This brings something very interesting to light, I have gotten really good at processing information returned from Google searches. I can quickly determine what is a useful result and what isn’t.

After using DuckDuckGo for one week I can concur with most of Yusuf’s findings. I’ve gotten so well acquainted with Google’s search results, and various other products like Images search and Maps, that I find it hard to stick to DuckDuckGo for anything other than single result searches.

In other words, if I’m looking for a particular web page I can use DuckDuckGo to find it. It works. It is quick. And it is actually less distracting than Google’s search results for the plain reason that Google now has more ads than search results per page. However, if I’m doing a lot of research on a particular topic I’m always in need of something a little more powerful than DuckDuckGo. I’ll need images, calculations, and – more often than ever before – Maps. Google has all of that.

For any search engine to come in and usurp Google’s strangle hold is going to be a really, really steep hill to climb. No matter how much I think it is time for it to happen.

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

It is now nearly 10-months later. How is Google+ doing? Not so well from my chair. They haven’t figured out a way, besides Circles, to differentiate themselves from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks that clearly have carved out their niche.

I think Google+ is a great product. It does a lot of things and does them fairly well (although their iPhone application is pretty unusable). If it was launched in February 2004 at the same moment Facebook was launched it would have given the now 900 million user network a run for its money.

So what’s the problem? Again, me, nearly 10 months ago:

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

[...]

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

At the time I thought this approach would have a positive effect for Google+. I thought that nearly anyone could find a way to make Google+ useful. But it seems like it has been the opposite. Perhaps this lack of focus has made it so that Google+ doesn’t identify with very many people.

The only types of people that I see using Google+ on a regular basis are early adopter tech geeks, social media experts, and people that work at Google. Perhaps someday they’ll separate themselves from the pack somehow but until then it doesn’t seem like Google+ has caught on with any particular crowd in any meaningful way.

If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don’t have any disclosure of this link modification on their site, and so far, while it has been written about, no major news outlet has picked up on the practice or its implications.

Now you know.

I don’t believe this is a bad or unethical business model – I simply think it should be disclosed. The same way we expect Twitter to disclose what a Promoted Tweet is or Google to disclose what the Ads are on the top of our search results. News like this should spread in order to put just the right amount of pressure on the Pinterest team to make this more apparent.

Jason Santa Maria stated something on Twitter yesterday that I think fits here too:

If I like the things you create, nothing makes me happier than giving you money to keep doing it.

I don’t use Pinterest (perhaps I will one day) but people seem to like the service. If they like the service they’ll likely want it to stick around. Maybe they’d be willing to pay for it. Or maybe they’d be willing to accept the fact that Pinterest is generating revenue using affiliate links. Either way, let the people decide.

[figure] out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Not a week ago Google shot a few projects directly between the eyes and the rest they are going to give to the world via open source. Is Page listening to Jobs?

“That’s not 62 million active users, though — a point that everyone covering these numbers seems to have missed. It’s just the number of total users. And specifically, it’s the number of new surnames that Allen’s team has tracked being created on the service.

Because Google has aggressively integrated G+ into many other properties, including its top navigation bar and the OneBox, one would expect a certain baseline amount of sign-ups from among the hundreds of millions of people using other Google products.

The real question is how many people are returning after creating their accounts, which Allen doesn’t try to answer.”

Precisely. I have absolutely no doubt that Google can get people to sign up to just about anything. They’ve marketed Google+ on all of their existing products, through commercials, by actually replacing features in existing products, etc. These are all ways to market Google+ that a competing service or startup would never be able to leverage.

Getting profiles isn’t Google+’s “problem”. It is keeping active users.

Robert Scoble (on Quora) and Chris Brogan (on Google+) seem to challenge the theory that Google+ is dead by showing that they’ve grown their “number of people who have them in their Circles number” faster than they were able to grow their networks on, say, Twitter or Facebook.  While it took X number of months to get to Y number of followers on Twitter it took far less time on Google+ to do the same or better. I don’t think that is a very good metric to determine whether or not Google+ is successful in retaining an active community. It is simply a metric to determine how many profiles they have. When you first sign up to Google+ you’re taken through a wizard of sorts to add people to your Circles. Brogan is on the suggested user list (or was). Scoble isn’t, by choice, but arguably you’d have to be on Mars to miss Robert’s posts.

Google+ is still very new. It will inevitably cut out its own user base. And I hope it is successful for Google because I think it is a pretty great product. It could be extremely valuable to some uses. But so far I don’t see it sticking for many people as their daily go-to way of sharing. In my Circles Twitter is still winning. And this is coming from someone who likes Google+.

So, to recap, you can now subscribe to cdevroe.com in the following ways; RSS feed, @cdevroecom on Twitter, Facebook page, Google+ page, and carrier pigeon (coming soon).

Oh, I’ve got a personal account on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ too.

Google Wallet is the first real step in the right direction. Square’s CardCase application is very nice but it is very, very limited and is contingent upon the store, cab, etc. knowing about Square and being compatible. Google Wallet is built on top of the already existing credit card, pay pass, infrastructure. Wherever MasterCard’s pay pass works Google Wallet will work. I’d imagine more card companies will follow suit soon and Google Wallet will improve.

This won’t make me jump the fence to Droid but I can only imagine it will be a matter of a year or two until Apple has a similar solution (perhaps even made possible via a Google Wallet iOS app) with the iPhone.

“Starting today, when obtaining a link to a Google Map using the ‘Link’ button on the upper right-hand corner of the page, you now have the option of obtaining a convenient, shortened link by clicking on the ‘Short URL’ check box. Shortened URLs can make it easier to coordinate events and share maps with your friends.”

This is great news. Sharing links on Google Maps has always cause problems with Instant Messengers and Mail applications having trouble interpreting the URL. Not to mention SMS character limits. Very glad to see this update.

/via Google LatLong: Just a Short URL away.

A good read and a discussion I’ll be sure to follow.

Google+ has run me over like a freight train. Over the last few weeks I’ve been living on it instead of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. In fact, I made the prediction that Google+ could replace many of the most popular services.

But before I get into all of that I thought I’d share how Google+ is different.

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn was created to be the professional’s social network. A network of people that are connected at some professional, rather than personal or familial, level. This sort of distinction for LinkedIn is completely different to that of Facebook, which tries to connect people that know each other in some way, or Twitter, which doesn’t care if you know anyone, and is an invaluable differentiator in the world of social networking. Heck, it led to LNKD.

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

Circles are nondescript buckets of relationships that you create on your own and can change at anytime. For example you can create some typical social Circles for Coworkers, Friends, Family, Ex-Schoolmates, Basketball Friends, etc. Each of these Circles will have specific meaning to you and no one else. They allow you to segregate your relationships into very meaningful categories that help you connect with many different people all in one place.

Why is this a good thing? In my mind the reasons are innumerable. For instance, maintaining profiles and networks in multiple locations, and somehow engaging with those services regularly, can end up being a monumental draw on your time. I won’t say it is a waste of your time because keeping a LinkedIn profile up-to-date and active has meant many professional opportunities for people. However, keeping every single site up-to-date can get cumbersome and, for those that “follow” you in multiple locations, noisy.

Your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook networks could all co-exist and never intersect using Google+’s Circles.

One more thing to say about Circles… they aren’t just lists. Facebook and Twitter both have lists and Google+’s Circles are not, and should not be, comparable. On Facebook someone has to confirm that you are their friend before the relationship is created. So if you only want to “follow” what is going on with a particular person you can’t unless they approve the relationship (or if they are a Celebrity and create a “page” for themselves rather than a normal account). Once they have, though, you can then separate them into lists. On Facebook you may use lists to filter your main stream or use them to send messages directly to those within those lists (though not nearly as easily as you can on Google+ which I’ll get to in the next paragraph). On Twitter, lists are made to keep your main stream cleaner. Rather than “following” Ashton Kutcher, as an example, one can add him to a Celebrities or Entrepreneurs or Investors list. This way Kutcher’s tweets don’t muddy up your main stream but you can check in with him from time-to-time using Twitter’s Lists. At least, that is how I use Lists. Oh, and you can’t specify how you share on Twitter. You’re either public or private and that is it.

Here is where Google+’s Circles really separate themselves from the pack. Sharing. Anything you share on Google+; a post, a photo, a video, specific information on your profile such as your phone number, etc. can be shared with a limitless subset of your relationships on Google+.

Here, I’ll provide some examples. Let’s say that you want to send a message to everyone at work. If you had a Coworkers Circle you can type in your message to them, choose to only share it with your Coworkers, and hit publish. Only people that you’ve put into the Coworkers Circle will see it. But it can get even more granular than that. You can choose to share a bit of information with more than one Circle or a Circle and a specific person and so on. Maybe you want to tell all of your friends that you’re going to see a movie tonight but you also want to tell your family and one guy from work. You can do that. Or maybe you just want to send a message to one particular person, or two or three, you can do that too. Or, better yet, maybe you want to send a message to someone privately that doesn’t even have you in their Circles, you can do that (unlike Twitter’s Direct Message feature).

