My Initial (Premature) Thoughts on Google Wave.

Wow - from the little bit I see here (and it is a very little bit) - Google Wave looks and sounds impressive. I hope this actually comes out soon and is not just vaporware.

And while it looks to be a massive piece of software, I hope it is not another fragment of Google floating around the web. I hope it acts as a replacement for Gmail. I don't want it to be a separate thing I have to log into. Or something that I can't use with people not on Wave. Hopefully a "wave" acts as an email (or IM , or SMS, or meeting request or whatever) for those that are not on wave. Obviously there will be new functions that can only be a wave, but I hope it is backwards compatible with other communication. Don't make this just be a different network.

Since this is all about communication - hopefully we will see it bring in Google Voice as well. That's important. And hopefully the calendar plays a major role in here. I would think the events and meetings I'm involved in would be considered a wave since more often than not it involves my contacts. Picasa will obviously be involved.

Will I be able to add other social data to my contacts? Can I tie my friend's flickr, twitter and last.fm account to them. Can I generate a news feed on my contacts from this data? Jaiku started playing with this idea - does Google bring it and it's more prominent status update over here? (IM status update does not count - that needs to be different).

If it somehow includes this giant wish list maybe Google finally pulls off the long awaited "the internet is the social network". I've always doubted that was possible - but this looks close. Well the direction my imagination went when I saw the picture looks close. I'm excited to see what Google's imagination comes up with.

Google breaks the intranet - with no warning

Here is an issue with moving to "the cloud", and even more so moving to the cloud with Google. I recently moved our company's intranet over to Google Sites. I wanted a low cost, easy way for department heads to be able to manage and update their sections of our intranet from anywhere. Google Sites was perfect for this. Recently though Google made some unannounced changes to Sites that broke the intranet.

Google apparently decided to host images and code for the new Sites on different domains than they had previously been on. The problem with that is we use internet blocking software at our retail locations and all domains (even location of graphics) have to be opened up in the software.

Since we had no warning or control over the switch - everyone just came in one morning and could no longer see or navigate the page (we also lost all our navigation links on the site for some reason and had to set them all back up).

So since this is in the cloud (and mostly because it is Google) we received no warning or notification that changes were coming - they just came. We were given no control over the change. I did not even receive an email about it when it was complete. I had to start digging once the phone calls started pouring in. Had this been on our own servers, we would have had the option to upgrade at the best possible time for us (which would not have been the moment we walked in the door on May 19th).

Had it not been a secret (for whatever reason) we would have prepared the PCs ahead of time to access the new domains Google was going to use to host these. But this is what happens when you let these things out of your control.

We use the free version of Google Apps for this intranet. But even so - with Google making such a push to get business to take their cloud services seriously- it's a pretty stupid way to go. You're not going to talk us into upgrading to additional features if you keep jacking around with us.

LIfe - Collecting

I think I'm going to start a tumblr blog . Let me rephrase, I think I'm going to start using my tumblr blog I set up a year or so ago. There are so many different fragments of my life floating around on the interwebs now. From my kids/family blog, to facebook, this blog (whatever this is), twitter, friendfeed, Flickr, youtube on and on. It's important that each of those has their own place. I think different parts of my life need to stand on their own still. But I also want to bring them all together somewhere. Or bring at least some of them together.

There are other topics I would like to talk about as well. This blog seems to be more focused on technology, social media, google, etc. I'm fine with that. I need a blog for that. I'm passionate about all that. But that's not really all I'm passionate about. I'm also passionate about bacon and baseball, this just seems like an odd place to talk about those things. I also enjoy taking pictures, music and puns (I'm just kidding - I hate puns). Again - they don't seem to go here. But they go somewhere.

I posted earlier wondering how we tie all this social together, and I still don't really know. But this is a start for me as far as my personal brand goes. I talked about what Skittles was doing at the time and how using multiple social networks as their site did not seem to work. They tried to build a site on top of a bunch of separate sites. What needs to be done is to build content for your site from a bunch of separate sites. But it still has to be "your" site. That could work.

And no Friendfeed suggestions please. I like Friendfeed a lot and use it. But it's not really what I'm trying to accomplish here. I'm not looking for life-streaming, more like life-collecting. I want it to reside in one spot  - not linked all over the web and not mixed in with everyone else.

Really the only reason I'm telling you all this now is because I needed to write a post here and see how it feeds to my Tumblr blog. We'll see how it goes.