Keeping track of unread marks in Slack

In recent years IBM (and other companies) have become enthusiastic users of Slack to communicate. I must admit that I am not so impressed with Slack (partly because I was involved in developing some alternatives that I consider better), but I am leaning to use it nevertheless.

A confusing thing about Slack is how the concept of Workspaces and Channels intersect. On the far left of the Slack client you see a list of icons showing the Workspaces that you have joined. When you click on a particular Workspace , you will see a list of Channels in the Workspace and when you click on a channel you see the associated message. This sounds very straightforward, but the confusing thing is that you can have lots of Shared Channels and these will appear in multiple workspaces.

Like most messaging systems, Slack allows you to keep track of the messages you have read. I frequently load up Slack and read unread messages in each of the workspaces. However, I notice that when I switch to a second workspace the messages in the shared channel which I marked as read in the first workspace  are still showing up as unread.

Eventually I figured out how to solve this problem. You need to either select the menu item "View\Refresh" or else type ctrl-R each time you switch workspaces. The Slack screen goes blank for about 30 seconds and then comes back with the unread marks correctly applied. It is annoying to have to do this, hopefully Slack with fix this bug soon.

What tool do I use for interacting with Twitter?

Because, I am a frequent user of Twitter, many people ask me what is my favourite tool to use. I like to be helpful, but the reality is that I do not have a single favourite tool and I use many different tools depending upon the circumstances.

Luckily Twitter keeps a record of the tool that is used to publish each status update, so I decided to write a tool which would automatically analyse my feed.

The following table shows tools that I used for the 1,000 most recent tweets from my account (ignoring the tools which were responsible for less than 1% of the Tweets each):

Percentage	Count	Tool
31.67%	317	web
24.38%	244	TweetCaster for Android
11.49%	115	foursquare
10.79%	108	LinkedIn
4.00%	40	Tweet Button
3.70%	37	HootSuite
3.30%	33	Facebook
3.30%	33	Twitter for Android
2.50%	25	NetworkedBlogs
1.60%	16	bitly
1.30%	13	Flipboard

Another thing that people sometime comment upon is whether Twitter is a broadcast service or a conversational service. So I also looked at what percentage of my tweets were replies to other people (8.7%). However, almost half of my tweets (42.8%) are accounted for by retweets of content originally Tweeted by someone else.

An academic once told me that my social networking style was "to collect interesting information and share it with my friends". However, a more honest explanation would be that I am lazy and it is much easier to click on a "retweet" button than to think up original content to Tweet about.

My colleague Andy Stanford-Clark was recently featured on a list of Tech Execs that smart people follow and so I decided to compare his activity to mine. More than half of his tweets (67.5%) were replies to other people and retweets accounted for only 10.8% of his tweets. Therefore it is clear that he uses Twitter as a conversational service more than I do.

He also used a much smaller set of tools to interact with Twitter. He only used 8 different tools (as compared to my 18) and over half of all of his updates (65.4%) were done directly on the Twitter web site.

Percentage	Count	Tool
65.40%	654	web
8.80%	88	Twitter for iPad
8.70%	87	TweetCaster for Android
6.80%	68	txt
5.40%	54	Twitter for Android
4.70%	47	TweetChat
0.10%	1	HTC Peep
0.10%	1	Tweet Button

It is also interesting that Andy is a much more prolific user of Twitter than me. I had to go back as far as 23/Nov last year (about 6 months) to get 1,000 tweets from my feed, while I only needed to 10/April this year (slightly over a month) to get 1,000 tweets from Andy's feed.

It would be interesting to a similar analysis on a wider sample of Twitter users, because I guess there is no such thing as a typical Twitter user.

Harnessing the fun factor to bring young people into contact with the Lotus Products

I am delighted to see that Lotus are making special efforts to connect young students during the upcoming Lotusphere event. The Lotus community is very vibrant and the people who work with the Lotus products tend love them and be very loyal. However since Lotus products are not really aimed at the consumer market, many young people who are studying computer science are not even aware of their existence.

