Category Archives: Google

VIDEO: How to use Google Wave for Collaborative Conference Note-taking

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googlewavepreview.jpgOver the past two weeks, I’ve both witnessed and participated in an incredibly powerful way to use Google Wave. The use case is simply this:

collaboratively taking notes at a conference

I saw this first Oct 28-30 at eComm Europe in Amsterdam. Members of the Google Wave team set up some initial waves and showed “live waving” during the actual event. Others then participated in (everyone at eComm was given a Wave account). I joined in asking some questions and participating in the dialog. Although I wasn’t there, I wound up learning a lot of what went on there and now there are some great notes people can reference about the sessions. If you have a Wave account, you can see the eComm waves yourself by going to the search box at the top of the center column (where it usually says “in:Inbox”) and entering in:

tag:ecomm with:public

Now you will see all the public waves that were created by multiple people during and after the event.

At VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 this week in San Francisco, I and a number of others did our own “live waving” and the process was quite powerful in cases where a number of us were collaborating. You can see the waves in Wave by searching on:

tag:voicecon with:public
tag:e2conf with:public

There weren’t as many Wave users at the two conferences, so we didn’t have quite as many collaborators in some of the public waves – but look at the ones relating to “Google Wave” to see some strong collaboration.

I actually used ScreenFlow on my Macbook Pro to capture one of the editing sessions, because I think you really need to see that in action to fully appreciate what it can do. I’m hoping to edit that and get it up as a screencast soon.

To show how to use Wave in this manner, I created this Emerging Tech Talk screencast based on the eComm public waves:

The Emerging Tech Talk blog post has a few more details about what I showed in the video.

If you use Google Wave in this fashion, please do leave a note letting people know how to find your waves. As we all explore this early preview of Google Wave, it’s great to learn from each other.

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Experimenting with Google Wave? Here’s a great list of keyboard shortcuts

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googlewavepreview.jpgAre you experimenting with Google Wave and wish you could work quicker within the Wave windows? If you are like me and love keyboard shortcuts, I found this site that may be of help to you:

http://spreadgooglewave.com/syndication/google-wave-keyboard-shortcuts

The two shortcuts that save me the most time are:

  • “Shift+Enter” – ends your editing, the equivalent of pressing the “Done” button with the mouse.
  • “Ctrl+Space” – marks all blips in a Wave as read (important in a wave like the VUC Wave that has lots of commentary).

What Wave keyboard shortcuts do you find most useful?

P.S. If you are on Wave and want to say hello, I’m at “danyorkLPG@googlewave.com”.

P.P.S. No, I don’t have any more invites. 🙂

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Today’s launch of Google Wave – some links and initial thoughts

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googlewavepreview.jpgUnless you were under a rock, or are not in the tech part of the online world, you knew that yesterday into today was “the big day” when Google Wave launched it’s wider public preview. Having had a Wave login since back in July, but not honestly had a whole lot of folks to try it out with, I was pleased to get the invite this morning to join in the public preview. If you are in the world of Wave, I can be found at:

danyorkLPG@gmail.com danyorkLPG@googlewave.com

Feel free to invite me to a wave. [UPDATE: It appears that within Wave, you have to use the “@googlewave.com” address.]

LINKS, LINKS AND MORE LINKS…

There were, of course, a zillion stories written over the past couple of days related to Google Wave. Some of the ones I found most useful in understanding the basics:

Mashable has also had extensive coverage over the past few months, as has RWW in particular.

There were some other posts I found interesting:

The Salesforce.com demo, in particular, was quite compelling and intriguing to see how Google Wave could fit into existing business apps like Salesforce.

With ANY service that was so incredibly hyped as Wave, there was the inevitable backlash… predicted by a TechCrunch article, chronicled by a RWW piece and certainly given the greatest roasting by none other than Robert Scoble himself:

Many, many, many more posts out there, naturally, and I’m sure many more will come in the days and weeks ahead as more people try it out. (I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out Dion Hinchcliffe’s great post from back in May: “The enterprise implications of Google Wave – Definitely worth a read.)

