - I have to do everything on a spreadsheet.

Click the image to see a view-only version of this spreadsheet.
You can also click here to get your own copy of this spreadsheet which you can edit and play with.

I expect to be playing lots more with this, but here's how this simple version was done... I created a spreadsheet with two sheets. In one sheet (the second one in the file), I used the Twitter API to pull in what's called a user timeline - the same thing you see when you click on a user's screen name in Twitter. This is done using the =ImportFeed() function in Google Docs. The actual formula looks like this:

=importfeed("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.atom?screen_name=" & B1, "items", true)
- where cell B1 holds the user screen name I want to grab.
[note - I also tried to have a count - to pull in a certain number of tweets, but that doesn't seem to work - so this spreadsheet actually is totally dependent on puling in 20 tweets at a time right now - and does the formula 5 times to get 100 tweets to play with. Look at that second sheet and scroll down a bit to look for the repetitive formulas and you'll see this hack.]

Then I have a second sheet (which is actually the main/first sheet you see) which is basically the user interface - it allows you to enter a screen name and shows you the chart once the data in that other sheet is collected.

It's fun to enter a name of someone you follow, just to show you something visually that you already know - that they either blab all the time, or hardly ever ;)

For now, this only looks at the prior 99 tweets... but I'll likely be posting some updates and new versions of this TwitSheet... so let me know if you have other ideas or watch this space...

My Tracks on the G1 is oh so sweet

If you're in tech, you've always sought the killer app, and while I know it's a plural (after all, I've got several killer apps near and dear), there's one that hit me right between the eyes this weekend - and I'm telling everyone. It's on my G1/Android phone. It's called "My Tracks". It was developed at Google - but that has nothing to do with my feelings expressed here. Seriously - it could have been developed by Bernie Madoff (oh - more on that soon) and I still might have to love it.

The main reason for my instant adoration of this product is based on my prior experience in custom mapping... Almost exactly a year ago, I painstakingly clicked off about 4 different hikes using the original My Maps feature of Google Maps - trying to re-create the exact path taken through some wooded hikes. At the time I was raving about how cool it was that I could create those maps and share those hikes - but, I realize now why I rarely went back to do more. It was just too much effort (oh - poor me... 5 minutes of clicking a mouse is too much effort... really - I need a dose of pre-tech life). It all comes down to convenience. The number one rule of successful products - convenience.

I mentioned the maps to my brother in law, who told me I could borrow his awesome Garmin everything-GPS device to track my next hike, "I haven't taken the time to figure it out yet - so you can try it and then show me", he says... so I tried it. Got some interesting... uh... "results"... Some elevation info...that's about it... and carrying this awkward, 1970's cell phone looking thing... I never figured out how to actually get the data out of it.

This time - I take my two boys bike riding on a cold day at a nearby park. I take my phone (which I'm carrying anyway, duh), and click My Tracks - Menu - Start Recording. Done. Put it in my pocket and never looked at it again until 60 minutes later when we got back to the car. Stop Recording. More - Send to Google - Send to My Maps. Done.

I get home and bring up My Maps. OMG. In an area which was otherwise blank, I now see my tracks around the park's different bike trails... I even see one anomaly - a single track across the grass when I was trying to play a trick on my kids to get ahead of them. Busted! Then I click on the push pin in the area of the parking lot, where our ride ended... OMG (again) - Time moving, average speed, average speed when moving, elevation traveled, min elevation, max elevation, etc. Wow. "Craig!" I yell to my Bro'in-law - who's with us with his kids that day, also a gadget freak and the owner of that, uh, great GPS device I mentioned earlier. "Check this out"... "wow". I know he went home and put that ol' GPS device up on ebay.

Anyway - you'll see some of the pics I've included of that first experiment including the detailed riding around in circles I did in the park... which, unintended, is a great show of the detailed capture used in this killer app. I'm suddenly motivated to hike, to bike, to walk anywhere... I'll never leave my G1 home again (anyone wanna buy a first gen iPhone with Jelly Car pre-installed?)

Friend Connect now open

I had many people ask me about Friend Connect when I put it on my blog as part of an early beta, so I figured I should post quickly about it again... While it's been pretty cool up until now, there were only a few blogs which had it - so a bit less "connecting" on my blog. But now, anyone can add it to their site.

If you haven't noticed it, or don't even know what I'm talking about - it's those to little windows (gadgets) on the right side of this blog. The first shows people who "follow" my blog, and the second provides a place to quickly comment on the blog or on a specific post (comments on a specific post page are separate from other comments).

Check out the Friend Connect blog post to get the accurate info.