The Lotusphere conference which is happening next week in Orlando, Florida is the biggest event in the year for the Lotus community. It combines education and fun in a way that really helps build enthusiasm for Lotus products.  Normally this event is only attended by people who are already working with Lotus products, but this year a special initiative is being undertaken to help connect with the next generation of IT professionals - we are expecting over 500 students from local universities to attend Lotusphere on our special college day 31st of January,

In addition a special Xpages contest for students is being run in conjunction with a business partner. Because of all of the great results from the Hackdays inside IBM I am confident that we will get great results from this contest.

What will be the most important mobile platform

One of the most interesting talks at Blogtalk 2010 conference a few weeks ago was the presentation "Apps are bad" by Ronan Skehill. The basic point that the speaker was making was that the best choice of target platform for the developers of mobile applications was the web rather than developing a "native application" for any particular mobile device platform. His reasons for saying this were the fact that there are too many different mobile platforms to keep up with andf in any case it is now possible to develop very high quality web apps that give just as good a user experience as any native application.

As part of the discussion thast followed the presentation some people raised the fact that you would categorise platforms differently depending upon whether you are a developer or a user.

From the developers point of view of developers they might categorise platforms based upon one of these:

• Operating system: Windows, Linux, Mac OS ..
• Browser: IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera ....
• Device Form Factor: Desktop, Laptop, netbook, tablet, smartphone ....

However, comsumers might be more likely to categorise using one of these critereon:

• Price
• Size/Weight
• Colour
• Brand

People used to speak of Linux as a potential target platform, but this is not really a single operating system. For example, if you read the list of Linux distributions on wikipedia it is several pages long. To make thinks even more complex, there is a complex set of ways to view the dependencies between these distributions as you can see from the page which compares the various Linux distributions which typically gets several edits per day.

Ronan's advice is to develop as much as possible of your application using web programming methods and only use native interfaces when absolutely necessary. There exist a number of application development environments such as Appcelerator Titanium which allow developers to develop applications for mobile platforms that combine the portability and ease of development of web applications with the power of a native application.

Blog Talk 2010 | Apps are Bad

View more presentations from Cauwill.

By co-incidence I also heard a talk recently from the Velocity conference (via IT conversations) which was talking about the MITE platform which seems like a very impressive system that allows people to monitor how the performance of their mobile applications are performing as seen by a number of different device types on a number of networks. I have not personally used this tool, but I have experienced applications which theoretically work on a particular device but in practice they don't actually work for users on 3G networks because the network is so slow that the application keeps timing out.

How much notice should service providers give their customers when the terms of service change?

One of the cool things about the Twitter service is the fact that they don't send many emails to their subscribers to let them know how wonderful their service is. They have a very unusual attitude in that they expect that the usefulness of their service should be able to speak for itself. Therefore when they sent me an email today entitled "Update: Twitter Apps and you" I decided to actually read the email.

It started out quite well:

Over the coming weeks, we will be making two important updates that will impact how you interact with Twitter applications. We are sending this notice to all Twitter users to make sure you are aware of these changes.

Then I read the next paragraph:

Starting August 31, all applications will be required to use OAuth to access your Twitter account.

At first it sounded reasonable, but then I realised that this email was being sent on 2nd of September!!! I know internet time is different from normal time, but how can they use the phrase "in the coming weeks" to refer to 2 days ago!!

Suddenly the penny dropped and I realised why BlueTwitSidebar stopped working with Twitter yesterday. I pinged the developer of this tool to let him know of the issue, but it turned out that he already knew about it becuase everyone was screaming at him.

Surely this is a very unfair way to treat users by telling them of a significant change in authentication policy after it has already been implemented :-(

Are we nearing the end of "The Windows Age"?

I have been working in the IT industry for many years. As a result I remember a time before Windows or any other graphical  operating system was available. Initially when graphical operating systems became common on personal computers there were several popular alternatives, but after a few years Microsoft Windows became so popular that many people thought that it was the only viable operating system.

In the last few years the popularity of Microsoft Windows has been
slipping due to a number of buggy releases and so people have started to
look for alternatives. My personal experience with speaking to Sametime customers is that many customers in
Europe have begun to ask us for support for Linux client support (mainly Ubuntu
flavour) while customers in USA have begun asking for Mac support.

There was a lot of interest in the recent story in the Financial Times about how Google is strongly discouraging their employees from using Windows for their daily work. In fact the Daily Telegraph reports that Google employees are effectively banned from using Windows and are encouraged to choose either Mac OSX or Linux instead. I am not sure if this story is even true or if it is an indication of a trend that will be replicated at other large companies.