SOME INITIAL THOUGHTS

As I worked with the public preview today, I did have some initial thoughts:

  • Overall, I definitely LIKE it – Having worked with it for a while, I have to say that the potential for near-real-time collaboration is pretty amazing. It’s great to see the ecosystem of applications (gadgets and robots) developing. The preview seems pretty fast and stable. And it’s all built on XMPP and other open standards with the promise of a distributed architecture. All in all pretty impressive.
  • UI takes some getting used to – Having said that, the user interface to Google Wave does take some getting used to. Just the way comments are inserted… it’s part IM… part email… part wiki. You might be leaving a comment toward the bottom of a wave when someone else inserts something toward the top. Just takes a bit to understand.
  • Namespace shared with GMail – This is either a good thing if you have a GMail name you like, or an annoying thing if you were hoping to get a particular name. In my case, I had perhaps naively hoped that maybe I could get “danyork”, but since someone else has that for GMail already, I couldn’t. So I wound up using my GMail account name. To be honest, it makes sense for Google to do it this way. There will just be namespace collisions for people like me with common names. So it goes.
  • Yet another place to check for messages – Both Louis Gray and Robert Scoble mentioned this, and I definitely agree… your Google Wave inbox becomes yet another place to check for messages. I already have a work email account, a personal email account (well, several, but all coming into one client), a Skype IM account, a dozen other IM accounts aggregated into Adium… so in addition to checking all of those I need to check my Wave inbox. And because it is web-based I don’t have a way in my Mac’s Dock area to know there are new messages. Hopefully at some point it will be integrated with GMail or provide some other way to help us with this issue.
  • Distributed architecture isn’t there yet – I realize that this is only a “preview” for 100,000 people, but I’m impatiently interested to see the distributed architecture outlined at Waveprotocol.org. As I recently wrote about at great length, the “Internet Way” is to have distributed, decentralized architectures. Services like email or the web where: 1) anyone can set up their own server; and 2) you don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do so. Google Wave holds out the promise of giving us a very rich collaboration infrastructure built on a distributed, decentralized model. I want to get there. Today. 🙂

Those were some initial thoughts… I’m sure I’ll have more as time goes on and I’ll write about them here.

What do you think? If you are in the initial preview pool, what has your experience been?

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Tomorrow is “Google Wave Day” – some links to learn more…

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If you’re in the tech part of the blogosphere, you are probably aware that tomorrow Google will send out 100,000+ invites to Google Wave. It’s a big deal, really, as a larger audience gets a view into what Wave is all about. Thankfully the folks at RWW put together a great post:

For those wanting the “official” Google perspective, here you go:

Now if only I could remember my %#$#% password to get into my Wave sandbox account, I could find out tomorrow how to get set up in the “real” Google Wave.

I’m looking forward to seeing Wave in action with a larger audience!

The Great Gmail Fail – and the collective panic/meltdown on Twitter…

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In case you weren’t watching your Twitter stream this morning (US Eastern time), Google’s Gmail has been down. You can read about it on Mashable, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and probably a zillion other blog sites by now. It’s probably back up by now.

But if you were on Twitter this morning, you would have DEFINITELY known that Gmail was down. Here’s the state of search.twitter.com after I left the tab open for a bit:

gmaildown-twitter2.jpg

Yes, that’s 22,057 messages since I opened the window – all mentioning “gmail“. In the time it’s taken me to write these few paragraphs, the count has now climbed to 22,601.

gmaildown-twitter-1.jpgThe Twittersphere is experiencing a gigantic collective spasm of worry/panic/meltdown, along with a healthy dose of amusement thrown in at all of the worry/panic/meltdown.

Many of us have spoken or written about Twitter as an “attention lens” where it helps point you to what others find important at the moment. This morning it wasn’t so much a “lens” as it was a giant screaming sledgehammer!

It was, in many ways, absolutely fascinating.

Kind of like standing on the side of the highway watching a giant wreck/collision. Or watching similar scenes on TV. It was mesmerizing to a certain degree. I also learned of the site http://twitterfall.com/ via the page to watch ‘gmail’ tweets:

Twitterfall.jpg

It was admittedly interesting to have on my screen in my hotel room as I did an early round of email checking. With the sheer volume, though, I did have to bump up the speed from the default to “4 per second”.

The reality is, of course, that the collective focus probably did absolutely nothing to help Google bring the service back online. Instead, you had 7 zillion people repeatedly checking their browsers – or rushing to configure IMAP because IMAP access to GMail was working, albeit with slow spots. The amount of traffic heading into GMail’s servers must have been rather massive.

Scattered amongst the plaintive wails of anguish were naturally those pointing to problems with so many people relying on Google’s services… and pointing out the problems of pushing services into the “cloud”… etc.

All of which are valid concerns, of course, but I suspect the reality is that in a few hours or a day or two this will long be forgotten. Google’s Gmail was down for a few hours. Next topic….

