Robert Scoble wrote an article earlier today about how he is bored with the discussions around RSS. Basically, RSS is not real time, and Twitter offers the best access to news and information. I am being very loose with the summary, but it’s really just best to read his short article if you want to get his meaning.
He ends by asking “What about you? Is RSS interesting or boring to you? Why?”. This struck me immediately as I have been spending more and more time on Google Reader recently reading RSS,. and I figured I should write up a response. I should say that I fit somewhere in-between a news hound like Robert or Louis and what I would call a casual RSS user (someone who adds a feed to their My Yahoo page for example).
I wanted to make just two points to answer his question. I find RSS to still be quite exciting. This is in part due to the social aspects of Google Reader that have been brought online recently, and in part due to new and better filters which are available.
The first point I want to make is that while Twitter is a great way to get the most recent information, but it is just a big black hole. If you have the time to watch everything getting sucked into the void you can derive a lot of value, but once the tweets have passed into the void beyond they are gone. One of the first things I do in the morning is check in with the Twitter trending topics. This morning I saw that Senator Kennedy had died. Trending topics can be a great Twitter filter. This news was not in my paper, nor was it in Google Reader yet, making Twitter’s speed a benefit in this regard. I filter Twitter by following a number of topics via searches, and I read the filtered content through RSS and Google Reader. I am basically putting a video camera right in front of the black hole which is recording everything on a particular subject that goes in. I don’t need to read all of those items, but I have them captured should I need them. I agree with Robert that Twitter is important, and I agree that filters are important (even better filters than we have now), but it is the ability to grab that filtered Twitter content as RSS that makes Twitter really useful to me.
Secondly, I have to ask where is all of the great content in Twitter is coming from if not RSS? Isn’t it PubSubHubBub and RSS feeding these new post from the blogs into Twitter and FriendFeed super fast? Even the articles that feed into Twitter a little slower are often coming from people who are monitoring various news and blog sources (through an RSS reader). In my mind, RSS is not boring because it is the root of getting this information distributed. I love hearing about new advances in getting information into RSS faster.
Robert is right though, filtering is super important. This is why I am finding the new social features in Google Reader nice. I am able to look very quickly at articles for shares and likes to see how popular articles are. I can sort articles by comments which can be helpful as well. The filters are not perfect yet, but better than they were. Filtering and search functionality will continue to improve and I will continue to take advantage of those in my feed reader.
There were two announcements tonight that are good news for Google Chrome users. First, the Chrome developer channel has been updated and now has the option to sync your bookmarks across all instances of Chrome. Xmarks has also announced a closed alpha test for their own sync option for Chrome.
I downloaded the newest Chrome and setup the sync. It is easy to do, just need to add the –enable-sync switch onto the end of your Chrome shortcut (in Windows). Once you have enabled the switch, and restarted Chrome you will have a new option to setup sync. It uses your Google Account and oddly enough it stores the bookmarks not in Google Bookmarks but rather in Google Docs. It took me a few minutes to find where they were stored but I noticed that I now have a Hidden option between Starred and Trash in the Google Docs sidebar and in that Hidden folder are all of my bookmarks. This was quite unexpected as it leaves all of those bookmarks I have built up in Google Bookmarks high and dry. It also continues the trend in Chrome to not offer tagging for bookmarks.
UPDATE:
It appears that the bookmarks are not just in hidden, they also do show up in an obviously named Google Chrome folder in the sidebar. Not sure how I missed that one.
I have assumed that Google would be working on an enhanced bookmarking application that would be a part of the Google OS, but perhaps I am wrong. It will be interesting to see how things develop.
I was in South Dakota on the 6 – 9 of August attending my 20 year high school reunion. A day before I left I received a new netbook from Amazon, the EEE PC 1005ha. I really love my EEE 901 for everything except typing, the keyboard is a little too small and it has a bad habit of entering double letters on occasion. It was enough of a hindrance that I decided to replace the machine.
Perhaps the best thing about the 901 is the size. The 901 was one of the last batches of 8.9” EEE PC’s and that really is the best form factor for travelling. I reluctantly went with the new 10” display standard and purchased my 3rd EEE PC (701, 901, and now the 1005ha). I size difference is noticeable when compared to the 901, but the weight is quite similar thanks to the seashell design of the 1005.
The claim to fame of the 1005 is it’s 10.5 hour battery life, which I am not sure I am seeing under my usage. I show 6:00 left with 88.8% remaining which is definitely better than the 901, but not quite the 10.5 hours that was promised. I did upgrade the computer to Windows 7, so it is possible that there is a difference in times vs. the XP that normally ships on the laptop. I am happy with the battery so far and will try some battery bench marks when I have a chance.