I really do have more than 4 friends (I think)

You've probably noticed that I added this new feature to my blog which lets people become "members" of my blog... It's the Google Friend Connect product. The features I'm using let people show interest in my blog and even leave comments - not on a specific blog post, but on the blog as a whole. It definitely adds a level of connectivity to my blog which was missing before. Readers can now connect more directly and tell others about my blog through their membership...
I love it! but...
... like other online social networking tools and sites, there's a level of transparency that can either be encouraging or seemingly require defensive justification.

In the case of my friend Orli, it must be encouraging! She's got tons of friends immediately joining her site as members, and even press coverage of her use of this new tool..

In my case - uh... I really must say that, uh, all my friends are not on the web... well, actually, they are... but they're pretty busy, you know... no time to become members of my blog.. 'cause that would take like 2 clicks... well... maybe all my friends are on vacation without their laptops... oh, wait... How many "real" friends do I actually have?... let me see... (1, 2...uh...5... hmmm....... 6...) - yeah - 6. So... let's see... 6 members today, not including me and my mom (seriously)... So, on a percentage basis of real-life friends to Friend Connect members, I'm pretty popular!!

Lots to learn at Google IO conference

If you're looking for one of your web developers, you can probably find them in San Francisco at Google IO... a conference for developers to learn more about Google development tools and web services. Reported in varying levels of detail, and focused on many vertical topics, by plenty of bloggers... so no reason for me to give detail... but the energy here is very high and the sheer number of cool tools to learn and use could keep me busy for a decade.

I realize now that adding FriendConnect to my blog last week was a good exercise in learning more about the Social tools being made available to web sites and to people who trust their friends more than they trust other sources. If you want to start somewhere - start there... It's those two boxes on the top right of my blog - where you can see who has "joined"... think about how useful it might be, when you're using the web or web-accessible services/information, to be able to ask "what do my friends use? Who do they trust? what do they think? Expect to see this in more places than my insignificant blog so you can get that advantage of friendly advice and guidance for any web page, business listings, etc... and be able to combine the power of your relationships with your activities on the web. Have Fun.

Computing in the Cloud at Princeton U

I participated on a Panel at Princeton University last week, as part of the "Computing in the Cloud" workshop, hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy. Definitely a valuable experience for me... I met great people and learned from other panelists and participants. The panel I was on - moderated by Andrea LaPaugh and called "What's Next", included Reihan Salam and Jesse Robbins - both of whom are great story tellers and brought completely different perspectives to the subject.

Overall, panelists and attendees of the workshop conveyed a general net positive attitude, balanced with useful caution regarding privacy and security, with strong hope that Cloud Computing (should I be capitalizing that?) will bring increased transparency to such things as government collected information. As in most areas of new technology ("new" is a relative term), there are some valuable pessimistic views which keep people like me - call me a pragmatic optimist - deeply appreciating the skills of security and legal specialists who act as the sherpas (lower-case 's') in their respective mountain ranges (or jungles). I personally still have a strong view that "I trust the cloud more than my laptop" - to sum it up as simply as I can. You can watch the video of our specific panel (that one alone is 90 minutes - and all the others are also posted thanks to the UChannel). I also thought it might be useful to post the notes I put together before the panel, to organize some of my thoughts (opinions) about Cloud Computing...
(click here for the whole post, including my pre-panel notes)
My notes used at the panel:

• Computing in the Cloud - "software and data being served from the web" - will continue to grow and will be the norm. The benefits for vendors and customers simply outweigh the risks
  
  • Software distribution is an obvious win. Ridding the distribution process of physical delivery gives:
    
    • higher margin for the vendors
      
    • lower prices for the customers
      
    • better service for customers - bug fixes, security issues, new features can all be delivered to customers faster, since there's less motivation to batch these up into the next costly snail-mailing.
      
    • better products - similar to the above, this gives good developers the ability to respond to user feedback and deliver improvements continuously.
      
    • happier developers (working remotely and getting quick feedback from real users)
    
    
  • NOTE: I have an XO from OLPC (OLP2C - one laptop per 2 children, soon to be OLP3C, once the little one notices)... that further convinced me, seeing how this super-light technology gave me basically everything I needed since all I needed was the browser (notwithstanding the slow speed or issues with that specific browser)
    
  
  
• Some are still betting on desktop-to-cloud synch products - like SoonR bought by Cisco (mobile access to your desktop).
  
  
• I've learned to really hate explicit SAVING of my desktop stuff... Somehow, easy autosaving came along with the web products I use.
  
