Better Than Smoke Signals

It's time to talk about Google. I have become something of a fanboy in recent years and today I feel like sharing. I use a lot of their other products: Gmail, Blogger (obviously), Reader, Calendar, Tasks, and Documents, to name a few. The fact that they're all synchronized is a big deal to me, the systems engineer. Google doesn't provide the only such system, but theirs is a good one, especially if you're already using Gmail.

I have also recently added two new Google products to my toolbox: Google Voice and Google Wave.

Google Voice is a phone forwarding system that gives me significant control over my phone lines, voicemail, and text messages. I've had it for a few months now and I love it. It would be even more useful if I had multiple phones, but for now I just use the voicemail capabilities. I can filter calls, put up specific messages for specific callers, save voicemails to my computer (I really wish I had this capability when my dad left the Goose V-formation joke on my voicemail), and receive transcripts of each phone message as an email or a text on my phone. It's quick and easy to check (and while the transcript program isn't perfect, it's good enough for me to use to interpret the urgency and topic of the message). It's still in beta and requires an invite to get in, but those are relatively easy to come by. I've used up my invites already, so I can't get you in myself, but I know a few people who might. And I got in by requesting an invite directly from Google. Check it out if either of the following apply to you:

• You have multiple phones and want to manage when calls go to which lines. Especially useful for those of you who have poor cell reception in your house, or who can't or don't want to get cell phone calls at work.
• You like to keep old messages, but hate trying to navigate the list structure of traditional voicemail to find them again.

Others are doing similar things with voicemail. For example, Verizon now offers Visual Voicemail on their smartphones and I'm sure other companies do as well. I suspect all voicemail is going to head this direction soon.


Google Wave is billed as what email would look like if it was invented today. It's a communications/collaboration platform that acts as a sort of combination of Gmail, Google Docs, Wiki, and Instant Messaging (if none of those words mean anything to you, than you probably don't need Wave either). It's great for collaboration. Sarah and I have been doing a fair amount of our wedding planning with it. The trouble is that it's the kind of thing that is only really useful at scale. Right now it's kind of empty, although every time I sign on, I see more of my design friends have joined it (especially those still in school). This one is also still in early beta, so it has issues. They're getting better, and the promise is there, but it still needs some polish. I do have plenty of invitations available for this. If you're interested, let me know.

I realize I'm not selling it very well, but it is an excellent tool. If more of my friends were on it, I'd use it to organize our Xbox Live nights and coordinate groomsmen activities. This would have been the perfect place to organize the weekly Dinner & Game nights we used to have in DC. And, of course, I can imagine some pretty entertaining B&B conversations on here :)

Shiny ... and not much else ... yet

Google has introduced their new web browser, Chrome. I spent some time playing with it recently and figured I'd pass on the results of my experiment. Nothing formal, or even all that prolonged, but I have at least started to poke around.

So here goes: It's not for me (yet), but it might be for you.

I say this because what they do, they do well, but they're not yet letting anyone else tinker under the hood. They've got tabs down. They paid attention to what everyone else was doing with tabs and learned from it. The search bar/address bar combination is brilliant and intuitive. Bookmarks are easy and they take full advantage of the tagging concept to really make them useful. All three of these things are positive iterations of what Firefox has been doing all along (and what Explorer has been attempting to copy). There are also upgrades to the download process, the url display, and numerous other tweaks and improvements

It's actually not a significant leap from what Firefox 3 does. It's tighter and cleaner in several places, but in general both Mozilla and Google seemed to have spotted the same opportunities for browser improvement. If I were just using Firefox 3, I'd make the switch because there are enough little improvements (from my perspective) that it would be worth the cost of transition (and absolutely make the switch if you're still using Internet Explorer).

I don't just use Firefox 3, however, I use Firefox 3 plus Add-ons. See Mozilla is open to improvements, they let users create content that improves or adds to the existing functionality of their browser (crowdsourcing is a fascinating topic for another time). I've mentioned several of the ones I use before. Chief amongst these is Delicious which introduced the whole bookmark-tagging idea that Chrome so effectively emulates (and which Firefox added to their arsenal in 3). The difference, as it applies to my browser use, is that I surf the web on at least three different computer systems (my home PC, my work laptop, and my classroom system). Delicious lets me keep the same set of bookmarks across all three systems and, as you'll see if you visit, I've built up quite a selection. Firefox lets me use those bookmarks directly in the browser thanks to the Delicious addon. Chrome does not yet support such cross-machine interaction (as far as I can tell). So to use Chrome, I'd have to start my bookmark setup all over again, without the benefit of importing things, and I'd have to do it for each computer that I use. That doesn't sound like much fun.