The keyboard was the main reason for upgrading and I am very, very happy with the outcome. The keyboard is a bit clicky, but very fast and responsive. The keys are large enough to type on comfortably and the new configuration gives a good sized shift key on each side of the keyboard. I am easily able to touch type on the keyboard, at least as well as I can on most keyboards. I am not sure if the difference is the larger device or just the better keyboard but it has made a world of difference where typing is concerned.
About the only thing that I do not like about the laptop thus far is that it comes with a 160GB hard drive. It is not the size that I dislike, it is the fact that it is a traditional HDD instead of an SSD. The drive is so much slower than what I am used to on the EEE 901 (which I upgraded to a 16 GB Runcore SSD). This drive has been very slow at times, with very slow boot times as well as slowness returning from sleep (see the benchmark below). I think I will nab a 64 GB SDD from the Runcore Pro SATA line. The read and write speeds on that SSD are quite fast and I am thinking that it will make this laptop perfect.
Disk benchmark for included HDD.
I am looking forward to this being my primary laptop for the next year. With the nicer keyboard it is my hope that it will be easier to write a bit more. I would recommend the 1005ha to anyone interested in a 10” netbook.
Thanks in part to the announcement by FriendFeed that they are being acquired by Facebook, the recently added social features (and here as well) of Google Reader have really taken off over the past week. Google Reader has become a place to not only read RSS feeds, but to have discussions on the best articles (replacing FriendFeed? only time will tell).
For me, one of the best parts of this new found interest in Google Reader and sharing is that all of the 40+ people I am now following are sharing the best articles they read with me. Instead of having to cull through 600+ feeds, I can make do with the 120 or so that I really care about and let all of the people I am following do the rest of the work for me. I am still following sites via RSS, but this new crop of people I am following is where the real value is on Google Reader. For example, I don’t actively follow or read TechCrunch (for various reasons) but I know that many of the people I am following do. I am able to track the most important articles from TechCrunch in this way.
The ability to share items in Reader is not a new one, nor is the option to comment on them. The Reader team has recently added the ability to like articles though. These social features all came together recently when Google changed the way you can search for and subscribe to other people. Leveraging Google Profiles, you can search for people who use Reader and have shared items. This makes the feature so much more usable, as I don’t have to ask people for their email address. The whole thing integrates with Google Contacts, which is nice if you already use Google Contacts, and works by simply adding the people you follow to groups. Once they are in a group you can allow the group to comment on your items. This is a critical step as it is what opens up to social side of Google Reader. While this method is a bit tricky for people, and not terribly intuitive, it is nice that the default option is to keep things private. I like having control over what I share.
Confused by how this works? You can take a look at the image on the pingmicro site which attempts to explain it. I am planning to record a short video in the next couple of days that walks through how this all comes together.
You can find me on Google Reader (like everywhere else) by searching for seanabrady.
Google announced that they are building a new computer operating system. The Google Chrome OS is a lightweight OS designed on the Linux kernel that is intended to be used on Netbooks and other computers where users want to use primarily web applications. The Google blog article reads:
Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.
As a huge Google fan I am very excited about this news, and 2010 cannot get here soon enough so I can try this new OS out on either my EEE PC or perhaps a new netbook from one of the vendors that have already been announced as working with Google.
As I have thought about this new Google OS a few things have come to mind:
My biggest disappointment with the Chrome browser is the lack of integration with Google stuff. Google Reader for RSS and Google Bookmarks for bookmarks would have been very obvious integration bits. I really hope Google includes lots of Integration with the OS. Since Joshua Schachter joined Google, I have been waiting for a way cool new version of Google Bookmarks. Perhaps that integration will come with Chrome OS?
Jungle Disk, Live Mesh and Pogoplug are my local links to cloud storage. With these three applications I am either replicating data (Mesh), backing things up (Jungle Disk/S3), or simply making most of my data available anywhere (Pogoplug). I hope that Google realizes that getting to this data is important, and either works to provide access to some of these types of cloud services or offers a compelling service of their own (the fabled gDrive). I am storing a few hundred gigabytes on the three services I mentioned, so any gDrive will have to allow that at a price point close to what I am paying now to make me even consider it.
My EEE PC is awesome, but part of that awesomeness comes from my ability to connect to the Internet from anywhere. I tether my Blackberry using VZAccess to grab a 3G connection on the go. I almost always tether via Bluetooth. If the Chrome OS does not offer me the ability to use VZAcess and tether my BB it will be much less useful and I would likely just keep what I have and use Windows 7.
