Category: Web/Tech

Last week, Google’s big announcement was for something called Google Wave – a whole new approach to collaboration among groups, etc.

Google called it a new approach – but, actually, I saw a lot of similarities to the “post-email world” that Ray Ozzie thought a lot about ten years ago prior to starting Groove. Wonder what Ray thinks?

Anyway, let’s set that aside that history for now – the basic idea’s the same: email is insufferable for real collaborative work. It just stinks. We continue to use email for collaboration simply because it’s there. Convenience (!) trumps again.

What I found particularly intriguing about Wave wasn’t the small group collaboration stuff that Google demo’ed but, rather, some big ideas I’ve been thinking about regarding online activities of a commerce kind.

Over on Payments News this morning, I used the Google Chart API to create a simple pie chart showing the distribution of payments in the UK by type based on just released APACS data.

Pretty cool!

I’ve got several accounts on Google’s Gmail – and, as I was reviewing each of them tonight, it dawned on me just how pleasant it was that they all just work.

It’s a delight to have an ultra-reliable, always there, spam-free email service – and Gmail more than meets that test!

It’s been very interesting to me as I’ve learned to use the Gmail browser interface – very quick, fast, and productive!

Kudos to the Gmail folks for delivering such a great service!

Frankly, I’m a bit confused. Confused between Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter – and my status updates.

At the moment, I’ve got FriendFeed posting updates to my Twitter account – but I have left Facebook out of that loop. I had Facebook included for a while but it seemed to me that the Twitter/FriendFeed updates were just a bit too much for Facebook.

[Update 2/16/09] In thinking more about this while driving to work this morning, I think the reason I’m confused is that I’m using these three tools for different things:

• Facebook – for staying in touch with friends. Short, “what am I doing” status updates make sense in that environment. What doesn’t make sense is having those status updates propagated out to Twitter and FriendFeed.
• Twitter – for tuning into what other folks are finding interesting, not what they’re doing. On Twitter, you find little nuggets of learning that you’d otherwise miss.
• FriendFeed – similar to Twitter but in a more organized, conversational way. I’m also finding FriendFeed’s rooms feature to be very valuable professionally. I’ve got several rooms setup on different subjects that I follow – and find them very useful for tracking news of interest.

So, that’s it – there’s a basic difference between “what I’m doing” (Facebook) vs. “what I’m finding” (Twitter/FriendFeed). So, for me, it makes sense that my Twitter and FriendFeed status updates are interconnected – but it doesn’t make sense for my Facebook status updates to feed into them.