Google just makes Gmail so seductively easy to use. I imagine people will just keep on going (although one hopes people will look into either IMAP or Google Gears so that they do have a local copy).

gmaildown-twitter-2.jpgMeanwhile, the tweets continue… (as now everyone needs to tweet that the service is back up for them, of course!)

P.S. And I should say that I am as guilty as anyone as tweeting about Gmail being down.

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Today’s Squawk Box will discuss “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

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squawkbox.jpgOn today’s Squawk Box conference call/podcast at 11am US Eastern, we’ll talk about Nick Carr’s essay in the Atlantic Monthly called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Are his concerns valid? Or overblown?

Some of the other links I provided for background:

Knowing the Squawk Box “regulars”, it should be a fun discussion.

If we have time, we might talk about continued information coming out of Apple’s WWDC event and/or the Microsoft TechEd event happening this week. For instance, what do people think about the MobileMe service that I discussed in my blog post.

You are welcome to join us at 11am US Eastern via the Free Conference Calls application for Facebook. The show will also be available for download later in the day on Alec Saunder’s weblog.

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Google’s orkut to launch application platform based on OpenSocial

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orkut - login.jpgDoes anyone still use Orkut?

Obviously some people do and the first visit to my page in eons showed me that a couple of people I know had actually been by there recently. But in the grand “battle” between Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc., orkut doesn’t seem to get much mention these days. I know that I joined orkut back in 2004 when it launched and you had to have an invite to get in. But a year or so later I had basically left it behind (except that my account is still there and now and then does get friend requests).

So I was a bit surprised to encounter over on Official Google Blog the post “orkut going more social” that contains this text:

“Starting this month, we’re enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We’ll start ramping up to more than 50 million people over the next few weeks.

To prepare for this growth, we’re now accepting social applications. For a while now, developers have been able to write, test, and play with applications on orkut. Later this month, however, we’re going to start rolling them out to orkut users. OpenSocial developers can submit their completed applications (deadline: Feb. 15).

To help developers ready their applications, we’re offering engineering support and training. We’ve scheduled orkut hackathons on Feb. 14-15 from 10 am-6 pm at the Googleplex in Mountain View and via videoconference in New York. For more information or to RSVP, please email hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com. If you can’t attend, we hope to see you in the OpenSocial forums or on chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial).”

The post obviously has more information and the relevant links.

That Google is doing this is no surprise given their backing of the OpenSocial initiative. It is interesting to see the note about “ramping up to more than 50 million people“. Is that the current number of active orkut users? If the Wikipedia entry is accurate (that states 67 million users in August 2007) that would certainly be plausible.

Regardless, it is great to see another social network indicating that they will have working support of OpenSocial apps soon. The more there are, the more incentive it is for app developers to develop for OpenSocial.

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New “Shindig” project will be open source OpenSocial implementation

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3A99D7EC-F80D-4655-88EA-84A78313CC00.jpgGoogle’s OpenSocial effort passed a milestone yesterday when the first pieces of code were uploaded for Shindig (tip of the hat to Mr. Topf for pointing this out), an open source implementation of the OpenSocial API.

Why is this important? Quite simply, I see an open source implementation as critical for the success of any API. As noted in the Shindig Proposal on the Apache Software Foundation’s web site:

Shindig will provide implementations of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants.

A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users.

The Apache Software Foundation has proven it is the best place for this type of open development.

The Shindig OpenSocial implementation will be able to serve as a reference implementation of the standard.

The key part is that last sentence. A “reference implementation” does a couple of things. First, for developers for whom the license terms are appropriate, they can simply incorporate the code directly into their products and… ta da… they are writing OpenSocial applications. Second, for developers who can’t directly use the code verbatim due to licensing, they can at least study the code and understand how it works. They can see how the OpenSocial interaction occurs in a working example.

Getting an open source reference implementation out there enables developers all over to rapidly use and learn about the API. While this news yesterday represents only the very first step in the development of the project, it’s a good start down the path. Now, developers can download the existing code, try it out, and, hopefully, contribute patches/fixes/etc. back into the code base.

Shindig will be a good project to watch. There does not yet seem to be an official project web page, but there is a “project status page” on the Apache Incubator site.

P.S. And for those wondering, “shindig” is an English word for “a social gathering” which makes it rather appropriate.

Still thinking about Google’s Open Social… does it truly tear down the walls of social networks? Or just make widgets work across socnets?