In IBM we have a policy of supporting a wide variety of operating systems and allowing employees to choose which they would like to use on their work laptops based upon their personal preferences. Recently a batch of eight students began summer intern-ships in the Dublin labs and were issued with laptops. Seven of  the eight students in IBM chose to install Ubuntu for their desktop. I wonder is this an indication of what operating system is most popular with the current generation of students!!!

How exact do you need to be when specifying longitude and latitude

If you want to follow the advice of my previous blog post and advertise the position of your home or business via latitude and longitude coordinates, you might wonder how exact you need to be with your measurements. Obviously if you are more precise when you measure the position you lessen the chance that your friends will call to your neighbour's house instead of yours, but on the other hand a long number is harder to remember than a short one.

The level of precision needed depends slightly upon how big is the place is that you are advertising and where exactly on the globe you are, but the short answer is that 4 decimal places are often enough and 5 decimal places is definitely accurate enough.

If you want to learn how to accurately convert lat/long cooridnates into distances you should read this web page (be warned the maths gets complicated) but a rough rule of thumb is that if you need to move one meter north or south to increment the fifth decimal place of your latitude i.e. 0.00001 degrees north is one meter away from the equator. The same rule of thumb can be used when conversing between longitude and distance when you are at the equator, but as you move away from the equator there is a decrease in the distance represented by a given number of degrees. For example, in Ireland if you move 0.00001 degrees east or west this is a distance of only 60cm on the ground. It is hard to imagine a situation where you would need to specify your location with greater accuracy than this and in any case most consumer GPS devices would not even be this accurate.

If you look at the page listing IBM locations in Ireland you will see that some of the GPS co-ordinates are given to an accuracy of 6 decimal places which specifies the location of the facility to a precision of 10cm, which is obviously much to much detail.

The browsers that people use to visit your site depends upon the site contents

Many people argue about which browser has the biggest share of the market. It seems that the consensus is that a few years ago Internet Explorer (IE)  was the dominant browser with well over 90% of users using it to browse the internet. In recent years however, this share seems to have been eaten away by the growth in usage for Firefox, Safari and more recently Google Chrome.  However, it is very hard to get definitive figures because everyone's data seems to give different results.

I publish two different blogs. On this blog I write about topics of interest to geeks like myself and on another blog I write about a girls soccer team that I coach - which has probably a more "typical" set of readers. I decided to look at the reader statistics collected by Google Analytics for the last three months for both of these sites. Both sites received slightly over a thousand visitors in the last three month - a very small number in internet terms, but still enough to draw some conclusions. As you can see from the following table there is a bug difference between the percentage of people using Firefox and Internet Explorer on each site:

Browser	http://www.brianodonovan.ie/	Soccer Site	Difference
Firefox	67.75%	31.95%	35.8%
IE	16.30%	45.29%	-28.99%
Chrome	8.30%	6.44%	1.86%
Safari	5.27%	15.86%	-10.59%
Other	2.38%	0.46%	1.92%

I guess that people interested in the geeky topics discussed on my regular blog are more likely to be well informed on the merits of various browsers.This group seem to have opted mostly for Firefox, while the readers of the soccer news are more likely to choose Internet Explorer for the simple reason that it is the default on their Windows system. I am not sure why Safari is more popular than Chrome among soccer fans - maybe they are more likely to use a Macintosh or an iPhone, but maybe it is just pure chance because as I said the sample size is not huge.

Using Notes to manage my Tasks in a GTD way

Since the start of the year, I have been trying out a number of different tools for implementing Getting Things Done (GTD). For the last month or so, I have reverted to using Lotus Notes as a task tracking tool. I have been using the standard Notes email database design and did not use any special tools.

In order to ensure I was following GTD best practices, I read a document from David Allen's company which gives very practical advice on how to use Notes for GTD style task tracking. This guide is quite useful - as a long time Lotus Notes user I already knew most of the tips and tricks, but a new user of Lotus Notes would really benefit from reading this guide. Unfortunately it was written for an older version of Lotus Notes and so it does not mention any of the newer features such as follow-up flags or  the ability to drag emails from your inbox onto your ToDo list to convert them into ToDo items.