Privacy and Sharing options on Google+ are probably the best we’ve ever seen on a social networking service to-date and, believe it or not, they’ve made it pretty easy to understand and use. We all remember the flack Facebook got for making privacy confusing to its hundreds of millions of users. Google+’s privacy options, by comparison, are very easy to understand.

They even have a “view my profile as” feature that allows you to view your own profile as if you were someone else. You can view your profile as if you were your boss or the public-at-large or your future girlfriend. This makes it simple to edit who can see what.

Hopefully this helps frame where Google+ could potentially fit for some. It could, in theory, replace Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s niche approach to social networking and allow you to combine all of your relationships in one place. And, you can control exactly what you call those relationships rather than being tied down to the world’s nomenclature of relationships.

The Plusses

I’ve described why Circles are, potentially, better at describing relationships and give us the ability to combine all of our social networks in one spot. But that isn’t the only thing Google+ has going for it.

Ever since the days of Brightkite I’ve been using a secondary service to handle check-ins. Checking into a place, for me, is a better option than simply tweeting “I’m at such-and-such with so-and-so”. Surrounding a check-in is important metadata like location, time, etc. and a tweet is fleeting. Also many check-in services provide you with some sort of context around the location you’re currently in. At the moment my favorite check-in service is Foursquare. However, Google+ provides you with a nice set of check-in tools (although very young). From the Google+ iPhone application you can simply check-into a place and provide no other information (ala Foursquare, Gowalla) or you can choose to add additional information or a photo. While it separates out an actual check-in from a normal post it doesn’t make you feel as though the two are not interchangeable. They’ve struck a great balance with this and I can only hope it will get better.

Photo sharing from your computer or mobile-phone on Google+ is not only simple but also has a rich feature-set. Don’t forget, you can use the power of your Circles to share photos with any subset of your relationships. A photo of your newborn that you only want mom and dad to see? Done. A super-secret-mockup of something you’re building at work that you only want your coworkers and wife to see? Done. A photo of you in front of a landmark for the whole world to see? Done. Oh, and Google+ allows you to apply some effects to your photos as well. Someday Google+ could replace Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook photos.

Posts on Google+ have no character limit. Some consider the 140-character limit of Twitter to be its single greatest strength. As is often said sometimes your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. There are times when our thoughts span beyond 140-characters (no matter how succinct you are). I’ve found the slightly longer posts of Google+ to be most enjoyable and the Google+ team have designed the interface in such a way that longer posts don’t detract from the shorter ones. The vast majority of posts I’ve seen on Google+ could fit within Twitter’s character limit but every once in a while people have more to say.

Google+’s Hangout, Huddle, and Sparks features are neat but they don’t yet fit into my plusses list. They aren’t minuses either. Whether you use them or not they do not get in the way. I’ve played around with these features and while I haven’t found a valuable use for them yet I may in the future.

The Minuses

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

Keeping up with your stream on Google+ is fairly impossible and by that I mean making sure you see every single message. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that these realtime services care less and less about people keeping up-to-date with what has happened but care much more about showing them what is happening right now. This is a design choice and one that ultimately we may all have to get used to – but it isn’t one I particularly care for at the moment. Right or wrong I treat these streams like I treat my email inbox. I don’t want to miss messages from my family or friends and on Google+ this is very difficult. You see, Google+’s stream shows you the most-recently-updated post on top rather than the most-recently-published post. This distinction is important. A post that was written 5 days ago could resurface to the very top of your stream because someone left a comment in it. From what I’ve heard and read Google is using some complex computation to manage the stream. These guys are extremely good at fiddling with “algorithms” until they’re just right so I’ll withhold judgement on how they do this until they think they’ve got it.

The brevity of tweets makes them very, very easy to consume. Posts on Google+ can be a little harder to digest and that has caused, in some, a feeling of being overwhelmed. When my mother logs onto Twitter she sees a few messages from friends and family and perhaps a tweet or two from NASA. On Google+ with links, photos, videos, hangouts, etc. it can be a bit jarring and you feel like you can’t get your feet on the ground. Maybe Google will be able to figure out this problem but maybe not. Those of us that stick with Google+ may be the type of people that can wade through an enormous amount of information quickly while those that can will be left out in the cold. We’ll see.

At a technical level Google+ is fairly sound. The growth rate of Google+ has been nothing short of astounding and the fact that there hasn’t been an interruption in service is commendable. The iPhone application, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It was released fairly soon after Google+ went into “field testing” mode and its newness shows. It is incredibly slow, poorly designed (for actual use but it looks great), and has major issues with location. These types of frustrations, no doubt, will go away but for now the iPhone application falls squarely at the bottom of my minuses list.

Overall I believe that Google+ could replace many services for me; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr. Each of these services may still have their place but the majority of what I choose to share could definitely be handled by Google+ if more people actively used it. Ultimately whether or not I go 100% Google+ or not will depend on whether or not people adopt it. I don’t know if the 25M+ people that have created Google+ accounts will give it enough time to sink in and use it on a daily basis. Selfishly I hope they do because I’m sort of tired with keeping up with multiple streams and services. It’d be very nice to consolidate many of these things into one stream.

Time will tell where we all end up. But if you’d like to add me to your “Really Cool People” Circle I’ve created a special URL for my Google+ profile: cdevroe.com/+

John Gruber, as he typically does, does a good job asking the same questions as I would. So I recommend giving his questions to Google a perusal.

However, I’d like to comment his 3rd question to Google. When WebM was announced in May of last year it was said that YouTube would immediately begin to encode their videos in WebM. And, according to YouTube’s HTML5 page, they did exactly that. So part of John’s question is answered. But the other parts – whether or not YouTube will drop support for H.264 or not, and why – remind unanswered so far.

My biggest “huh?” to all of this is Google’s “to foster competition” and “web innovation” statements as to why they are doing this. Gruber is asking why the Flash Player plugin isn’t being removed from being bundled with Google Chrome. I’m wondering how removing support for H.264 video playback is “fostering competition” at all. Isn’t it squashing it?

Think about where the competition really happens for video codecs. Users of the Internet will never decide on a codec. They don’t care. Developers and engineers do. Apple will decide what they will support with their devices, Google with theirs, RIM with theirs, HP, Dell, Toshiba with theirs. My mother could care less if a video is in Flash, H.264, WebM, Theora or any other video codec – she would simply want to view the video and would probably download any software it would take for her to be able to watch it. Do you think she really knows that when she goes to the YouTube application on her iPod Touch that the video that is being delivered is in H.264?

So really, the “competition” doesn’t happen at the user level. It happens at the engineering level. Engineers will pit two codecs against each other and see how they stack up. They’ll decide which to use based on the quality of the codec and then they’ll measure that against the install base for that codec. Right now H.264 is comparable on nearly every level to WebM while the install base for H.264 is enormous in comparison to WebM. So the decision is still pretty clear which codec most engineers would choose for video playback. Unless they are open source zealots that think Apple’s approach to things like H.264, iOS and the App Stores is “closed”.

Now, if Adobe removed H.264 playback from the Flash Player – that’d make some waves. That’d change the game a bit.

All of this being said I really don’t care. Even as a team member for Viddler, a company that has millions of videos that we take care of, I don’t mind allowing the industry to figure some of these things out. I side with the end users and so does Viddler. Viddler will always strive to deliver high-quality video to users the way that the majority of them want it regardless of their device. As of today an overwhelming number of the Internet-connected computers in the world support H.264 playback via Flash Player. So we deliver that. The next step down is H.264 playback via the <video> tag. We deliver that too. If we see a strong need for serving all of our videos via WebM to our users – we’ll deliver that too. We’re already prepared for it. Each of our team member’s have very strong opinions about what is going down in this space – but at the end of the day we’re willing to deliver video for our customers how and where they want it.

Illustrated by Christoph Niemann.

I think Google Instant is the best thing to happen to search since “the realtime web” services like Twitter and Facebook added search to their services. These two things are not directly connected – I simply see them both as giant leaps in how we will find information for many years.

The speed at which I can now find information using Google is simply stunning. Sure, many companies can do incredibly cool things. But, not many companies can do incredibly cool things a billion times a day.

Because of this speed increase I’ve now set Google as my default homepage in Safari. I’ve never done this. Ever. My homepage had always been the Top Sites feature in Safari or Chrome, some news site or a blank page. But now, because I can search the entire Internet nearly instantly, Google.com is my homepage.

On the Mac I use Spotlight to access nearly everything on my local computer. I also use it to do tasks like math or opening applications. Spotlight is a fairly versatile tool (and yes, there are more robust alternatives) to helping me both find and interact with pretty much everything on my computer very, very quickly. Google Instant is like Spotlight for the entire Internet. Do math, pull up a map, check the weather, see movie showtimes in your area, look at beautiful images of Yellowstone, and see the latest news without moving your mouse.

Remarkable.

• AppleTV = Google TV.
• App Store = Chrome Web Store.
• Amazon S3 = Google Storage.

There are a few other examples coming out of Google I/O this week too.