  
• Capitalism will drive "good" products (doing the right thing if people demand it)...with companies meeting the needs of other companies and individual customers... INCLUDING all the new challenges
  
  • privacy, security, safety
    
  • relevance, integration, convenience
    
  
  
• Collaboration will be an expected feature
  
  • so much of what we create is intended to share...
    
  • existing products and services take on new value with collaboration...
    
  • Creating content TOGETHER, reviewing expenses TOGETHER, planning projects TOGETHER
    
  
  
• MICRO-INNOVATION will grow fast as it becomes more achievable - can you say "Gadgets!" ?
  
  • Platforms, tools, delivery
    
  • "pay-as-you-go" Operations and commerce
    
  • Commoditized services make operating a micro-innovation more viable... for example, legal agreements, support, etc.
    
  
  
• CONTENT value with further differentiate:
  
  • Original, creative, popular content gets market-driven value assigned, while repetitive, derivative content gets super-commoditized
    
  
  
• Simpler integration / commerce / delivery will give better channels to creative talent, allowing them to:
  
  • easily syndicate
    
  • easily gain attribution (back to their service/site)
    
  • easily monetize
    
  • gain celebrity status (e.g. Youtube publishers)
    
  
  
• Collaboration brings new productivity - and new issues.... (see "issues" section)
  
  
• INTEGRATION between services will increase...
  
  • Integration can be more seamless, bringing customers to even the smallest granular service.
    
  • Access to customers / markets
    
  • Micro-Innovation becomes profitable - with canned legal process, pre-defined service delivery and support, etc...
    
  • GADGETS become a platform not only for micro-innovation, but for integration of services.
    
  • Web Services finally become a reality.
    
  
  
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for web services and data will become more important, but they will be simplified, standardized and improved - driven by the Service Integration Supply Chain (below) and the need for simplified "service commerce" (the buying/selling of services).
  
  
• A new "service-integration-supply-chain" exists and will expand:
  
  > Containers for gadgets > platform for gadget development > gadget types (content free) > content-relevant gadget instances
  
  
• Collaboration and aggregation of services will result in derivative (sometimes larger) products/services
  
  
• Do-It-Yourself web creation tools will be improved - to meet new(ish) demand.
  
  • the tools are too disparate and hard to find, and still hard to use
    
  
  
• Great Development tools - still an opportunity, since new components are available for integration (and new methods)... supporting micro-development and distribution
  
  
• Great User-Interaction design (UX) still wins
  
  • Usability and designs really do improve applications and the web overall
    
  
  
• Semantic Web-like Structure for much more interesting products
  
  • we used to cal it a "data model"
    
  • Great contribution products (community tagging) will drive this...
    
  
  
• Ubiquitous Identification - let me be me wherever i go... without worry.... (OpenID?)
  
  
• Increase in Premium Services model - advertising has been over-used by non-relevant publishers
  - Maybe even a Premium "absolutely private" web
  

ISSUES LIKELY TO OCCUR - which, themselves, drive opportunities...

• Ownership and control of Content:
  
  • Collaboration:
    
    • who owns that document which 3 people collaborated to create?
      
    • 3 people collaborate - 1 leaves and "shuts off access"...
      
    
    
  • Integration:
    
    • Content from one source being used in another service - how to split value?
      
    • example: 1 company publishes data - 2 others use it as a basis to create their own service - who's the owner? Who gets the revenue?
      
    • similar issues as those in traditional media - e.g. actors or writers demanding part of the revenue stream of syndication...
      
  
  

Note: These were just my notes that I used for the panel, since the format included each panelist giving a 10-15 minute no-slides discussion of their views. Nothing Google in here - just some semi-random personal views and not organized into a standalone presentation.

Competing with software today vs. yesterday

It used to be very hard (more investment) to crush (win) a given business area with a killer software product - corporate or consumer. It was harder to actually code (program) quality, easy-to-use software (I think) – which meant it would take longer to produce, which meant you better get it right. “Getting it right” meant spending more time on requirements gathering, more time on testing and therefore, (in our infinite developer wisdom) less time on usability – after all, there was no time for those “nice-to-haves” and no recognition of its value in comparison to getting the business rules right. All of this, by definition, meant that the software took longer to deliver, which, in turn meant that it was more common for users to outgrow the software by the time it was delivered - particularly in the corporate environment.

Users often never got any value (ROI) from software which took 1-2 (or more!) years to deliver. But, even in that environment, (which I think I describe as more grave than it was) sometimes you could get it right and win – and then, as a software vendor at least, you could win big since it was so hard for others to compete (for the same reasons it was hard for you to win).

