aaron c beals

i received an invite to Google Wave a while back, but haven’t made the time to really try it out until now. there seem to be more people on it now, which is a good thing as makes it easier to test collaboration.

first impressions:
* the interface is a wee bit messy. it looks a lot like an email interface (even uses the terms “inbox” and “spam”), but there are a number of controls in the list and detail frames. it also seems as if i can move each frame around… but i can’t. i can just minimize them.
* i like the fact that it automatically pulled my contacts from Gmail into the contacts list, and just those people who have Wave.
* i dislike the fact that i received new wave content over the past few months, but never received an email letting me know. i realize that Wave is supposed to act as a sort of replacement for email, but why am i going to check it if there’s nothing yet going on? talk up your product a little more, Google.

my first wave:
* received a wave from my friend who invited me. it seems empty. is it weird that you can start an empty Wave?
* the playback option seems neat, but i’m not sure when it would be useful. perhaps from a mobile device…
* this wave doesn’t have a subject (or text, for that matter), so where i’d expect the subject to be, there’s a list of the avatars for the participants in the chat. pretty straightforward how to add other people to the discussion / wave.

my other waves:
* ok, now there’s some content. my friend sent me a wave that includes an embedded photo. he also references adding ‘robots’ to the wave, and it seems as it on this wave there is an ‘email notifications’ robot. doesn’t it seem silly that you have to add a robot to send you emails? shouldn’t that be one of the built-in options for Wave? couldn’t i just set that app-wide if i wanted? either that, or a follow/unfollow via email model would work.
* looks like they’re already using a follow/unfollow model to keep or remove things from your inbox. unfollow makes sense to me… it’s like ‘mute’ in Gmail. follow doesn’t make as much sense. the action exists in your inbox, and if something’s in your inbox, doesn’t that mean that you’re already following it?
* there’s a ‘draft’ checkbox on my reply, but it won’t let me check it. unfortunate.
* oh… i get it. playback shows the progression of the wave. when you make something look just like audio playback, with controls and everything, your users expect it to be audio. just saying.
* apparently, i can edit my friend’s post. when i do so, it says that that post is now by him and me, but otherwise, there’s no indication in the text about who wrote what. in that way, it acts a lot like a Wiki. interesting.
* almost constant saving of text means that you don’t lose what you’ve written. nice.

other:
* you control your Wave settings in a wave? i know that we’re all supposed to buy into the Wave model of the world, but can’t you just put settings up in the top right nav, like every other Google app?
* when i click on my avatar in a wave, i see my info: an email address and a website. apparently i have a wave (@googlewave.com) email address? that’s news to me — haven’t seen that listed anywhere else on the page. if i can email info to myself and then discuss it with others, isn’t that an important feature?
* i tried emailing my own google wave email address. after 5 minutes, still no new waves.
* why is so much real estate dedicated to the list of waves? i would prefer the Gmail model, where the list of waves is the default but is replaced by the content when you click on one. This 3-column approach is very Outlook.

contacts:
* my contacts list looks a lot like google chat — i can even set a status (by clicking on my avatar). but it’s not chat. if you click on a contact, you can start a new wave with them, find waves by them, and ‘ping’ them, which i assumed was like ‘poking’ someone in Facebook.
* the ‘ping’ is actually just a wave, but one that renders itself initially as a chat, a sort of inverted version of the Facebook chat.

praise:
* Wave is an interesting concept, sitting at the collaborative intersection of chat, email, wiki, and document editing.
* there are collaborative elements here that could be split off and re-purposed elsewhere, perhaps integrated into other websites or applications. from what the Wave team has said in the past, it appears an API of this nature is forthcoming.
* i think the real value in Wave comes from the real-time aspect — being able to very rapidly interact with your fellow collaborators.

criticism:
* let’s assume that Gmail let you embed objects (images, maps, etc) right into your emails. let’s also assume that editing someone else’s text is something you’d rather do in fully-featured app like Google Docs. what value is Wave adding? it’s a confusing email client (compared to Gmail), sub-par document editor (compared to Google Docs), and a middle-of-the-road wiki (compared to MediaWiki, PBWiki, et al).
* Wave is still pretty rough around the edges, and while Google has been good at generating hype (hour+ presentation, limiting invites, getting good press via major news outlets), they have been operating in a “here’s a tool — figure out what it means for you” model. not a terrible model, but certainly not the way you’re going to revolutionize email and overthrow the status quo.