Granted, though, that some of these products are simply natural progressions from Google. Google Storage and the entire HTML5 “push”, as an example, have been things coming from Google for a while. Also I believe pretty strongly in choice and competition being both good for business and for consumers – so all of this stuff coming out of Google I/O is great to see.

I just wish we saw something strikingly original. The best presentation by far, which had very little to do with Google itself, was about 7 minutes into part 6 of Day 1′s Keynote when Sports Illustrated showed off some of the stuff their doing.

I’m really proud of some of the stuff coming out of our blog lately and the hits are just going to keep on coming.

I just gave it a whirl using Chrome (which is the only browser it works in currently) and it works beautifully. If you drag the image into the ‘image well’ it will simply attach the file. If you drag the image into the message composition area it will insert it directly into the message.

Funny how something that desktop mail clients have had since the late 90s makes us all geeky excited here in 2010 but the feature is much appreciated nonetheless.

Now, it appears, Google and Apple are at war in the mobile space and perhaps even other markets. To be honest I like both companies and their products so I don’t care who loses – I just know that I’ll be winning again because surely some great stuff is going to come out of the conflict.

I can’t have much more of an opinion on Google Buzz because I can’t use it. You see, I use something called Google Apps for Domains. Google Apps allows me to have Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and other services by Google for the CDEVROE.com domain name. My colin [at] cdevroe.com email, in other words, is simply a glorified Gmail account. But, for some reason, Google handles these accounts completely separate from all other accounts.

Google Reader Header

Take Google Reader as an example. I use Google Reader everyday. On the top right hand side of Google Reader (see the image above and click on it to zoom in), where it tells me whom I’m logged in as, it says colin [at] cdevroe.com. One would think that would mean that my Google Apps account was being used to authenticate me for Google Reader. This isn’t so. On the left hand side of the page there is a link for Mail (presumably my Inbox). If I click on that it asks me to sign up for Gmail. Wait, what?

To make matters worse Google does this for all of its services. Google.com, Maps, Adsense, Analytics, and more. I have accounts for all of these (using my same email address) but I don’t have a Gmail account. I have a Google Apps Gmail account.

Chris Messina, someone whom I admire very much, recently went to work full time at the GOOG as an Open Web Advocate. I know he’ll be busy striving to get Google to become the foremost example in the open Web but I also know that he understands this whole Google Accounts fiasco as well if not better than I do. I hope that, while he’s changing the world from the inside out, he’s also able to convince those at Google to consolidate all Google Accounts into a single-account-sign-on-something-or-other.

I look forward to one day playing around with Buzz but I’ll wait until it is available in my Google Apps for Domains flavor of Gmail.

Addendum: So I thought I’d try my hand at following through the Gmail setup process to see if, like with Google Reader, it just used my colin [at] cdevroe.com account as its primary account. Now I have no idea what it did and I have a new email address and Google Profile that are unrelated to my normal Apps account but it is linked to it somehow. I’m a professional Internet user and developer and I have absolutely no idea what Google is trying to accomplish. Wow.

NOOO! Now all of my accounts are associated to a new account.

But then came this statement by Steven Frank of Panic (whom I interviewed in September of this year):

“Yes, but have you ever read the privacy policy for your _current_ DNS? I know I haven’t.”

This has Google’s public DNS casting a slightly different shadow now doesn’t it? Your ISP, while they probably do have a policy for privacy in place, has more than likely never shared that policy with you. Or, even if they have, you may not have read it.

Some people took Steven’s statement to mean that ISPs and other DNS providers do not have privacy policies. That isn’t how I take the statement at all and it isn’t how he meant it. He specifically said, “have you ever read the privacy policy from your current DNS”? He didn’t say anything about there not being any to read.

For the last few years I’ve used OpenDNS. They have a privacy policy right here. But, as Steven predicted, I’ve never read it. I’ve never thought about reading it. I was never worried about OpenDNS’ intentions with the data. So why would I be afraid of Google? They have my email, my documents, my calendar, all of my search history, my ad revenue, etc. etc.

What would I care if they have a log of where I’ve gone online? I don’t.

Google Image Search somewhat recently added the ability to search by color. Which I think is fantastic! Here is a search for moth, constrained to only those in the yellow color space. What’s more is that Google Labs is testing “Similar images”, which I think will also be a great update.

How awesome is this blog post from Google? A few weeks ago (and I’m just getting the chance to read this now) there was some rumors being spread around the Interwebs that some sort of city-like pattern had been found on the ocean floor just off the coast of Africa. Then, of course, someone had to say the word Atlantis and the two stuck together. Well, Google took the time to squash those rumors and, at the same time, give a little more information out about how all of this data was retrieved in the first place, and why these anomalies show up the way they did.

I like that Google squashed this rumor. But I like even more the fact that they didn’t use a simple blog post to say “No, that isn’t Atlantis”. They asked Walter Smith and David Sandwell, two Oceanographers at the top of their fields, to comment on the rumor, Google Earth, the process of retrieving this data, and proof positive that this wasn’t Altantis.

I love everything about this post, down to the title: Atlantis? No, it Antlant-isn’t.

Turns out, my reasons for turning it back off one day later were no different than my reasons for turning it off a few years ago. Redirects and downtime.

What Feedburner does, in a nutshell, is redirects your feed URL (in my case, this one) to a URL at Feedburner. This way they are able to track the number of times the feed is requested, what requests the feed, etc. They also do this for individual posts to help track statistics by post.

The service is, or rather was, very good at one point. It was one of the only services that truly did a fair job at calculating the number of subscribers to a feed accurately. Among other things.  But that was years ago. Then they were having trouble keeping the service up likely due to popularity.

You see, when a service like Feedburner goes down – it effects everyone that uses it. Not in the same way that if Twitter goes down it effects everyone that uses it though. If Feedburner goes down, my feed is “down” (even when it really isn’t). People are unable to retrieve my content through feeds.

You may have seen services like Bit.ly or TinyURL. They are convenient in that they shorten a URL for use on services that only allow a finite number of characters. But, if they go down, all of those URLs also go down.

Feedburner was acquired by Google somewhere around May of 2007. After raising only $10M in capital over two separate rounds of funding – they managed to exit to Google for a reported $100M.  Not a bad turn around. The upshot for the users was that the service would, or should, become much more stable. Combine that with the talents of all of those Google engineers drumming away on their keyboards in Mountain View, California – and you’ve got yourself something of great value.

To top it off – Google decided to lift the veil on Pro accounts and give them away for free.

On Sunday, after years of having the service off, I wanted to find out how many people were subscribed to my blog’s feed. The obvious choice was Feedburner. Surely by now they’ve figured out their stability issues, they’ve improved the system 10-fold or more, and they’ve probably got some features that would “wow” me. That simply wasn’t so. Hours after installing the needed plugins Feedburner went down. So did my feed. When the service came back up I logged in to see if there was anything new at Feedburner. Generally speaking, there wasn’t. In fact, some of the tools that I used to rely on didn’t seem to perform as well as I had remembered.

So, in my opinion, Feedburner is dead.

To top if off – Feedburner put my number of subscribers at a relatively low number. This could have been due to the downtime which made the count be a little off. Who knows? Who cares.  I am not going to try to count them anymore.  If you are reading this post from a feed, consider stopping by the site now and then. Thanks.

Side note: Please check the URL of the feed you are subscribed to for this site.  It should be http://cdevroe.com/feed/ and not anything with “feedburner” in it.

The most notable updates about version 2.2, for me, are:

• Walking directions in Google Maps – Although I use the driving directions in Google Maps as much as any feature on the iPhone, I’ve found myself wanting more accurate walking directions when visiting bigger cities.
• Podcasts are downloadable in iTunes – I’m not sure how often I’ll use this feature since I sync my phone every day to get the latest content from my computer to the iPhone. I’m hoping moreso that the iPhone now displays Podcasts in reverse-chronological order.
• Display the address of a pin – Another update to Google Maps that I’ve wanted to see since day one. When you drop a pin on the map, you can now see the street address of that pin.
• And last… updates to Mobile Safari.  Any updates to Mobile Safari are good updates.

There is one feature I’m leaving out because I would have loved to see it done a bit differently. In Google Maps you can now share your location via email. Google Maps will now construct an iPhone friendly URL and email it to anyone of your choice. This is an excellent update and I’m sure many will use it. But I would rather have seen Google Maps send the URL via SMS. Someone get on that, will ya?

Oh, and Google Maps has Street View too now. I have no idea why I’d ever use this. But, who knows.

Source: Apple – iPhone – Software update.

In my testing this application works very well and quickly over EDGE on an iPhone 2G. Two little niggles that I have with it are that it doesn’t search the address book by voice and that when I searched for “Chinese” I had to click on “Local” before it showed me the restaurants in my area.

Source: Google Mobile App page.
Download: iTunes App Store link.

In no particular order I present – the best of the Web 2008.

The Best Blog: Daring Fireball

John Gruber’s blog will, it seems, always win this award from me. I toyed with the idea of awarding Daring Fireball with Best Journalism but I don’t want to take anything away from the writers that are writing about much more important topics than the goings-on of the Apple community and marketplace.