While I followed most of the instructions in the guide, I deviated from the official advice in a number of ways:

• David Allen is quite adamant that it is important to distinguish between appointments which have a specific date and time and tasks which don't. However, I like to see at a glance what I need to do next. Therefore I ignored David's advice and configured Notes to show a all incomplete ToDos to on my calendar. I used the following guidelines when deciding which date to assign to tasks:
  
  • By default tasks go into today's list. By looking at a combination of my appointments and ToDo items for a particular day, I can quickly see when I am over booked. For example, if I have only two or three appointments on a day I can expect to get quite a few ToDo items completed, but if I have seven or eight meetings on a particular day I know it is pointless to expect to expect many ToDos to get done in the short gaps between them.
  • Whenever I see a day that is overbooked, Notes allows me to easily change its assigned date by using drag-and-drop to place it on a date with fewer appointments. This automatically updates the start date field for this ToDo without needing me to touch the keyboard.
    
  • By default ToDo items don't have a due date. If something really needs to be done by a particular date I will give a due date of the day before, then Notes will automatically put a red indicator beside it on my calendar after the due date is passed so that I can see it is more urgent.
    
  • I tend to put the less important ToDos on  Friday. This means that they don't clutter up my list of things that I need to do on a particular day, but at the same time I can easily see them if I have some free time and am looking for something to do.
    
  • I put most personal ToDos on Saturday unless they are something which can only be done on a week day (e.g. ring insurance companies to get a quote).
    
  • I put things that fit into the "Someday/Maybe" category onto new years eve. When it comes to the end of the year and I am making new years resolutions I can decide if I want to move these onto the active list or leave them on the "Someday/Maybe" list for next year.
    
  • David Allen recommends creating ToDo entries with an agenda for anyone with whom you will need to meet with regularly e.g. your boss. If I have a scheduled 1-on-1 with somebody I normally place the Agenda entry on the date of our next 1-on-1. If I don't have a scheduled 1-on-1 meeting with this person I move the agenda out some number fo days in the future which reflects my feeling for the urgency of the items on the agenda. If something on the agenda is really urgent I might even place a due date on it to remind me that I need to meet the person in question.
    
• I followed David Allen's instructions on setting up categories for my ToDo items, but I must admit that I did use categories for all of my ToDo items. I find that I tend to have around 30-50 items and so I find it relatively easy to scan through them even if they are not all properly categorised. Therefore the small amount of time required to assign a category to a ToDo item is wasted time for me. I have heard David say that most busy professionals should expect to have about 150-200 outstanding things listed in their task management system. I am not sure if this means that I am not very busy or if it means that I don't capture all of my possible ToDos in a tracking system (I suspect the later).
  
• I delete ToDos as soon as I complete them rather than marking them complete. I do this partly because I want to save space on my limited email quota and partly because I find that completed ToDos tend to clutter up some of the Notes views. However, I do realise that this means I won't be able to properly do reviews of what I was spending my time on - I might  change this policy in the future.
• David Allen's guide gives no mention of the use of Follow-Up flags (probably because they were not contained in the version of Notes that was available when he wrote his guide). This feature allows you to place a flag on an email indicating that you need to take some action on it - then you can safely move it out of your inbox safe in the knowledge that you won't forget it. In general these flags are very simple to use, but I would love to hear some expert advice on how/if these flagged emails should be managed in conjunction with my ToDos
  

In general I find that Notes is very efficient and easy to use. Since I already use Notes for email and managing my calendar, it is very efficient for me not to have to switch to a different tool for managing my tasks. As a result, I think that this will be my task tracking system for the foreseeable future.

I have heard people speak highly of the eProductivity template which makes it even easier to use Notes in a GTD compatible way. It probably is very good, but I find that the standard Notes template works fine for me. In addition I believe that IBM won't pay the cost of the template and I don't think that I want to pay this out of my own pocket.

Evaluation of Remember The Milk as a System for tracking tasks in a GTD way

As part of my quest to find the best GTD task tracking system I have been using Remember the Milk (RTM for short) for the last two weeks. In summary this web site is very straight forward and easy to use. I found that it was less complex than ToodleDo. RTM seems to have fewer possible options and this allows the interface to me much cleaner and less cluttered.