I think Google has a real opportunity for the netbook market with Chrome OS. Windows 7 works so well that I am not 100% sure that this OS would have much effect on Windows sales for anything other than netbooks. I certainly don’t see anything in what I have read that would make me consider abandoning Windows at the office. I guess there is nothing to do now but wait and see what Google does.
How much software do you use to work in the cloud?
I am just wrapping up the install and configuration of a brand new computer for work, and I was kinda surprised at how many applications I am running locally now to feed my cloud computing addiction.
I installed the Pogoplug client, Jungle Disk, and Live Mesh to control my various backup and file access needs. I installed Offisync to give MS Office access to my Google Docs. It seems like a lot of software to install just to feed my cloud computing needs.
I install most of this software on my EEE PC as well, where I typically try to go very light on software. The EEE typically just gets Pogoplug and Jungle Disk. I have stopped installing Mesh.
Do we need this much software to be effective in the cloud? I am using both Pogoplug and Jungle Disk for backups, and Pogoplug also serves as extended storage. Mesh I am using to synchronization, and perhaps most importantly, for remote access. Offisync just makes working with my documents so much easier as I can use the full Office suite when needed.
I guess we are not quite to the point of ridding ourselves of client side software.
There has been a whole lot of buzz over the past week about the upcoming release of Google Wave. For those of you that have not had the chance to read about this new software that Google will be releasing later this year, let me try to lay things out.
Wave is a new communications platform that takes e-mail, IM, document collaboration, photo sharing, and just about every other type of communication you can think of and shakes them all up together. Sprinkle on a huge dash of real time streaming access and you have Google Wave. Don’t beleive me? Tuck in for the next hour or so and check out the keynote from the Google I/O developers conference.
I have been reading a lot about the new service, and not too much is known at this time. Still, I must admit that it has me pretty excited. The last time I was this excited about a Google product launch it was for the now defunct Google Notebook, which turned out to be a dud…I think Wave will be different.
The anticipation for new products like this is perhaps more interesting than the actual release. It is this anticipation that I have been focusing on in my mind recently, and I started running through little scenarios of how a day using Wave as my main method of communication might work. Of course this is all anticipation, and I really have no idea how the product will work when it is released.
I am thinking about this tool from the perspective of my professional life. The open source nature of this product means that I should be able to download and run a Wave server behind the firewall at work. This would make a huge difference in the ability for me to actually get it implemented. So in my imagination what does a day with Wave look like?
I arrive at the office and notice a new wave in my inbox from our IT guy in the Beijing office. He is confirming that the changes we made to some software settings have indeed improved application performance over the WAN. Since the change affects the way things work in that office, I add the Help Desk supervisor to the Wave so that she can give the details out to her staff.
I notice a few new items have arrived from my Google Alerts which now feed directly into my Wave. I read through a couple, and see that Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will release in late October. This is good to know and I add the OS team to the Wave so that we can comment on the news.
Later in the morning, a call comes in from the help desk about an error someone is having in Outlook. It has front line support stumped, and so they have pulled me in to help them out. Support uploads a screenshot of the error message to the wave so that I can see it. We discuss the error, and I do a bit of research. I determine that an unsupported 3rd party addin to Outlook is likey causing the issue, and add a link to a MSKB article with details on the issue. I ask support to disable the addin and see if that fixes the problem.
The Wave from earlier in the day regarding the change in Beijing bounces back to the top of my Inbox. The help desk staff has been added and there is a question from one of the guys wondering if the change may have an unintended consquence. Since both myself, and the analyst who made the change originally are on the wave we both see it and can do a little bit of research. Turns out the consequence will not occur, and we update the wave.
Around lunch time the standard lunch Wave pops up and we all add in our vote for what we should do for lunch today. It’s raining, and we decide to stay in. I add a poll to the Wave offering up a few boardgames I have in the office to see if anyone wants a quick game. Ticket to Ride wins and I bring the game along to lunch.
After lunch I see that the removal of the Outlook addin did fix the problem, and I clean up the formatting in the wave to better describe the problem and solution. I then use the integration with our help desk KB system to automatically add a new support article.
We have some new software going out in a few days and need to get an e-mail notification out to the rest of the firm. The software deployment team sends a Wave with a first draft of the e-mail to the applications and training teams. There are a few small changes to be made from a technical standpoint, and the training department quickly drops in some links from the integrated learning management system. Now the e-mail will contain all the class times and dates for training. Once the message is ready we flag it to follow up in a few days when we will be ready to send it.