The Best New Blog: The Big Picture

Boston.com’s The Big Picture is easily the best new blog of 2008. Jason Kottke agrees with me, or I agree with him maybe. The photos are always stunning and the topics always seem perfectly aligned with my particular interests at the time of publishing. Even though I’ve read Andy Baio’s interview with the author, Alan Taylor, I still don’t know how this blog is as consistently awesome as it is.

The Best Blog Redesign: Jason Santa Maria

Jason’s latest redesign for his personal site is inspiring. Each of his posts, as he so choses, are designed specifically to empower the content he is posting. Example. Example. Example. His site has made me rethink my random headers on this site and I’ve now begun development of a much more intelligent way to allow my site to choose the headers. And that is just a start. Jason’s blog is also one of the only blogs that I purposefully leave the Google Reader interface to read the article as he intends, on his site. Brilliant.

The Best Blogging Platform: WordPress

My love for WordPress isn’t a secret. But Automattic’s effort to continue the momentum of this open source project has certainly been a big win for it. Regular, scheduled, feature and bug fix rich updates to an already industry-standard-setting piece of software is refreshing in every way possible. Kudos to every single developer that works on WordPress.

The Best Feed Reader: Google Reader

I’ve wrote about Google Reader a few times. I know that this is a touchy subject for some – because we all have very different ways of keeping up-to-date with our subscriptions – but I feel that Google deserves the recognition of building what has quickly become the most popular feed reader on any platform. NetNewswire held that title for a very long time, and deservedly so, but I believe the throne was usurped this year.

Side note: Boy do I miss Ranchero in its original form.

The Best Company: Apple, Inc.

I’m sorry but I have to give this award to Apple for their apparent take-over of the entire mobile, computing, and music industries. Regardless of relative size and market-share as of this moment, I believe that we’ve all seen what it looks like to rip these things out from other holders. In a few years Apple will be on top of every single list not just the “this year’s top” lists. I’m not sure how this will effect Apple overall but right now I’m happy that it is happening. Check back in 5 years to see if Apple makes my Worst Of 2013 list when I hate Apple for being like Microsoft, or something.

The Best Mobile Twitter Client: Hahlo

For me this is a no brainer. Being an iPhone-owner means that I have many, many applications at my disposal for posting and keeping up-to-date on Twitter. Whether we’re talking about iPhone applications or web applications built for the iPhone – Hahlo is far and away the best mobile Twitter client.

The Best Twitter Account: @MarsPhoenix

Duh. The Mars Phoenix Twitter account is the only somewhat-non-human account on Twitter that I follow that I’m not directly related with in some way. I’m sure there are other great Twitter accounts that are out of my own echo-chamber but this just strikes me as the obvious choice because of the way it has fundamentally changed the way that NASA delivers its news about their programs.

The Best iPhone application: Handshake & Ocarina

Two bests? Yes. These two are tied for very different reasons. Handshake is probably the iPhone application that I feel should have been part of the iPhone all-along more than any other application that I have installed. Being able to share contacts with other iPhone users through the air is awesome. Ocarina just simply makes me happy in a way that no other iPhone application has done. I can’t play a lick of music with the thing. But the ability to listen to other people who are equally horrible Ocarina players makes this application get a dedicated spot on my iPhone’s home screen.

How’s that for subjective!

The Best Application: Coda

I don’t do near the same amount of programming as I once did. However, the one application that completely changed the way that I do programming has got to be Coda. It’s single-window environment has made working much more enjoyable, less frustrating, and much more focused than ever before. The latest update which allows other developers to extend its text-editing functionality will, I think, improve the built-in text editor at a much quicker pace. I’m really happy about that.

The Best Browser: Fluid

I don’t know what else to call Fluid and it needs to be on my list somewhere.  My normal browser of choice (that is, the browser that I use to ‘surf’ the Web) is Safari. But as far as creating a single site browser for my favorite applications; Hahlo, Brighkite, Gmail, Google Docs, and Basecamp – Fluid is the best choice.

The Best Preference Pane: Connect 360

This selection could also be categorized as The Best Way To Save Money By Not Buying An AppleTV. If you have an Xbox 360 and a Macintosh – I suggest purchasing a copy of Connect 360. You can use your Xbox 360 to view photos and videos and listen to music on the television in your living room. Painless. Perfect.

The Best Email Client: GMail

I switched to GMail this year, using the aforementioned Fluid, and haven’t looked back. My main reason for switching was because Mail.app was slowing down a lot. On my first-generation black Macbook, using Mail.app with IMAP for 3 email accounts, Mail.app was incredibly sluggish.  I’m fairly certain I could have done something to improve the performance of Mail.app – and I do appreciate its synergy with the Mac OS – but GMail has won me over with its speed and operator searches. To be specific, I use Gmail for domains and so does Viddler.

The Best Messaging Client: iChat

I do not know why people on the Macintosh use anything else besides iChat. Not mentioning any names, most of the other clients do far too much or suck up too much memory or have features that just do not work. iChat works, is simple, has small foot print, and has generally every feature I could ever want in a messaging client.

The Best Keyboard: Apple’s wired keyboard.

How did a keyboard make this list of obviously Internet-related things? If you don’t ask, I don’t have to come up with an answer. My Macbook’s keyboard is crazy-fantastic. Since I connect to an external monitor while working in my office, I needed a keyboard that would offer the same level of crazy-fantasticness. Apple’s new wired keyboard does that. It has not only reduced the noise of typing – which I appreciate – but it has done it in a way that has not taken away from the tactile response that I have come to love.

 

In an effort to get this list out the door – this is not an exhaustive list. I didn’t keep a list throughout the year so this is an off-the-top-of-my-head list.  I fully plan to add a few more ‘categories’ to this list, especially if you care to suggest any in the comments, and will hopefully have a much more revised list for 2009.  I will do one of these every year.

Thanks to everyone who made the list this year because, in some way, you made my technology experience much more enjoyable. You probably already have my money – but now you have my public applause too.

Suggestions, comments? Add them below!

Google, and more specifically Google.org, has setup an equally neat and useful system for tracking search trends regarding influenza. Apparently search trends are enough of an indicator to track actual flu activity. In other words, Google’s Flu Trends tool can now tell you how active these influenza viruses are in your area “up to two weeks faster than traditional systems”.

That seems an incredibly tall order but I believe them.

This tool sort of reminds me of two other systems that, while they too are incredibly ambitious, have made a large impact on the general human population. The National Weather Service’s storm warning systems and The Amber Alert. Both of these government-backed systems are very different but both have had incredible successes to help save lives and return missing or abducted children to their parents.

If Google is able to raise flu awareness in the US population by even a small percentile, it’d be a huge win for this tool. I wonder what other “search trend tools” could be built to help protect and serve the community.  And, even more importantly, how they can effect those that live inside and outside of the United States.

Source: Google Flu Trends.

Thanks Peter.
If you’d like to suggest a topic, please do! 

However, more and more data is being stored “in the cloud” and so Spotlight sometimes needs to learn new tricks to keep up with the times.  Google Docs is a perfect example of cloud computing/storage.  I use it for personal documents that I need to collaborate with people on and Viddler uses it every single day.

Google’s Precipitate “… lets you search for and launch the information you have stored in the cloud from within Spotlight or Google Desktop for Mac”.  Essentially it does something I’ve always wanted to do; create a simple file and link it to the Web.  Spotlight indexes the file’s information, but the link opens a browser ((Now I just need to force Spotlight to open these links in Fluid.app and I’d be all set.)).

Give it a spin!

Source: precipitate – Google Code.

It is obvious that Aaron knows WordPress down to its very core, including even the unused code, and that makes him perfectly suited for these types of updates.  He probably does research on each release before it comes out because his previous job position at b5media demanded that he know what was coming on the platform.  He still uses WordPress on a daily basis as he is the cofounder and lead editor for Technosailor on which this article is written.

These lists are extremely useful to those that do not have the expertise nor the time to focus on what is coming in each release of WordPress before they are released.

A note about WordPress 2.6: This, like 2.5, is an excellent release and I’m really looking forward to it.  I’m hoping that Apple updates to a version of Safari that Google Gears can run on, since Google has said it runs in the latest Webkit nightlies, soon since I won’t be able to use the Gears integration with WordPress until they do.

Source: Technosailor: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6.

“Sigh, I was excited about Google contact syncing in 10.5.3, but it turns out it’s only for iPhone and iPod touch users. Lame.” — Kyle Slattery on Twitter.

I didn’t care too much about this at the time because, well, I have an iPhone and I figured I’d have the feature once I updated to the latest version of Leopard.  But then I got to thinking.  Why would Apple, or Google for that matter, want this feature to be limited in such a way? Turns out, even the daring John Gruber thought the same thing.

I have no idea.  But such as limitations are, someone took the time to figure out a way to hack it.  And so now it is up on Lifehacker and all of you out there without iPhones and/or iPod touches can rejoice.

Source: Lifehacker: Enable Google Contact Sync Without an iPhone or iPod Touch.