Additionally, I have an addon that blocks advertisements pretty effectively, an addon that automatically copies whatever text I highlight, and a more recent addon called Better Gmail 2 that improves the interface for my email. Some of the options are superfluous, but there are a few (like the one that lets me see what type of file is attached to an email before I read it) that are pretty handy.

If Google ever permits an addon structure with their browser, I'll revisit it. Were I to switch to Chrome at this point, however, I'd have to do without a great deal of the functionality I have come to depend upon in Firefox.

Also, Firefox's addon feature means I'm not missing much. There are already addons that imitate (or, in some cases, inspired) much of what Chrome does, right down to the look.

Final recommendation:
If you haven't added anything to your existing browser, check Chrome out.
If you're using addons, however, you should probably wait until Chrome let's you bring them over.

Johnny Lee!

Johnny Lee is awesome. More awesome possibly than even I am. That's pretty awesome. Want proof? Watch the video below.



I spotted this on one of the design blogs I read (Core77, if you must know - their writeup on the video is a nice compliment). I sort of skimmed past it, but the name caught by attention and I backtracked. It was indeed my friend from UVa! I was very excited to see someone I know. Then I watched the video. Then I shared the video with every person in my class, probably twice. Then I read his website, checked out his projects, and browsed his photos. A day later, one of my professors passed around a copy of Make magazine during a discussion and there, on page 84, was Johnny's $14 steady cam. I'll say it again, Johnny Lee is awesome.

Who is Johnny Lee? Many of my readers know him, or have met him even if they don't remember it. I went to UVa with him, we were both in the Rodman Scholars together and shared a number of classes. Even before he got there, he had already patented a 360 degree camera and continued to awe the Rodmans from that point forward (a pretty impressive group themselves). Watch carefully at the minute mark in the video above and you'll spot the electric cello he designed and built in a group project our freshman year. He's at Carnegie Mellon now, pursuing his doctorate (it doesn't stand a chance). Aside from being incredibly intelligent, he's also one of the nicest people I know (and I know a lot of nice people). I'm delighted and excited for him that he's doing so well.

With this video, it's entirely possible he just revolutionized video gaming. I can't wait to see what he does next.

Some Useful Addons

My girlfriend recently got herself a new laptop. This is a vast improvement over the Flintstone's era thing she was using. I've seen abacuses (abaci?) with more processing power than the computer she just got rid of. Fortunately for her, this new one actually runs software.

With that in mind, for her benefit and your own edification, today I will be describing (and linking) several programs I find particularly useful. Each should offer a nice little way to improve your computing experience. Now, I don't have Vista yet, so I don't know how these programs actually interact with that system (or even if it makes some of their functionality obsolete), but they all do fine for XP. If you can make your computer do these tricks without downloading anything additional, so much the better for you. If not, well here they are. Added bonus: they're all free.

Without further ado, the programs:

EULAlyzer
This one analyzes End User License Agreements, flagging any particularly alarming clauses. It beats trying to read through those things on your own, and it certainly beats not reading them at all. I'm putting it first, since some of the programs that follow might have EULAs that you might want to test it out on.

Adblocker
It does just what it claims to do, blocks ads. It even prevents banner ads and those irritating pop-up ads that expand on the webpage to get in your way. I'm pleased with it, if only for the reason that I haven't seen a dancing silhouette in a long time.

Autocopy
This firefox addon is pretty clever. It operates on the principle that the only conceivable reason you would select text on a webpage is so you can copy it. This cuts out the Ctrl-C aspect of the operation. Just highlight text in your browser and it's automatically copied to the clipboard. It's not all that dramatic, but it is a nice feature.