Gaining market share was even harder. From the customer’s perspective, in the face of their large investment in a software product (nothing was free back then and just the installation cost was something never to take lightly), they had a much stronger “follower comfort” motivation – perceiving it to be safer to go with the leader (“you can’t be fired for using IBM”). That meant you needed customers to get customers. A key reference customer was necessary and critical mass was, well, critical to succeed. In Financial Services, if you did succeed as a software vendor, you were bought by Sungard – they knew how hard it was to win, so they let other companies do it and then just bought them (all... so many, in fact, they have to present them in an alphabetic index ;).

Today, it costs less to enter a given market with an idea and then to fix it, expand it, scale it – or even abandon it. Less up-front time on requirements gathering (because you can credibly limit v1), which means getting software into the hands of users earlier, which provides better usability feedback, which produces better software. There are even basic automated services - APIs - , like transaction processing, storage, etc, which are a snap to integrate.

Overall, the time to produce something valuable is shorter and it's more iterative, delivering value in stages. Programming is easier. And deployment... OH! Deplyment! Those barriers are lifted almost completely – at least for web services (SaaS) – allowing developers to get software into the hands of end-users immediately, without even an approval or onerous legal process (if both sides willingly participate).

All this means there are more competitors. Big companies need to compete with small companies (who, by the way, might be able to alter pricing due to their lower R&D legacy). Old companies compete with new. Customers probably have lower switching costs too, due to their ongoing demand for ‘switchable service’ as part of the service they choose (ironic, isn’t it – that to win a customer’s business today, you hove to prove to them that they can easily stop using your service).

Competing today is actually, well, fun! Got an idea? Try it! Get it out there!

Popularity caused by Popularity

Thinking about the competitive environment in web applications as part of the whole Office 2.0 conference pre-think, it seemed worth analyzing (a gross overstatement) what makes some new applications just zoom past the competition in terms of user popularity - and therefore, success (from a usage, not a revenue, perspective).

The examples already seen are obvious, including auction markets (eBay), Video (YouTube), demographically-focused social networking (MySpace, LinkedIn, FaceBook) and plenty of others. Popularity seems to bring popularity. Once a winner is chosen in a certain cross-section of function and demographic (or business vertical), it becomes a peer magnet. The obvious reason this occurs is:

• Critical Mass. It often adds value to have more people involved in a service – for example with bidding services, you want 200 potential bids, not 2... or with social networks, there's not much sense to using one which your friends won't use.
  

But there are 3 other reasons people (or their companies) select particular apps, which might apply more to non-social business-focused apps or at least apps which do not rely on critical mass:

• Trust. People perceive something that other people already use as more trustworthy and safer. "If Avis and Budget already use Salesforce.com for CRM, than I'm probably ok selecting it for my business".
  
• Laziness. Given the time commitment of a proper analysis to chose a service, people are willing to save time by going with what peers are already using.
  
• Promotion and Buzz. The more people use a service the more other people hear about it and the more likely they are to at least try it (then it must rely on it's own value).

The speed at which people communicate in this new environment, fosters this phenomenon, since the above reasons given rely on knowing what applications or services others are using. Maybe this is why it seems that a winner in more recent years becomes a winner faster than in the past... or maybe it's just that time seems to be going by quicker...

Darn... I forgot to mention the new Doclist we launched last week... I've been trying (really!) to avoid too many posts related to the Docs & Spreadsheets product... But this time, I'm surprised at my own self-control - 'cause I love this new doclist... Have you tried the search bar type-ahead yet... Muah!! Ron explained it well in our team blog, so I'll stop there...
I know we had a fairly low bar to meet, and we still need a bunch of features people want (including me), but it is a huge improvement...

Anyway - that was just catch-up...

the real reason for this post is to profess my way-too-early love for the yet-unproven, barely-seen iPhone! I finally got my hands on one today for about 4 minutes. Do you think I called my mom? No. I should have. But I forgot this thing even lets you make calls... I immediately went to docs.google.com to check out the doclist - and then, as fast as I could, opened a spreadsheet... and, Voila! There it was!



In it's full browser glory! (calm down, JR, you geek-loser). The proud owner of this particlar iPhone got it away from me long enough to show me how to zoom in (wow... just like Jeff Han's Demos on the big screen), and that's when I snapped this second picture... oh... what's that... a "trying to reach google.com" message... oh - right - Ajax communication in a collaborative edit session don't yet work on the iPhone browser... oh well... full disclosure is always best anyway - besides, viewing the spreadsheet worked beautifully! So just don't try to edit remotely yet... So now - what to do... buy v1.0 and risk the yet-unknown new product-itis symptoms - maybe a battery failure re-call or a cracking-screens problem? or wait to get the perfected v2.0 in a year... hmmm.... Nah... this is Apple... v1.0 is good enough!