My experiment was to only show ads to people that came from search engines, and those that have not commented on my site in a while, or ever (shame on you).  In fact, if you came from a search engine, the site would show you two sets of ads; one on the top of the post and one on the bottom.  This method of displaying ads very selectively, I think, has improved the overall statistics regarding my ads.  Which I’ll share with you now – in perhaps too great of detail for some of you.

My click through rate is at 0.33% and my average eCPM is $0.94 (though today it is inexplicably at nearly $3.50).  If I’m able to keep the click through rate fairly high, and continue to increase the traffic on my site, I’d stand to do pretty well for a personal blog within about a year.

Above is a graph showing my sites overall page views over a 1-year period, not counting my own hits to this site.  Obviously I wasn’t interested in these numbers until I began this experiment on January 3rd of this year, which I’ve marked with a 1. Since then the trend has noticeably angled in the desirable direction, which I’ve marked with a 2.  The number 3 on this chart is the current month, which is not fully calculated until the month is over, which is why it appears to have such a steep drop.

The only thing I’ve done differently on my blog since January is attempt to be fairly regular with writing, and as you may know I’ve been bringing all of my content to my site rather than spreading it all over, and I’ve tried to maintain a certain level of quality with everything I’ve published here.  Combining those three things is what I believe made my site’s traffic increase as it has.  My actual numbers are nothing to brag about, to be sure, but so long as the trend continues in the right direction you could say that the experiment was a resounding success.

But, was I able to accomplish my goals?  Yes.  Here is what I said my goal was in January:

“I don’t have any hard number goals that I’d like to achieve, but I wouldn’t mind being able to buy myself one lunch per month off of this site’s ads. Seems like a low goal? Remember, this is a personal Web site with a very small number of subscribers, less then five-hundred posts, and I only manage to write on here when I find the time. So how much does a good lunch cost nowadays?”

In the very first month of my running this experiment I made enough to buy a lunch.  In fact, based on the amount I paid today for lunch at Panera Bread, I’d be able to afford two lunches for the month of January’s earnings.  Success!

But wait, in February I would have only been able to buy a little more than one lunch.  Still a success, but odd that the amount I made in February wasn’t more than it was in January, since my overall page views were higher.  Here’s why; the number of clicks on ads that I had in February was only half that of January.  The main reason, I believe, this occurred was because of search referrals.  The main way I make money from ads on this site would be through search referrals, especially since I show two sets of ads on those page views (which probably brings down my CTR in retrospect).  If the traffic I get from search engines decreases over the course of the month so will my earnings.

Thrilling I know, but there’s more.

What about March?  March was, statistically, the best month this site has had in at least a year.  March was much better than February but still not quite as good as January.  While traffic from search engines did indeed increase, it didn’t increase enough to make up for the losses incurred in February, or even to match that of what was made in January.

Now we’re onto April.  You’ve probably painted a camel-like graph for yourself in your head with January and March being the humps and February being the valley in the middle.  So, where will April end up? With the month already half over, this site has made more than all of February, and almost as much as all of March.  I believe the month of April’s earnings will end up being slightly more than that of January.

What I’ve actually learned

Ads don’t have to be obtrusive to make money. The most important thing when serving ads is that you serve them to people that are most likely to click on them.  If you show an ad to 1,000 people that won’t click on it, you’ve just decreased your CPM average.  Context is also very important, but Google takes care of that for me.  However, if you’re reading this and in the middle of building your own ad system, know that properly serving an ad contextually is just as important as serving an ad to the right person.

I know what you’re thinking; this is advertising 101.  Not exactly.  I’m speaking of actually turning advertisements off if you think the person viewing the web site is not going to click the ads.  Do not even bother showing an ad to a person that will not click it.

And I’m not talking about demographics here.  I’m talking about scope.  If the person you are serving an ad to is there to see a very specific “thing”, and the ad is not well suited for that “thing”, you won’t get a click.  Plain and simple.  However, if the person you are serving an ad to is looking for something related to the ad, or is highly vested in something related to the ad, or even better yet is incredibly interested in something related to the ad – that’s when you’re going to get a click.

Here is the best example I can come up with on the fly.  If I’m reading an article on CNN.com, I don’t even notice the advertisements because I’m there to read the article.  However, if I’m looking for information, products, services, etc. that the article just happens to be about, and the ads are relevant, then the ads become part of the content.  The ads become valuable.

The second thing I learned is that having a lot of traffic doesn’t equate to more click-thrus.  February’s earnings dip is a perfect example.  Having a friend, or just about any other web site, link to you will not help the number of clicks you get on your ads.  If I was earning money based purely on CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, then it would, but not if I’m earning money solely on the CPC, or cost per click, model. (There are probably arguments to this, and I’d love to hear them.  The first thing that comes to mind is that the Long Tail will improve with Page Rank.)

Advertising will always be the most obtrusive when they are based only on number of impressions.  If I was earning money on CPM, I’d be showing an ad at every opportunity.  In fact, I’d probably put them right in the middle of my post.  This is why advertisements based on only on CPM should be replaced by poignant sponsorship campaigns that make sense.  More on this at another time.

New goals and some changes

I think I’m going to make some changes to the way I handle search engine referral page views.  As of right now I show an ad both at the top and the bottom of the post.  I think I might adjust it so that I only show an ad on the top of the post and not at the bottom.  This way I’m not showing two ads, which “fluffs” the impressions statistic, and lowers my CTR average.  I am not sure if this will help or hurt me, but I’m open to suggestions here if any of you have experience.

My new goal is that my earnings per month increases at a rate of at least 10% per month.  So if I make $1.00 this month, I want to make $1.10 next month.  I don’t even know if this is possible or plausible.  But it is a goal nonetheless, and a measure at which to weigh this experiment when I revisit it in the future.

If you have any comments, suggestions, tips, or tricks – please share them in the comments.  Hey, by commenting you don’t have to see the ads at all, so why not?

Turns out a few people would like to see PHP support as well.

Source: I WANT PHP.

Google Reader’s Heads Up Display for Keyboard Shortcuts
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

When I saw this I immediately thought: “Wow, Google really gets this whole web application thing.”. But what else can we learn from this? I think there is definitely something to be said for quickly explaining the keyboard shortcuts in a way that is available throughout the entire application, at any time, with one keyboard shortcut.

One thing I know we have to work on better at Viddler, and this is partially my responsibility, is that we have a ton of features that are sort of in between development, testing, and live. We’ve got a simple player, which you can see in use on the top-right hand side of our new front page, we have a play all player – in use by the DadLabs team, and a JavaScript library to control our player. All of these are live, usable, and yet poorly documented and not easily accessible by our community.

Seeing this in Google Reader has prompted me to get my butt in gear and begin to, at the very least, document these features that Viddler has so that people can find them.

Monday’s stats

Take for example this passed Monday night, when the Green Bay Packer game went into overtime. Though short lived due to a long pass by Brett Favre, during the time this game went into overtime my site received hundreds of referral hits from the major search engines. Why? Because I show up on the first page on Google when you search for NFL overtime rules. These types of things happen all the time – and to nearly ever blogger.

Sometimes these trends can be predicted (which is why blogging about niches is so popular). Other times though, trends just appear out of no where.

Take for instance the most popular post on my site; Tolype Velleda. I know what you’re thinking: “How the heck is that the most popular post on your site?” Because the number of visits to this page is skewed by the fact that my photo of this moth comes up on the first page (and sometimes in the first row) for a Google Images search for the word moth. Combine that with the fact that, when clicked, the photo of the moth is only contained in a small frame above my site loaded in a lower frame. This happens, a lot.

It is funny to see where you get traffic from. Some of the searches I end up seeing a lot of referrals from are funny to me because – once and a while – I know people are looking for something completely different then the content on my site. For instance, doing an image search for ‘pot’ on Google will refer you to my post about a gift Eliza gave me. I’ve gotten emails asking: “Did you know your site comes up when I search for pot? Do you have any weed?”. No joke. And to answer those wondering, no I don’t have any weed. Ask Josue, he has some.

I could go on forever about all of the odd ways people end up seeing my site. What are some of the weird ways you’ve seen on your site?

… my main reason for not using some of the most popular web applications has been because I can not use them offline. I am a firm believer in having all of my data available to me at anytime. — Why I’m excited about Google Gears

Yes, I am. But there comes a time when you must give something a try, regardless of your preconcieved notions, even if just for the sake of trying something new. I had tried to switch to Google Reader, prior to yesterday, with no luck. But finally I took a few hours, yes – a few hours – and bit the bullet and switched because I was having a few problems with NetNewsWire.

My tags in Google Reader

My main reasons for wanting to switch to Google Reader, prior to actually doing so, were:

• It is free.
• I can use it on my iPhone. Again, for free.
• I can access it from any Internet connected computer.
• The interface is completely customizable.
• It makes good use of “tags”.
• The keyboard shortcuts are amazing.
• With Google Gears, I could use it offline.