—

update:

let me preface this update by letting you know that when it comes to software, i’m a notorious non-instruction-reader. i believe that most software should be intuitive, so i wrote my review before reading or watching any of the instructional information. after writing the initial review, i watched some videos from the Wave team and learned some things:
* apparently you can reply within a Wave ‘blip’ (creating a sub-’blip’) by double-clicking on the blip. pretty cool for in-line comments.
* there are some Wave use cases listed by the Wave team: organizing events (ok, but i’d rather have it tied into my calendar); meeting notes (i’m not a huge fan of extensive meeting notes, but this would work well for those who are); group reports and writing projects (as i mentioned before, i’d rather use Google Docs); brainstorming (yes, yes, yes!); photo sharing (meh. i’d rather use Picasa, Facebook albums, Flickr, etc)
* i sent that email in to my account a while back, and still don’t have a new wave. i even tried sending from another email account, but no dice.
* robots seem pretty powerful (Blogger, Twitter, email notifications, etc), but i can’t seem to see an easy way to add these robots to my contact list. the UI doesn’t make it clear, and the short tutorial videos all assume that you already have the robots in your contacts (which i don’t, in case that wasn’t clear).
* Rosy the robot does automatic translation, so people who speak different languages can communicate — ok, that’s just amazing.

i realize this presentation has been making its way around the web recently, but i’m just getting to it now. the folks over at Netflix (of whom i am a paying customer) put together a ‘little’ slide deck about their corporate culture.

the theme of the presentation is “freedom and responsibility”. given that these characteristics are two that i prize highly in a work environment, they started off on a good foot.

you should read the whole presentation (it doesn’t take that long), but here are the points that stood out to me (not that I agree with every word, but a lot of it rung true):

• “The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go”
• “The Keeper Test Managers Use: ‘Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving in two months for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix?”
• “In procedural work, the best are 2x better than the average… In creative work, the best are 10x better than the average”
• The desire for process grows over time in a company not simply due to increasing complexity, but due to dilution of high-performance employees in the face of increasing complexity.
• The Netflix vacation policy is probably the most-quoted part of the presentation when it is referenced on the web, but I hope that people look past this (I think it’s a common-sense move I happen to strongly agree with) and see some of the other points in the deck.
• “Act in Netflix’ Best Interests” — the premise here is outstanding. I have always thought that the time and wages it takes to fill out and process lengthy expense reports is simply wasteful. If someone willingly abuses the system by acting in an irresponsible manner, fire them.
• “Managers: When one of your talented people does something dumb, don’t blame them. Instead, ask yourself what context you failed to set.”
• The compensation plan can’t be adequately summarized in one bullet, so check it out. Just outstanding.

Jon Payne — who is doing some work with us here at the Global Health Delivery Project — has been working on outlining an ontology for the area of “Health IT”. the category is broad, so there are a large number of possible sub-categories, and increasingly so as federal money here in the US is put behind Health IT initiatives. head over to his blog and weigh in!

some background

almost two years ago now, i posted about microblogging. at the time, i didn’t see the value in services such as Twitter, at least in a productive sense of the word “value”. it wasn’t that i thought people would avoid these services — rather, i figured the masses would flock — but my concern was that the constant cycle of tweeting and reading tweets would devolve into a dead-end of inactivity.

i still maintain that Twitter (the other microblogging sites i mentioned in my previous post have all but died out, leaving Twitter alone at the top) has the potential to be yet another information feed to fall behind on, like your email inbox and RSS feeds. however, as time has passed and innovative minds have started building new services on top of the Twitter platform, i realize that these deviations from the original “what are you doing now?” mantra hold the key for the transformation of Twitter into something useful.

dealing with information overload, aka “thinning the herd”

during a recent PIH gathering, i had a conversation with some colleagues about information overload. it’s a conversation i have had many times before, but one of the first with folks who are largely non-technophiles. i always assumed that the information overload problem (except for email) was unique to folks really hooked into the tech realm, but it has become clear that with the proliferation of social networking and information sharing technology, the problem has started to bleed over into the rest of the online world.

the issue, at its core, is this: what do you do with a deluge of potentially useful information? reading it all is a non-starter — you’d spend most of your life just consuming. filtering based on source (website, author, etc) is tricky, because not all content is useful, and it would be a shame to miss a true diamond in an otherwise uninteresting site. you could rely on the mechanical turk or “crowdsourcing” model like that employed by digg or reddit. many people go this route, but i find that the interests of the masses tend toward the middle of the bell curve, whereas my interests (and, honestly, some of the best information) lie on the long tail.

what i really want is to find a select group of people that share the same interests as me (or an one in each interest area) and then together, we’ll share the load of chewing through the mountain of information. if we each take a slice, the value to work ratio will be significantly higher. this is, in essence, the distributed computing model. the difference is that unlike digg, which uses an unbounded pool of computing resources, i want to hand-pick my pool of ‘computers’.

what about Facebook? you have control over your network there, right?

