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.

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

Firefox has plenty of extensions, but it’s not clear how to get them working on Firefox’s stripped-down, ultra-cool friend: Prism. to the rescue, there’s a great writeup over at the Lucky Disasters blog:
http://www.luckydisasters.com/2008/06/10/heres-how-to-make-an-extension-compatible-with-prism-two-ish/

i’ve been using Gmail for a while, and have bought completely into their UI (tagging, conversations, search etc). as i mentioned in an earlier post, i even installed Mozilla’s Prism so i could use Gmail as more of a stand-alone app. however, one feature i’ve really missed is the ability to display all non-HTML emails as monospaced (fixed-width font). other mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird) have this capability, and Gmail even lets you compose emails in a fixed-width font, but doesn’t display them that way as you’re reading them.

why fixed-width fonts? well, for hackers like me, code and “ascii art” display properly in a fixed-width font. fonts like Arial and even Times use different widths for different charaacters, screwing up the original formatting of certain emails. for instance, this:


+ Col1 + Col2 +
---------------
| data | data |
| mmmm | mmmm |
| wwww | wwww |
| oooo | oooo |


ends up rendered like this:

+ Col1 + Col2 +
—————
| data | data |
| mmmm | mmmm |
| wwww | wwww |
| oooo | oooo |

recently, they added a feature through “Gmail Labs” that toggles monospace, but it has to be turned for each and every time you read an email. a global setting would have been much nicer.

so i went searching, and this is what i found:

1) if you use Firefox, just install the “Stylish” extension and add a style for it.
2) if you use Prism, go to the unpacked bundle of the gmail webapp (the one on the Prism site unpacks to a directory called “google.mail@developer.mozilla.org”). in there, create a file called webapp.css (you should see webapp.ini and webapp.js already). add the following to that file:

.geTjV, .ArwC7c, .iE5Yyc, .uQLZXb > textarea {
font-family: courier !important;
font-size: 10pt !important;
}


enjoy.

starting off, as so many web 2.0 addicts do, with Gmail, i slowly started to gather more and more web-based-applications, and now i have a core group that i use regularly:

1. Gmail (personal)
2. Gmail (work)
3. Google Calendar
4. Google Docs
5. Google Groups
6. Facebook
7. LinkedIn
8. Google Reader
9. Remember The Milk
10. Joes Goals

for a long time, i used Firefox’s tabbed interface to manage multiple applications at once. on the plus side, all of my webapps were in one convenient location. unfortunately, this also meant that one application could dominate/crash the browser (i’m looking at you, google docs). i also like to alt-tab through my list of applications. the one flaw that really sent me searching for a solution was how difficult it was to log into two Gmail accounts at one time. the ietab plugin worked well while i was in Windows (ietab uses a separate set of cookies), but i’m running Kubuntu full-time at work, so that option became less practical.

eventually, i found an under-hyped offering by Mozilla Labs: Prism. web 2.0 applications have removed the need for many of the typical “web” features — link bars, navigation buttons, etc — and have started to look more and more like desktop applications. the goal of Prism is to start bridging that gap, and to achieve that goal they have provided a “browserless” browser interface in which you can run your webapps. it’s ultra-fast, clean, and each Prism instance provides its own cookies/cache/etc. the only vestige of a web browser that remains is the status bar at the bottom, but that’s just a good idea, as you’d like to see where you’re heading when you click on that link.

pretty much everything you need to know to get going with Prism is in their wiki (and there’s not much to know). give it a try and let me know what you think.

over the years, i’ve tried many (many) different ways of keeping track of the things i need or want to do. personally, i’m a huge fan of the list, which can take many forms: paper, emails, tasks in Outlook, tasks on a Palm Pilot, etc. however, what usually ends up happening is that my brain manages to circumvent the current method of task tracking, forcing me to switch tactics. finally, i believe i have found a method that works consistently because it’s right in front of me most of the day — rather than using individual emails to track to-do items (those emails scroll away as new ones appear), i have a to-do list that sits right next to the emails.

my to-do list of choice is Remember the Milk. unlike other web-2.0-ish online to-do lists, they don’t require you to visit their site to check your list (though you can if you’d like). they have built a Firefox plug-in that modifies the layout of your Gmail page to insert a collapsible to-do list right next to your email. you can add, edit, and complete tasks right from the interface — pretty much anything you need to do — and it’s all very seamless. if you’re in the habit of starring important emails, you can even automatically generate tasks for them.

anyhow, give it a try. it’s certainly helping me (until my brain finds a way around it, anyhow).

two posts in a week… what in the world is happening here?!?

(well, the deal is that i got around to linking to the “post” page from my blackberry, meaning that i can post from pretty much anywhere i get cell reception. however, i can’t promise this streak will continue indefinitely…)

this past thanksgiving, my younger cousins convinced me to join Facebook, something i had avoided for several reasons:

1) it started after i left college, and at first was limited to college students, so joining would have required some sort of email trickery.

2) i mentally grouped it with MySpace, that blight on the face of the web that managed to single-handedly resuscitate 1994-era monolithic webpages complete with blinking text, poorly laid-out pictures, and blaring music that starts upon page visit.

3) i didn’t see the benefit in social networking outside of my current utilities: my website, email, and instant messaging. i was using (and still use) LinkedIn, but that is more of a professional social networking tool rather than a personal one. i figured that i was connected enough.

what i didn’t realize at the time was that Facebook was built properly, with an eye to privacy and scalability, and seemed to be designed with simplicity in mind. luckily, my cousins managed to convince me, and i joined.

what i also didn’t pick up on at the time was that while i was freely sharing information about myself via my website, very few of my friends were doing the same. i could get information from those who had sites or blogs, but most of the rest didn’t have the time/money/patience/interest in something as heavy-duty as a website.

enter Facebook. it reduces the problems of website management and provides simple input for information from status updates to photos to contact information. my friends who didn’t have the incentive to run a website suddenly had little excuse not to sign up … and with all of them on there and updating, i instantly had a single source of information about what my friends are up to.

i’m not going to keep singing the praises of Facebook — like any time-consuming activity it does have its downsides — but will instead leave that to fanatics like Scoble. (90% of his posts in the past few weeks have referred to Facebook in some way, shape, or form.)

so i’m fine with taking some of the information i’d usually put on my blog (longer process, more thought-out content) and instead post bite-size pieces on Facebook. however, there are now ways of posting information on a more-constant basis. imagine a text-message-sized chunk of information about what you’re up to, updated several to many times per hour, and available for all your friends to see.

this approach has been called (appropriately, i think) micro-blogging, and there are no shortage of tools for sharing the minutia of your life with those who care to listen: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Tumblr are the main ones. the distribution methods for micro-blogs are slightly different than blogs and social networking (which rely on site visits and RSS feeds). the information in micro-blogs is text-message sized, which means that you can sign up to have all info piped into your cell phone.

faaaaaantastic. how are we actually supposed to get anything accomplished if our time is sucked up writing about what we’re doing and where we are at any given moment and reading the same from hundreds of our friends? can you imagine how rapidly this would break down? (“reading the news”…”driving the car”…”working”….”surfing the web at work”…”reading Twitter messages”…”writing this message”…”reading messages”…”writing”…”reading”…”writing”) it’s like hooking straight up to someone’s mind, but without any sort of filter. frankly, i think it would be mind-numbing.

in my opinion, the line between Facebook and Twitter is the line between sharing and over-sharing. (but who knows… i once said that Facebook was a total waste of time. in a year, i might be posting about how i couldn’t imagine life without micro-blogging.)