I was having some trouble, only recently, with NetNewsWire where it would crash without generating a crash report. Normally I would have gone through the process of emailing the developers a copy of my .console log – but I decided to use it as an opportunity to try out Google Reader, and also slim down my number of subscriptions substantially.

As of yesterday if you had asked me how many feed subscriptions I had I would have answered you with “750+” or “too many”. As much as I enjoy reading, it was getting harder and harder to keep up with everything in my feed reader and I was finding myself unable to retain as much of the information because I ended up skimming everything.

As of today I would answer “less than 200″. In fact, until I went in and subscribed to a few “activity notification feeds” I was down to 157. That means I slimmed down my number of subscriptions by over 80%! Sometimes a fresh pair of clothes is all you need to really get something done.

I’ll check in on this subject again in the future (perhaps in a month or so)… but so far my experience with the latest version of Google Reader has gone swimmingly. Far better than it had in the past.

Something I was worried about with Eliza and I both getting iPhones was syncing. She has data, I have data, we have data! How would I be able to manage keeping all of this data in sync between our two computers and the iPhones without forcing her to only sync her iPhone with my computer?

A few things came into play in order to make this happen – but out of the box I’m very happy with how the iPhone handles syncing. Unlike the iPod, and correct me if I’m wrong, the iPhone allows itself to be connected to more than one computer. Have you ever had an iPod yell at you when you connect it to another computer? The iPhone doesn’t. Which is beautiful! So now my iPhone syncs only with my computer whereas Eliza’s syncs with mine for music and her’s for mail, calendar, address book, and photos. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

However, this introduces a small wrench into the system. Syncing our iPhones separately would mean that we would have to manage two different address books and calendars. The address book is a non-issue since Eliza and I, for the most part, managed two very separate contact lists. The number of business contacts that I have makes it so that Eliza would not want to sync with my address book outright. I, on the other hand, want all of my contact’s information available to me all the time.

So we’re left with the calendar. How do I sync Eliza’s calendar with mine, mine with hers, and both of ours with our iPhones? Turns out this is made very easy using a utility called Spanning Sync. So here is how I do keep all of this information up-to-date between both of our computers, the Web, and our respective iPhones.

Syncing bliss. (made with Skitch)

The first step is to create the calendars that you think you need within iCal. I decided to create two calendars per person and one joint calendar for our use. So we both have a personal calendar and a work calendar, and then we share a family events calendar. Eliza maintains the family events calendar so that I don’t have to (thanks babe!).

The second step is to recreate those same calendars within Google Calendar. I could have easily set it up so that Spanning Sync used the same Google Calendar account, but I wanted to keep our two accounts separate for other reasons and I really think this is the better option if Eliza wanted to go into Google Calendar and subscribe to things like the Green Bay Packers season schedule or something.

Once you have this completed you tell Spanning Sync, on both computers, to sync the iCal calendars that you created with their online representatives within Google Calendar. This will pull your information from iCal every hour, day, or week and sync it with Google Calendar making them both up-to-date.

The final step is to share my calendars with Eliza through Google Calendar and share her’s with mine. Then, ask Spanning Sync to sync those calendars too with offline representatives within iCal.

Once I had this workflow down, and have tested it, I have been really, really happy with the results. If I didn’t explain this too well I’m sorry – it gets a bit confusing but if you have any questions you can leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them. Or, if you have any tips on how I can improve this workflow – I’d like those as well.

My precious!

Ok. So what do I think of the iPhone? As you might have already guessed, I love it. For the entire weekend I rarely got onto my Macbook to do anything except sync my latest settings of my iPhone to the computer. The iPhone is a great mini-computer for getting most of your core Internet activities done like checking/responding to email, surfing the web for information, or other simple daily tasks like this.

I won’t get into the speed of the EDGE network or how the virtual keyboard is. To me these are non-issues thus far and I don’t have much to compare these two things to since I have never had a cell phone that used the Internet, nor a full sized hard keyboard. I can type pretty fast on the keyboard and the Internet is nearly as fast as being home on Wifi. So again, both are non-issues.

Again, it is the little things

One of my fellow line-waiters John Gruber did a fantastic job giving his general overview of each feature of the iPhone the other day. My impressions are on par with John’s except that I’ve found myself typing just fine. Be sure to read his thoughts if you’d like to catch some of the nice things about each “feature” of the iPhone.

However, I’d like to extend his list a little bit to remark on some of the little things I’ve noticed while using the iPhone that I think make the experience all the more enjoyable.

The weight of the iPhone came as a surprise to some. Yes, it feels heavier than it looks. To me this make the iPhone feel tough and rugged when compared to the way it looks. I think the fact that we’re seeing people surprised at how tough the iPhone actually is, is because it doesn’t look very rugged. It looks elegant, which doesn’t usually mean tough. However the weight of the iPhone makes it feel very rugged to me.

The speed of the interface is something that I was very skeptical about. The commercials led me to believe that the interface was just as fast, if not faster, than switching windows on my computer. In my relatively little experience with mobile phones – the interfaces on these things have never been described by me as “snappy” or “fast”. However the iPhone’s interface, in general, is incredibly fast. When speaking with John Gruber in line, he remarked how the iPhone’s “one app at a time” focus really lent itself to being able to be very fast. The iPhone doesn’t need to show windows inside of windows or multiple layers or even windows on top of windows. The application that you are currently looking at is obviously getting the priority in the Operating System which makes the iPhone blaze.

The sleep, volume, silent, and home buttons are the perfect combination of buttons that were decided to be “hard buttons”. Although one can easily adjust the volume in most applications within the iPhone’s interface, you can also use the hard volume control on the side of the iPhone. The same goes for the silent and sleep buttons – I never have to “turn on” the iPhone to use these options. And the home button is definitely far better than keeping the “doc” visible and having a “desktop” button or something. I’m really glad the iPhone has a home button.

Within each application on the iPhone there are small, hidden gems that you will only find through experimentation or someone telling you that they are there. Like the ability to turn on the caps lock key, or tapping the top bar to auto-scroll to the top of the page in Safari (both tips came from John Gruber’s site), etc. None of these small interface features are handed over, but once you find them you love them.

Of course, I want more

Keeping in mine that, technically, this is iPhone 1.0 which includes all the hardware and software that came in those beautiful black bags on Friday, I have a few things that I’d like to see improved. I’m sure that, internally, this is build 10,000+ of the iPhone’s OS and its applications, but from my perspective it is still 1.0. Being such, I fully expected to have the wish list that follows.

• Better integration with Gmail. Right now Gmail marks things as “being downloaded” when I look at them either via Mail.app on my Macbook or on my iPhone. This causes some frustration since I’d like all of my email to be “everywhere”. To fix this, I think either Google or Apple will have to update it so that it marks it as being read on the iPhone or not. Either way, the email “works” – but it could work a little bit better. (Side note: On the first day of release, the Gmail integration was wrought with problems ranging from getting duplicate messages to simply not working with Google App’s hosted domain email. These issues have been fixed, presumably by Google, over the weekend. So ++ to them.)
• Though I haven’t used the “Notes” feature yet, I could see a huge amount of improvement being done here, which might make me want to use Notes on the iPhone. Simply saving the notes saved as RTF files that are synced to your computer into ~/Documents/iPhone Notes/ would suffice for me. Why create notes that you can’t really use? A work around is taking a notes contents and creating an email out of it, which can be done fairly easily.
• iCal integration seems to work “ok” but I have the same complaints as others. If I have separate calendars within iCal they should also be separate within iPhone’s calendar application. And, when syncing with my Macbook, I shouldn’t have to choose only one calendar that the iPhone can write to. I am not sure why there is this limitation. Something else I noticed is that if I setup an iCal alert on the iPhone it works perfectly but it doesn’t work within iCal. It shows up in the application but iCal never shows me the the alert when I asked it to. Not sure why, perhaps this is a bug.
• The camera feature should allow a photo to be taken by tapping anywhere on the screen. I think some people would hate this because it would cause a lot of accidental photos to be taken, but taking photos of yourself and someone else with the iPhone is very hard with only a small button to push. Perhaps this could be a setting? Can has Photobooth for the camera? I don’t care about the crazy bulging eyes and stretching chins stuff, but it’d be nice to have the ability to take black and white photos or something simple. Obviously this is a minor, minor update that I’d enjoy seeing to the Camera feature.
• Small browser cache? From what I’ve been able to tell Safari on the iPhone only caches the current page you are looking at. Reloading a page is fairly quick but the second you navigate away from a URL the cached version is lost. I have an 8Gb iPhone, I wouldn’t mind dedicating even a few hundred megabytes to Safari’s caching if it would mean that hitting the back button wouldn’t reload the page.
• Normal headphone jacks “don’t work” with the iPhone because the iPhone’s input jack is sunken so low into the casing of the iPhone. Jason Kottke resolved this by actually cutting his headphones a little bit to allow the jack to sink in deeper. There are several add-ons being offered to make this easier, but I am unsure why this was done in the first place?
• The iPod allows you to update your set of icons on the button of its menu. I think this should be an option in all applications on the iPhone including the home screen. There are a few web applications that are being released for the iPhone that I’d love to create a shortcut to from my home screen. The first button I’d get rid of from the home screen? YouTube followed by Stocks. I simply won’t use those things on my iPhone too often.
• Google Maps on the iPhone is amazing! But I feel this application will probably receive the greatest number of updates over time. It is perhaps one of the most “complex” applications on the iPhone and using it is a delight most of the time. However, there are a few usability problems when you switch from searching for a location to getting directions to that same location. (I’ve found that it is easier to save locations in your Google Maps bookmarks.) I’m sure these little things will be improved soon and that integration with the rest of the phone’s applications will happen in the future. One of the first things that comes to mind is to tell the camera application where you are using the Maps feature, which would in turn write the Latitude and Longitude to the photos.