Twitter vs Facebook

in my old post, i said that “the line between Facebook and Twitter is the line between sharing and over-sharing”. at that time, Facebook wasn’t really promoting their “status update” feature, and my notion of Twitter was that it was solely focused on the “what are you doing?” question. now, Facebook has started to ramp up the prominence of the status message in an attempt to tackle Twitter. in fact, the new site design (which should roll out next week) removes the notion of putting your name as the first noun in the status message, allowing you to post Twitter-like messages.

unfortunately–even with these changes–Facebook does not quite do the job, because your network there is comprised of your friends, and your friends do not all share your interests — which is OK! Twitter actually does a much better job of letting you manage information flow, because you do not have to be friends with someone to listen to their feed — you subscribe to someone if you’re interested in what they have to say and unsubscribe if you’re. Sure, one of your friends might be upset at you if you don’t follow them, but if you are willing to take that risk and realize that Twitter is not a social network but an information dissemination tool, you can use it to help tackle information overload.

of course, i’m not saying Facebook is without value. as i said before, Facebook allows us to keep informed about friends and acquaintances who do not have the time or desire to manage a blog. in fact, on Facebook i am very interested in what my friends are “doing right now”. however, in the fight to parse a mountain of information, Twitter–without the overhead of social networking–succeeds where Facebook cannot.

in which i blame Shaq

i consider myself a technophile (aka “nerd” in the minds of many), and in many ways an early adopter of technology, but i also have a realistic view toward my productivity and propensity toward procrastination. given that, i have held back from exploring certain technologies in the spirit of keeping my job, family, hobbies, etc. — social networking and multi-player online games are the two main areas of caution. i will engage in the former when i feel that the value outweighs the cost (read: risk of wasted time), and the latter is right out. don’t get me wrong, i love video games. i just like video games with an end.

but i digress. in order to get invested in a social networking technology, i need a catalyst: either someone to give me a push or overwhelming evidence that real value lies within. so just as my cousins were the catalyst that pushed me into Facebook, The Big Aristotle pushed me toward Twitter. i had heard rumors that his Twitter account was really him, not a poser or someone ghostwriting for him, but it wasn’t confirmed in my mind until recently. being hooked up to the mind of Shaq has been a surreal experience, to say the least. all i need now is for Sir Charles to join Twitter and i’ll call the experience complete.

so i signed up. i’m late to the parade, but i figure that i can’t properly critique something if i’m looking at it from the outside.

there was, to be fair, another reason that i joined. i have been involved for almost a year now in the Global Health Delivery Project (and more specifically, GHDonline). the GHDonline site has been up since June, and we have a great member base and a decent flow of discussion in the communities, but i wanted a way that we could communicate about progress on the site to those interested. since Twitter has started to be an essential part of marketing plans these days, i figured we should carve out a space of our own.

blogging, microblogging, and nanoblogging

so my own Twitter account is something i’m using as an extension of my blog — more in keeping with the idea of microblogging. i’m trying to keep the focus on technology, health care, and other work-related items, as opposed my blog which has historically been wide-ranging in subject matter. of course, i cannot promise that other topics will not creep in over time. but here’s the distinction and the reason i finally saw the light: in the end, my “tweets” will be less about what i’m doing and more about what i’m finding.

as i mentioned above, information overload is a huge problem, and one of the things i strive to do in my blog is to distill out the items that i find interesting and of higher value. of course, interest is purely subjective, but the hope is that others will find some information of value. so if i use Twitter as a means of providing smaller snippets of this information, i am extending the reach of my blog’s purpose. tweeting about where i am and “what (i’m) doing right now” has far less potential value.

what i have found about blogging on topics of interest to me is that–as with this post–writing a full blog post takes a bit of time, which is of course a rarity. as a result, the blog post ideas i have emailed to or texted to myself sit in my inbox, stressing me out as they await the day when they are either acted upon or deleted in a fit of mercy. with Twitter, however, i can post a note about them as soon as i find them, rather piling them on top of my always-growing todo list.

and in conclusion…

the Daily Show on Twitter

i realize that it might be perceived as mildly unpatriotic to post an article on Inauguration Day that slams several of the largest US businesses, but i cannot sit idly by and let this go unremarked upon. after 5 years as a Sprint PCS customer (way back in the day), i made the switch to Verizon Wireless, mainly because almost everyone i knew was already on Verizon, and if i followed suit, i wouldn’t be charged for calls to them. later, when text messaging became popular, VZW offered free texting to other VZW customers, so that was an added bonus. the downside was that they charged you 10 cents per incoming and outgoing text with members of other networks (that price has since become 25 cents). eventually they provided plan add-ons through which you could pay for 500 out-of-network messages for $10/month, lowering the cost to 2 cents per message. but of course, you had to use all the messages or the per-message price effectively increases… and heaven forbid you go over, because then you’re back to paying $0.25 each. i put up with this nonsense, their lack of a GSM network, absolutely terrible selection of phones, and absurdly high data plan rates all because they have the best coverage in the area and essentially give me a free phone every 2 years. oh, and because the other US carriers aren’t much better.