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200711021131Unless you have been under a rock for the past few days, you should by now be aware that Google released an API called OpenSocial. There is a new Google blog that had the announcement, which included this:

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it’s built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don’t have to learn a custom programming language.

The list of OpenSocial partners is quite extensive… basically everyone in the social networking space except Facebook, but also including other companies such as Salesforce.com and Oracle. Having the big players like MySpace and LinkedIn is definitely key. Google has also provided a wealth of information:

I find it all intriguing. There is a great amount of talk in the blogosphere about how this “tears down the walls” of social networks… and it does – in one aspect. It seems to me that this is really a direct shot at the Facebook Platform in that it gives application developers the ability to create applications that work across multiple networks. So from the point-of-view of a developer, this truly does open up the world of social networks. You can now write an app that is not just restricted to the confines of Facebook’s walled garden, but instead can run in any of the other social networks out there (that support OpenSocial).

So it solves part of the problem out there in social networking… and it looks like quite a compelling way to do so. I’m certainly going to be reading the tutorials and experimenting with sample code.

But please let’s remember that there are other issues with the walled nature of social networks. For instance:

  • Why do I have to sign in with a different username and password to each of them? Why can’t I just have a common (and secure) username/password that I use? (such as OpenID)
  • Why do I have to recreate my friends list in each social network? (something the “social network portability” folks are looking at)

OpenSocial lets apps be created that work across multiple networks. I commend the folks behind it and supporting it. But let’s please remember that it solves only one part of the overall “open” issue.

I need to really play with it more before I can comment further. In the meantime I’m capturing here a number of links related to OpenSocial that I have found useful:

Stay tuned for more…

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Google’s “Shared Stuff” lets you share web sites/URLs publicly, or with Facebook, del.icio.us and others (review with screenshots)

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Google yesterday quietly rolled out their “Shared Stuff” social bookmarking/sharing service and predictably there were a slew of postings in the blogosphere. Here’s my little quick tour for you. First, you add a link on your bookmark bar:

200709211116

Now you just click on the bookmark whenever you are on a page you want to share, very much like you do with del.icio.us, Facebook, digg or any of a zillion other services. The result is a popup page that looks like this:

200709211038

Once you do any of the optional things like add a comment, change the picture or add tags, you simply hit “Share” and you get a page telling you of your success and giving you the link to your Shared Stuff page:

200709211039

Clicking on the link brings me to my own private version of the “Shared Stuff” page (because I’m logged in with my Google account):

200709211040

which looks sort of like the public page you all will see (which I get by clicking the “As everyone sees it”) link:

200709211043

You’ll immediately note that the page everyone sees only has one of my two items on it. I can’t explain why… and I’ve forced a browser refresh multiple times to try to see if it was a browser issue but that seemed to do nothing.

Now I could not for the life of me figure out any way to edit the listing I had on the page, but by simply sharing the same URL again, it seems to have corrected the issue (and I also could change the picture associated with it).

It is somewhat annoying that for the “article preview”, it grabs the blog subtitle instead of the first bit of the actual post text – and there seems to be no way to change that, although you can add a comment. However, I have the same problem with Facebook “Shared links” and its preview.

Speaking of Facebook, the Google Email/Share feature has a “More…” link that brings you to a second page where you can share the link on Facebook, Furl, del.icio.us, Social Poster (which I’d not heard of), Reddit and Digg:

200709211034

I clicked on “Facebook” and got the standard Facebook sharing screen:

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You also can email a link (and add it at the same time) which is naturally integrated with Gmail:

200709211121

The “Shared Stuff” feature does have some other interesting aspects, such as RSS feeds, the ability to see stuff shared by others (based on your Gmail address book) and the ability to search for stuff shared by other users based on domain or tag. However, as I discovered, there is this minor detail that tags must be separated by commas although it doesn’t tell you that! Being used to del.icio.us, I put a space between my tags, with the resulting amusement:

200709211108

It is looking here for the most popular stuff tagged “pme podcastexpo podcasting socialmedia” all as one giant tag. Oops. I shared it again and inserted commas, after which it worked fine. However, I did have to change the image again as it defaulted back to the first image (my picture) instead of the one I had chosen.

Given that I am a heavy user of del.icio.us and am already all set up to use that, and that I’m also sharing stuff within the walls of Facebook, I’m not really sure how much I’ll use this new Google service. However, given that it’s Google and one might expect that some of this information might ultimately show up in search rankings (or at least affect search results), there’s a good chance it might be worth at least continuing to experiment with it.

What do you think? Will you use this new service? Or will you stick with the others?

Some other articles:

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