I’m going to cut this list short because, as I said, this is a 1.0 release and one that I’m overwhelmingly happy with. I’ve found the iPhone becoming an extension of my laptop in ways I hadn’t considered before. I knew that I’d find the iPhone useful, I didn’t expect to want to use it more than my laptop.

What are your thoughts on the iPhone? Any wishes that I didn’t cover?

The new Docs UI

Google announced a redesign of the main Google Docs dashboard that gives you quick access to all of your documents and spreadsheets that you have on Google Docs. In many ways this new interface is much better than the old one – except that Google has seemingly taken tags, or labels (see this post for more about labels), and turned them into folders?

I am of the firm belief that tagging is far superior to folders. Even though in Google’s use on Docs they seem to be handled as being one in the same, it is that the interface leads users to adding folders instead of using tags. What does this mean? This means that people will begin to constrain their tagging into a rigid set of folders instead of having the freedom that tagging offers. I think we’ll start to see folder structures like Business, Personal, Family, etc. begin to emerge where before we may have seen tags that were much more miscellaneous than that.

In my opinion this is a leap backwards. Or, perhaps – one step forward and two steps back.

MeToday: June 11, 2007

So I’ve been catching some flack over my MeToday photo that, more or less, described my feelings towards the WWDC Keynote on Monday. Perhaps I’m overreacting, perhaps I’m being a little overly critical, or maybe I just needed more sleep, but the fact remains — I am not alone in my thinking that this latest Keynote wasn’t what we all thought it would be.

If you haven’t watched the Keynote, or weren’t fixated on the coverage during it, I suggest you watch it and then come back and read this post – because I’m not going to recap what Steve Jobs covered, but more cover what I think was sorely missing which lead to my disappointment. If you’d like my thoughts on what was announced, I suggest reading Michael Heilemann‘s “WWDC 07 fallout” post which nearly reiterates my thoughts on the what was announced during the Keynote.

That which went missing

The days leading up to any keynote by Apple’s CEO are always filled with rumors of new products or services that Apple will announce. These generally range from iPods that will do your laundry to cloaks that make you invisible like Harry Potter. Though Harry made an appearance in this keynote – no cloaks were added to the Apple Store. A lot of times this rumor-mongering builds up the expectation to such a level that, no matter what Apple introduces, those expectations are ultimately let down. However, I do not want anyone to believe that I “expected the unexpected” and was thus let down by the contents of the keynote. On the contrary, I think nearly everything that was mentioned in the keynote was, in a word, great — but I definitely feel a few things were missing from the keynote and that is why I reacted the way that I did.

Ok, so there was one rumor that, in the end, let me down. The iPhone SDK isn’t really an SDK at all – which only lets me down from a “user” perspective since my Cocoa-foo is lacking to say the least. No, I don’t want to build Cocoa apps for the iPhone – but I know a few developers who I would have loved to have the opportunity to do so. Yes, I like the fact that Apple is providing hooks into the iPhone’s core system via OS X services that can be “called” via the Web. Yes, I will build a few “iPhone applications” for my own personal use – but there is something I’m not happy about. Speed, responsiveness, and local caching on the iPhone will all become a factor with having 3rd party web apps be the only way that the iPhone can be developed for. Most of my time is spent near wifi (by necessity currently) but when I’m accessing the web over AT&T’s network I imagine that my mobile version of NetNewsWire is going to suck. Google Gears for iPhone plz?

Where was the latest version of iLife? While watching the keynote during MacWorld in January I was sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting for Steve to announce iLife 07 and give a preview of the enhancements made to, what has become, my most used suite of applications on any platform. Nothing. Surely another opportunity to let us iLife-faithful know what is in store for the next versions of the applications wouldn’t slip by. Obviously, iLife 07 is destined to become Leopard-only (which I’m fine with) – and perhaps the keynote had a “bigger agenda” for this conference, but even announcing that an update is coming might have quenched my thirst.

One might argue that WWDC is not the platform for announcing consumer products but rather is focused on showing off features that developers would find most interesting and valuable. Good argument. But that doesn’t mean that Steve couldn’t show how iLife takes advantage of the new Core Animation API in Leopard to allow a much richer experience when sorting your photos in iPhoto, or how iMovie can burn HD DVDs (or something). Of course I could argue the point further that the new movie listing Dashboard widget being released in Leopard (oh thank God this was a top-ten feature of Leopard, gives me a lot of faith in the other 290+ features) is much more a consumer product than a developer one.

I also wanted to see updates to .Mac since Steve Jobs mentioned at D5 All Things Digital that we should expect updates to this service soon. No, he didn’t say that they’d be announced at WWDC – but still. .Mac is falling behind and really needs a shot in the arm. I’ve only used 60 day trials of .Mac – but I did like being able to use it during those times. However, with free and better alternatives available – there is almost no reason to use .Mac besides greater system-level integration. I’d love to see a partnership between Google and Apple on integrating .Mac with Google’s offerings. Having close ties with Google Docs, Maps, Gmail, and several other Google services inside of Leopard – via .Mac somehow – would be great to see. Obviously it would save Apple the need to reinvent the wheel – and with Google’s open APIs it wouldn’t be that hard for Apple to put some really slick interfaces ontop of these great services (like they did for Maps on the iPhone). Perhaps this is wishful thinking since Apple makes a fair amount of cash from .Mac subscriptions – but I’d also love to see .Mac go free as another pull to switch to the Macintosh and have the best system level integration with web services on any operating system.

Something new! In January Steve mentioned that they had to keep wraps over a few of the Leopard features because they didn’t want Redmond’s photo copiers to start early. Fair enough. But he couldn’t have been talking about Stacks or the movie widget, was he? Obviously Time Machine and Core Animation are Leopard’s most notable features (from my perspective). I’m sure there are a ton of advancements under-the-hood being that Leopard has been in active development for 21 months! And maybe, just maybe, we won’t know of the best features until we install it – but I really thought Steven built-up the expectations there a bit and never really came through with anything bigger than what he had mentioned in January. This isn’t to say that I’m not just as excited to update my operating system as I was in January, just that I thought there was going to be “one more thing” worth noting about Leopard.

So to recap. I’m pretty happy with what was shown in the keynote. I’m just a little disappointed with what I thought was missing in it.

Web applications are different then the applications you run on your computer in two very specific and obvious ways. First, they are run completely in your web browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.) and you do not need to download or install any local files for the application to function. Second, the data that the application stores or edits is not on your local machine but rather saved “on the Internet”. These may seem like very obvious differences but I’ve mentioned these two reasons because the paradigm has shifted overtime and Google Gears almost completes that shift.

One of the many mantras of “Web 2.0″ applications has been to freely allow users of these applications to have access to their data both via an API and being able to “export” their data into various formats. These APIs afforded many developers to blur the line between desktop and web applications – such as being able to geotag your photos in iPhoto using Google Maps – but these solutions still required an Internet connection for them to work properly. Something also to note is the fact that these APIs are mainly used by developers and not by the users themselves so even though the data was portable, this fact hasn’t been exploited by the average user much, yet.

Enter Google Gears – which provides developers with the needed technology to make their entire applications portable not just the data. The first example Google chose to show off Gears with is Google Reader (a really great example). Google Reader, up until a few days ago, was a way to read your favorite sites by subscribing to their feeds but its use was limited to when you were connected to the Internet. Google Gears allows you to use Google Reader, at least most of the application, offline. You connect to the Internet, download your latest feed subscription’s updates, get offline, and you’re still able to read the feeds that you’ve cached on your local system. What’s more is that you are able to flag those items and Google Reader will sync with your Google Reader account once an Internet connection is available.

In short; Google Gears brings your favorite web applications to your local computer and allows them to run almost like desktop applications.

Why am I excited? Because my main reason for not using some of the most popular web applications has been because I can not use them offline. I am a firm believer in having all of my data available to me at anytime. Unfortunately in some cases, such as my photo and music libraries becoming larger than my laptop’s hard drive, I’ve had to make sacrifices. However, when it comes to much smaller yet more important pieces of data such as email messages, bookmarks, and important documents I can not afford to make those sacrifices. As Google Gears is adopted and implemented in more web applications I’ll be able to begin using them offline.