and then, like salt in an already festering wound, comes the news that these wireless carriers don’t actually have much in the way of overhead (costs) for these precious text messages that they dole out at 4 for a dollar:

article in the NYTimes

i was reading my RSS feeds today, and came across this post about an Albanian developer who created an iPhone application that emulates the ancient Albanian lute (Çifteli):

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/19/if-you-like-the-oud-youll-love-the-tingalin-iphone-app/

i have to be honest, it takes some getting used to, but this is definitely playing a part in my next album. maybe a hidden track?

not quite as funny now that the burst of the web 2.0 bubble has been accelerated by the rest of the economy, but it’s still highly amusing:

…in these trying times:

link

surviving the email onslaught
my inbox is far less crowded (with actionable items, specifically) than it was when i was doing full-time product management, but i still struggle to manage my inbox properly. there have been countless sites dedicated to management techniques (a great example), but i haven’t yet found one that works well for me. perhaps it’s a matter of discipline. i can tell you one thing, though — i don’t miss my blackberry. i thought i did at first, but after a few weeks of sweet freedom, i realized that the value added by constant access to email and the web was far outweighed by the crushing burden of having to deal with constant interruption.

ideally, i’d like to switch to a email management model where i say “i read/answer emails from 9am to 9:30am and 5pm to 6pm daily; if it’s more urgent, call or IM me.”

my favorite new take on email, courtesy of one of my favorite authors: bad correspondence. (thanks to Melissa Leffler for the link)

(k)ubuntu / easy linux for the desktop… finally.
my buddy Brant recently installed kubuntu and has been getting started with it. it’s his first foray into linux and i was psyched to see him take the plunge — with a full install! talking with him about the experience got me thinking about how far linux has come as a desktop OS…

i run kubuntu on my work laptop and it’s been my sole development environment at GHD. with the exception of a few small quirks, i’ve been incredibly happy with it, mainly because it’s allowed me to get my work done without spending hours/days noodling with config. any configuring i do is solely because i want to make my life even easier.

i’ve been using UNIX since 93 and linux since ~95, when i first played around with Slackware. most of my college years were spent running a RedHat server, though i did have a Debian box and even an OpenBSD (not linux, i know) box for a bit. one thing that was common in all these experiences was how much of a struggle linux was with hardware, most notably in a desktop environment. generic, dumbed-down modems, network cards, video cards, and monitors were about the only things that worked flawlessly. have a cutting-edge card? write your own driver (honestly, never my strong point). have a sound card? better get used to the dulcet tones of the pc speaker, because that card’s useless. the time from installation to issue-free daily use was measured in weeks, not hours. linux on a headless server? outstanding. linux on your desktop? too much overhead.

at some point during college, the project known then as Ximian came out, and gave me a ray of hope. the idea was that you’d install programs through Ximian’s graphical installer, and when they needed to be updated, they’d pop up a notification and you could choose whether or not to upgrade/patch/etc… automatically! package management was available through RPM, but this was a whole new level, and definitely went a long way toward lowering the maintenance overhead on a desktop machine.

post-college, i took a break from linux for a while (at least as a desktop OS), until i took the big plunge and installed…er, compiled Gentoo. i thought i missed hacking around and tweaking, Gentoo is the ultimate linux distribution for that. big mistake. the overhead i mentioned above is multiplied when you’re compiling all your own stuff. and i mean EVERYTHING. who cares if software packages run 10% faster when most of your CPU cycles are dedicated to re-compiling? so Gentoo got the boot and i returned to *shudder* Windows.

now i’m running kubuntu, and i haven’t been happier. it detected almost all of the hardware on my Lenovo T61 automatically, and the crowning moment had to be when i booted up for the first time and was greeted with: 1680×1050 resolution, a network connection (wireless!), and sound! the only real challenge was to get my dual-monitors working properly (which required some hacking of xorg.conf). from there, it’s only gotten better — the ubuntu package management (employing Debian’s apt-get) is amazing, thanks to a well-maintained repository and simple management tools.

granted, this is my work machine, so i’m not hooking up my iPod or managing my digital photo collection, but word on the street is that these are easy, too. as a small point of proof, hot-swap device management has definitely improved — plugging in a USB key didn’t require using mount, so that’s a first.

the last big hurdle that kept me Windows-bound was documents — no open source software could interact well with MS Office. sure, there were open-source packages, but when everyone else at work uses Office, you’ve got to play nice. recently, two changes have rendered this obstacle obsolete — the prevalence of web-based documents (Google Docs) and the improvements to OpenOffice. now when i send out or read a document, i’m 99% sure that others are seeing what i am.

overall, i can’t say enough about (k)ubuntu. whether you decide to go the GNOME or KDE route, you’re not going to be disappointed. i think it’s about time to declare linux desktop-ready.