The promise of portals is finally here - as gadgets

The SIFMA Technology conference is in NY this week (sorry - that's the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Assoc) and I'm not attending, but I know some old friends are. I hope they picked up some good tchochkes for me... anyway...

I remember many (many!) years ago at those shows (then called SIA, and before they brought along the cast of the Sopranos to sell IT services - seriously) there were many companies singing the virtues of their Portal products - trying, of course, to sell to the corporate IT teams to sell their internal bankers, brokers, operations teams, etc. It sounded great - but it was too early. Every solution was proprietary or based on a not-yet-and-not-ever-to-be standard which was "awaiting approval" by the W3C or some other speedy standards body... And besides, the internal products were on dozens of incompatible platforms with really poor integration methods.
But now, about 12-15 years later, I think we're there - and it's the consumer market which is driving both the standards (de facto) and the methods and some actual content.

It's all best shown with pictures - which were beautifully collected and displayed on LifeHacker... a bunch of iGoogle screen shots ("show us your iGoogle"), including a very compelling Finance-oriented personalized page... something that really strengthens my belief that this gadget model will take over the corporate market. The simplicity of delivering consumable snippets of applications in windows which can be directly interactive and then expanded when needed is smart and usable and, for me, perfect. It's not just a google thing - Yahoo had some great portaly-gadgety stuff early on, and now pretty much everyone does - but I can sing the praises of iGoogle freely, as it's not my product :) and I really do love it.

media mashup tools do not make me a good producer

Thanks to my friends at GoToWeb20, I have a shortened morning, having spent the last 30 minutes playing with a media mashup tool they discovered by Vuvox. Embedded here is a sample:

It's Flash-based - so the styles they provide have some level of click-interaction while viewing... very slick. I picked a very subtle, hardly-dynamic style for these photos, but there are lots of other styles to choose from... (go ahead - click the flowers... go on... don't be afraid... it's not a banner-ad in disguise...)

If you like that, you should also check out iBloks - also a media mashup and publishing tool, but possibly further along in their product lifecycle than vuvox, with many options for sharing and gadgetry, and even a place for Agencies, Designers and artists to make money with iBloks. Yes Greg, an ecosystem ;) . Another differentiator here seems to be the focus on 3D animated models as the basis for media presentation.

You can just use the free models that they provide as your theme, or go to the "SHOP" tab and use a custom model (Mods), Themes, Music, Photos and Video... You can even create gadgets to share your creations... There's more depth here that I won't get into, as I have no time for a full review (now that I used my time playing ;)

Are you changing your email address again?

If you have an email address with your current ISP (provider of internet connectivity ) - please stop. You are destined to annoy your friends and lose contact with them... Think about it... you move houses to a new town with a new ISP... bye bye old email address... or your phone company or favorite pizza place offers you a better deal on internet servcies - and you don't sign up only for fear of losing that horrible current email address which you've now shared with your whole world of contacts... Your Internet Service provider (Comcast, Verizon, BT, etc) will not give you a free email address if you decide to stop using their services... And, when you do change, PLEASE don't just change your email address to another non-committed email provider...and if you do, PLEASE don't send me your pathetic little "I'm changing my email address from joe34225@ISPthisYear.net to joe476221@ISPnextYear.yuk". I've received at least two such notices from friends lately - and while I had an easy time explaining why this was not a smart move, I realized that I've seen no marketing to this point from any 'independent' provider of more continuous email services (iow, not associated with your connectivity, like Google, Yahoo, msft).

So - what email address would you want if you could have anything? How about joe@soCool.com ? Why not come up with your own domain name and then create email addresses for your whole family at that address? I know - "how the heck do you do that?" - well, besides finding a web domain you like that is available, it's actually pretty easy... Of course, my preferred way is the free way - using Google Apps for Your Domain.. I can give more details if the sign-up page isn't speakin' your language... just ask.

See your spreadsheet as a draggable timeline

Thanks to a chance online stumbling across Kiyo's Blog (ok, "chance online stumbling" is more like a link in my email triggered by a google alert for 'google spreadsheet' ;), I discovered this really cool open source timeline widget in the form of a Sample Timeline using a Google spreadsheet. So it was a double bonus for me.. a cool widget and, even better, a great use case for the spreadsheets API !

Now I could have discovered this earlier if I watched everything that came out the developer pages of Google - as this widget was highlighted previously as a
Google Code Sample related to using Google Calendar API.... but Kiyohito Yamamoto saved me the trouble of both recognizing the opportunity and then coding a spreadsheet-sourced timeline... Thanks Kiyo!