So why switch back? When I described why I had switched and my experiences doing so back in February I had said that I ran into many problems all of which I was able to solve save two:

The two things I have yet to solve, which are rather large things: 1) Spotlight can no longer find my photos since switching to [edit: from] iPhoto. I am really not sure where to start with fixing this so I think I’m just going to have to ask someone. 2) Reorganizing my keywords in Aperture (since I had them set up in iPhoto) is impossible. When I bring up the Keywords HUD, I’m greeted with all of my keywords residing subordinately to a master keyword of ‘iPhoto’. When I try to access the keywords that are “below” iPhoto Aperture freezes. Perhaps I have too many keywords (I do have an awful lot). I’m not sure how to solve this one yet either. Maybe there is a raw .plist file that I can manually edit (and I am willing to do so).

After using Aperture for the past 3+ months I’ve yet to resolve either of these issues. Recently there was an update to Aperture from Apple that, according to the documentation for the update, was supposed to help resolve my second issue with having too many keywords for Aperture to handle – but it hasn’t helped much. So since switching to Aperture I’ve not tagged more than maybe fifty photos, which is discouraging because I know that once I switch back to iPhoto I’m going to be busy tagging photos again.

So I suppose you could say I’m switching back for two main reasons. First, I want it to be much easier to tag my photos since that is probably the single most important thing to me and the experience with iPhoto and Keyword Manager is far superior to that of using keywords in Aperture. Second, I want my photos to start showing up in Spotlight searches again. I’m more than willing to deal with the caveat, albeit a rather large one, that I won’t have my photos with me wherever I go anywhere but that they’ll forever reside on my firewire drive.

What I need help with…

When I open iPhoto I see all of the previews for the photos that I had the day I switched to Aperture. However, the originals have been moved by Aperture onto my firewire drive – so when I click on each photo all I get is a ( ! ) symbol. The previews still reference a file that does not exist yet the iPhoto database still retains all of the relevant metadata (date/time, keywords, comments, etc) that I had worked so hard to put into iPhoto. I need to retain this information and somehow get the originals back into place so that iPhoto sees them again.

What I thought about doing was this: 1) Somehow restore the originals for the almost 25,000 photos into the place where iPhoto thinks they should be. 2) Move the entire library to my external firewire drive. 3) Import the remaining images that I’ve taken since switching to Aperture into iPhoto.

Since I have Aperture store my photos by date – importing only the images that I’ve imported into Aperture should be a piece of cake. I do not need to retain any metadata from Aperture since I’ve only tagged a few photos in Aperture and all of the other information I may need should be on the original file (like date taken, etc.). I know I’m going to lose a lot of edits that I’ve done like cropping, rotating, color balancing, red-eye reduction, etc. but I’m more than willing to lose all of that if it means that I can pick up where I left off and get back into the swing of things in iPhoto.

I’ve Googled like crazy and haven’t found someone doing exactly what I’m trying to accomplish so any help with my current situation is greatly appreciated. I’ve also posted this on the Apple Discussion boards.

[tags]apple, aperture, iphoto, google, photo library, help, firewire, external, switch, restore[/tags]
[slug]back-to-iphoto[/slug]

The Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo Floor

The expo floor was filled with companies of all types ranging from large companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to smaller more fun companies like Viddler, Zimki, and Piczo. Some people were being very professional and demonstrating some very high-level enterprise applications (which are typically found behind-the-scenes of more social software. ie. Analytics and monitoring systems for server grids). Others were demonstrating their next-generation web service that can take care of all your development needs from coding, to versioning, to deployment all in a social and collaborative way. Each had their pitch, each had something very interesting to offer, and each were trying to make their product/service stand out from the pack.

The sessions that I got to see (which weren’t many since I didn’t have a session pass so I had to sneak into any of the rooms by tossing Hershey Kisses on the floor in front of the badge-checker on the way in) were much more “professional” than the panels I got to see when I was at South by Southwest this year. This isn’t to say that those panels at SXSW were not done in a professional manner, but that the sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo were much less interactive and more a demonstration of some products/services/companies that stood out as doing good work in their various fields.

Web 2Open

The Web2Open Mashroom

Running adjacent to the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes and sessions was Web2Open which is a *Camp style event that run in the main corridors on the second floor. Various presentations and discussions given by people that attended and participated in Web2Open were very good. “Minutes” were taken by various people and left on the walls so that if you came late to a particular discussion, you were able to quickly catch up and be part of the conversation. If you didn’t like where the discussion was going you were able to change the topic yourself by suggesting a topic, or – you could literally get up and go into another room where maybe the topic suited you a little better.

The idea of doing Open conferences like this is still very much in beta – and the process is being refined by the attendees each and every time one of these events goes on – but they are definitely much more attractive than any other event that I’ve been to. Simply being able to steer the conversation by simply raising your hand and asking a question lends itself very well to building value for those that attend.

The Viddler team and version 2.0

Viddler had a massive push to finish Q&A and testing on the its latest version of the site and player and managed to fit in many hours of development in order to release version 2.0. There are still a few bugs being worked out as soon as the developers and managers get back home from this trip – but overall the release was a big success and was fairly well received. The roadmap for Viddler is still quite exciting and the entire team is looking forward to the next step. I’ll have some more information about this and will be asking for everyone’s feedback on some of our ideas shortly.

Viddler 2.0 Cake

We celebrated version 2.0 a little bit early with some champagne and cake. The entire team was staying in Saratoga at our President’s relative’s house. We were so well taken care of that none of us wanted to leave (freshly squeezed orange juice right off the tree every morning makes a man wanna stick around).

Meeting the entire team for the first time was awesome. Working remotely with our team is really great and is actually conducive to getting very good work accomplished without the added expense and overhead of having everyone move to one location and setting up the proper digs for such an effort. However, it was nice to finally spend some time together to get to know each other even better and fit a real personality to the people that I have the privilege of working with everyday.

Harry and I got to work on our commercial together, which has caused a little bit of a stir with some members – which is always good to know that our users are reading our terms of use. We’re looking forward to updating our terms of use to fit more inline with what we really want to be able to do — promote really good video content and display it in an interactive and valuable way.

The Web 2 Party

The moment I got a feel for who was going to be at the Web 2 Expo; namely my friends from Citizen Agency, Ma.gnolia, etc. – I decided I really wanted to have a party with a few companies to help fit the bill to really pull off something nice. I mentioned this to Larry Halff and Chris Messina and I must say – they really took the ball and ran with it especially considering my inexperience in putting something like this together combined with the fact that I’m on the east coast far away from finding out about all of the venues that were available.

Tara (unknown last name) (aka Tara 2.0) came through in a very big way and secured our venue and setup everything we needed go pull off a successful event. Having an “event planner” is really key when you are trying to do one of these events with multiple companies and tons of logistics involved. If you are thinking of doing something like we did – I definitely recommend assigning one experienced person to get everything setup properly.

The party attendees

The party, in my opinion, was a huge success and it seemed like everyone had a really great time. People were lined up outside to get in, we were “at capacity” for the entire duration of the party, and people had to be escorted out of the gallery when the place closed. I had been to a few events at South by Southwest where people leaved early, the bar tab ran out quickly, or where generally not many people showed up. Such was not the scene for the Web 2 Party and we had a great time meeting everyone who came, shooting some video, and had some great discussions.

We’ve been talking about doing something in New York in the Fall so be sure to keep your ear to the ground. We don’t want to let all the west coast peeps have all the fun!

I know I’m speaking for the entire Viddler team when I say that we’d like to thank Citizen Agency for helping to coordinate the entire event, and thanks to Ma.gnolia, Scrapblog, JanRain, faberNovel, Facebook, Plasq, and WineLibraryTVfor helping us in throwing the best party during the Web 2.0 Expo. We hope you had as much fun as we all did.

The photos

Here is just a small collection of photos that I took over the course of the week. I didn’t have a lot of time to shoot many photos as I always seemed to be busy recording video, talking at our booth, chatting with friends or just generally preoccupied with other things. I recommend you look at the Viddler Group on Flickr for more photos (oh, if you have photos please put them in the Viddler group) and also watch the Viddler tag on Viddler to see any video that may pop up over the next few days from the Expo.

Oranges from Saratoga

Breakfast meeting

Chris Tingom

Viddler Palace

Lucasz and Kasper

Version 2.0 development

Viddler booth

Blake Burris

Crazy Keith

“Naked” Dustin

Joyful Jina

The gang

Firecracker Harry

Photos taken while in California

Again I wish that I had more time to take more photos than I did but I’m thankful that friends like Chris Tingom were able to take a bunch of photos during our trip.

So the next time you hear that Viddler is coming to your town or throwing a party in your neighborhood – be sure to give us a shout and come out and drink some of our beerz…

[tags]web2expo, viddler, ma.gnolia, citizen agency, chris messina, tara hunt, larry halff, scrapblog, party, event, version2, california, saratoga, san francisco, santa clara, photos, flickr, google, yahoo, microsoft, d. keith robinson, dustin diaz, jina bolton, harry snodgrass, chris tingom, food, oranges, faberlove, facebook, scrapblog, hatomic, microformats, zimki[/tags]
[slug]webexpo-experience[/slug]