Panorama
Dave Click first showed me this program in 1997 and I've been using it ever since. It rotates your computer background through a set of images you select. You have control over just how often and in what order they change, among other options.

del.icio.us addon for Firefox
This is one of my favorite new addons. I mentioned del.icio.us once before. Well, this addon increases its usefulness dramatically.
For starters, del.icio.us is a means of storing and tagging links online. The tagging system is more versatile than the folder system and having it on the web means you can access your links from multiple computers. It also has a public/private option so you can share useful inks with other people and hide those you don't want them to know about.
This addon allows you to access your links through the firefox toolbar. It has completely replaced my bookmarks toolbar. The whole system permits me to manage far more bookmarks as well. It's currently tracking over 200 links and with the addon I have no problem getting quickly to the one I want. I also installed the addon in my profile at school, so now I have a synchronized list of bookmarks that's identical on all computers I use.
The addon, upon setup, will automatically import your current bookmarks if you like (they all start off set to private). So that part won't take any effort. However, if you're new to del.icio.us arranging your tags will take some time, but I promise it will be worth the hassle.
If nothing else, check out my collected links. You might find something useful or amusing.

IS THERE ANYTHING THE INTERNET CAN'T DO?

When I set out to write this post, it was going to be about "social networking" but in researching the topic a little, I found a more precise word for the concept I wanted to talk about. The new word is "folksonomy."

A folskonomy is a system of naming wherein the names are determined by the collective effort of the participants during the act of participation as opposed to a taxonomy wheren the names are externally defined and applied (and also static).

Actually what I really wanted to talk about was cool websites. My attempt to describe them under a term of some sort is merely an effort to make myself seem scholarly. It might have worked if I stuck with "social networking." "Folksonomy" on the other hand does not sound like a real word. Wikipedia seems to think it is, so I'm going to run with it.

To get to the point, though (finally): tagging systems. I'm talking today about websites where you tag content and then interact with the tags and the tags of others to try to take advantage of the processing power of large groups. The idea is that each user makes a list (and the type of thing such as movie, photograph, webpage, or book is generally determined by the website) and applies a variety of tags or labels to each item on that list. The user makes up their own tags and their own classification system and can apply as many tags as they want to each item. For instance one user could list the movie "Starship Troopers" and then tag it with "Science Fiction," "Heinlein," "War" and maybe "Stupid" but another user might tag it "10," "Action," "IOwnThis," and "FuturisticShowerScene." It's up to the user to decide what they want to track (ownership, genre, quality, etc...) and how they want to track things (quality is "stupid" through "awesome" or "1" through "10").

So these tagging systems are pretty useful for individuals attempting to classify and track things around them. Where they get their true power, however, is in the social aspect. The system on which these tags are stored is capable of analyzing and comparing the tags and feeding that information back to the user. It acts on the assumption that people who think alike will probably categorize alike. There are two means of sorting and some sites use one, some use the other, and some use both. The first is to sort by content, by how much the entered content overlaps between users; the idea being that if you and I own most of the same books, then I might also want to own the ones you own that are not on my list and vice versa (this is how Netflix and Amazon run their recommendation systems). The second is to sort by tags, by how similar users are in their labeling process (this is how most of the links below work) so that if I have a tag for "CasperVanDiem" then I might want to see what other people have tagged as "CasperVanDiem." Combining these two means of sorting lends even more power.

The trick, of course, is that you need to have a large user base for this to work. If only six people use the tagging service, the sample size won't be big enough for any really useful comparisons. It's the sort of thing that really couldn't happen without the Internet and it's part of a growing trend that takes advantage of social knowledge generally referred to as Web 2.0 (check that one out, too, sometime).

So what led me to this topic? These two websites:

del.icio.us
www.librarything.com

Del.icio.us is a means of collecting and tagging web links. It sounds really simple, but can be exceptionally useful. I have a list set up that serves as both a means of making my bookmarks portable, and a means of recording reference locations for future use. I do not really use the social aspect of del.icio.us, but I'm starting to. For instance, Adobe has a del.icio.us page with tons of really useful design links.

LibraryThing is a database for organizing books. I use it to catalog my own books (although I'm barely halfway done at this point) but it is also useful for figuring out what else I want to read. If you enjoy or own tons of books (Meredith and Brantley I'm talking to you) you will find this very useful.

And there are plenty of others such as MovieTally, which is the same as LibraryThing but for movies, although I have not yet attempted to use it. One of those things I'll get around to eventually...

Check them out, you may find them useful too.