Throughout the day I see various posts from Twitter, FriendFeed and Google Reader searches on topics of interest to me. I share out the ones that are interesting to other members of my team, and tag them for easy retrieval.
This has been in my head because this was basically ‘a day in the life’ for me one day this week. I embelished a few of the items with extra details and we used e-mail for everything here (which was slow and resulted in literally hundreds of items in my inbox), but otherwise this what it. Google Wave would allow all of this discussion and collaboration to happen in real time, and allow people to be brought into the covnersation dynamically as they are needed. Everything happens in the Wave, and the discussions can be saved out to other systems for archival purposes. If you could throw voice and video in the mix it would be even better I think.
I am pretty excited about Google Wave, and I really hope it is not too long before I can try it out. More importantly, I hope it can do al of these things and more. I should also add that I like the Wave logo and t-shirts a lot. Google should send me one.
Oh, and I am sure I am not the only one to think of Firefly/Serenity when they hear or read Wave.
I am a certified gear bag nut. I love reading about what people carry around with them in their bags, and perhaps more so about the bags that they use. Recently, there have been a number of What’s in my Bag posts on various blogs. Thought I would point out a few of the recent posts. I should also mention that Flickr has an awesome photo pool of bag goodness, you should check it out. The picture is the most recent of my gear bag(s).
group today where I plan to post links related to things that I often carry in my gear bag. If you are interested in the Kindle, Netbooks, Nintendo DSi, Blackberry Storm, or the Zune (well and some othe gadgets I am sure) then check out the group.
I don’t think it is much of a secret that I am a fan of Google and their online services. I use Gmail for all of my e-mail correspondence, and have been taking advantage of the features offered by Gmail Labs since they were released.
What is Gmail Labs? It is a set of small addins to the Gmail web interface that provide extra functionality. Offerings include everything from the ability to add Google Docs files directly to e-mail, to an inline viewer for you tube, to the much anticipated offline functionality, to a rather pointless little snake game. Most of the items in Labs are quite useful and as of this morning I have enabled 26 of the addins. I should mention that Labs is optional, you don’t need to use it, and each of the different options is optional. You can pick and choose which labs features you want to use.
Yesterday, Google released a new search box for Gmail that not only lets you search inside the UI, but also lets you easily attach search results to e-mail messages or chat windows. Fairly awesome way to share with your fellow internet buddies. The UI is fairly slick, although I think it could be a bit nicer. The search dialog pops up on top of your Window similar to how the Gmail Tasks window does. It can be popped out as well to get a bigger view.
All of these Gmail options are awesome, but the one bad thing is that once you have added a dozen or so your sidebars in Gmail get a bit junked up. There are actually a few lab features that can be moved to the right hand side, but everything else stays on the left. Right now I have Search, Links, My RTM gadget, Calendar, Google Docs, and the Twitter Gadget on the left side. Even if I collapse a few it still takes a bit of scrolling (or un-collapsing) to see the information I want to see. I would really like to see Google release a labs feature that lets me put items where I want. Something should be able to be done to clean things up a bit.
Still Gmail is a very nice centralized control system for my day with all of my (personal) e-mail as well as my calendar and tasks in a single area. I also use Google Chat directly from within Gmail which puts that communication there as well. If you are not using Gmail I sugest you try it out. If you are not taking advantage of the labs click on this icon at the top of your Gmail screen and take a look.
Amazon has announced some changes to the personal document delivery service they have for the Kindle. Currently, you can e-mail Amazon a document (many formats are supported) and they will convert the file and deliver it to your Kindle wirelessly. They charge .10 per document for this service. Beginning on May 4th, the service will increase in price to .15 per MB. Important to note that a) the service is going from a flat to a metered fee and b) the minimum charge is always the .15 cents.
I have only used this service a few times, but I do think it is a great service for Amazon to offer. You can manually convert documents and move them to the Kindle for free, but the convenience factor with this service is very nice.
i am sure that people will complain about the price hike, and make all sorts of claims about how the service should be free and how poor of a job the service does with complex PDF files. In my mind though, this is a good idea. Amazon has got to be spending a ton of money on the Whispernet service with Sprint. One of the primary reasons I like the Kindle is Whispernet. My hope is that by raising the price on this service a little bit they can recoup some of the money they are spending on Whispernet and keep the wikipedia and experimental internet parts free.
I will also note that they have added support for RTF files as well as experimental support for DocX file (Word 2007).
at the top of your Gmail screen and take a look.
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