The associated Android application for the phone was also very slick and easy to learn. Unfortunately this is only available to people who have subscribed to the Pro version of the RTM service, but the 2 week free trial for the Pro service allowed me to use it during the evaluation without having to pay anything.

The one limiting factor with RTM for me was that I could not get my RTM tasks to show up on either my Google or Notes calendars. The web site gives the URLs for the webcal and ICS feeds, but neither of these seemed to work for me despite several attempts. I think this would stop me from adopting RTM full time.

For the next two weeks I will try using plain old  Lotus Notes with the additional guidance from David Allen's guide to how to implement GTD with Notes.

Experiences using Toodledo

As part of my plan to evaluate the best GTD tool for me, this week was devoted to testing Toodledo. This is a short report on my experiences of this service.

In general, I found Toodledo to be very easy to use. The highlights were:

• The web site itself is very fast and responsive and I had no problem figuring out how it worked.
  
• Once I entered my tasks I could easily view my tasks, by a number of different views (e.g. by Folder, by Due date, by importance etc.) although it was some time before I found the search button because this feature is not as prominent as I would have expected.
• I installed the ToodleDroid application on my phone and it proved very useful especially for reviewing my upcoming action items and in marking them done.
  
• There is a Firefox add-on which allows tasks to be added via a simple right click option even when the Toodledo web site is not open.
  
• It is possible to add tasks via email and Twitter. Although I didn't use these very much, I can see how they could be very useful for some situations.
• Unfortunately there is no Notes plugin which allows me to drag notes emails onto my task list. This is disappointing because most of my task come from emails sent to me in Notes. Looking at the developer API, it should be easy to implement such a Notes plugin and if I was adopting Toodledo full time I think I would need to create one myself.
  

However, there were a few things that frustrated me about using this application. The biggest issue is to do with the calendar integration.

• I know that David Allen is a strong advocate of seperation between calendars and task lists, but personally I like to have a single place to look to see "what do I need to do today".
  
  • With Notes this is trivially easy to get ToDos to appear on ymy calendar (simply a preference setting). Notes ToDos have an optional start date and an end date. By default Notes ToDos appear on today's calendar, unless they have a start date in the future. ToDos which have a due date in the past will be highlighted as overdue. If my list of ToDos for today is getting to long I simply drag and drop them on another date and the "start date" of the ToDo is automatically updated. As a general rule of thumb, when the number of ToDo's against todays date is getting so large that it is crowding out my calendar I know I won't get them all done and need to re-assign some of them to future dates.
  • Toodledo tasks have a range of date options as shown in the following screenshot - despite extensive experimentation I have not yet figured out what exactly the different options mean :-/
• Toodledo offers calendar integration to both Google and Notes calendars
  
  • The integration with Google Calendar works, but it seems to assign tasks to a range dates based upon some algorithm that I have yet to figure out. In addition there seems to be no way to refresh the way my Toodledo tasks display on my calendar after I make edits - this might be making my confusion worse because my Google calendar is probably displaying details of my tasks based upon an out of date version of my task list.
    
  • The Notes integration works pretty much as expected with tasks showing up on appropriate dates. If I make changes to my tasks on the Toodledo web site I can update my calendar's display by hitting refresh (f9). However, Notes only allows me to read the task list - I need to visit the Toodledo web site if I want to update a task or even see further details appart from the task title.
    

Another minor issue is the fact that it is not easy to delete tasks. As I was moving tasks from Notes to Toodledo I often accidentally created duplicate tasks and I didn't want to make one of them complete because this would give me a misleading history. After some time I discovered that it you leave your mouse stationary above the "Done" checkbox in the web UI for a few seconds an additional menu would appear which includes the option to delete the task (see screen-shot) - this seems to be a pretty obscure place to hide this functionality so I decided to describe it here in case anyone else missed this.

My conclusion is that I think Toodledo could be an interesting system, especially if I could find a solution to the calendar integration problem. However, I am not yet convinced that I have found a killer application and so I will continue to test out other alternatices as outlined in my original plan.

Mixed feelings about Google Chrome Extensions

I am a big fan of the Firefox browser, mainly because of the wonderful extensions which are available. In particular the del.icio.us extension is so valuable I am  not sure how I ever managed to survive without it. However, I am also aware of the potential performance impact of having too many extensions installed.

I have recently started also using the Google Chromium browser and have been very impressed with its overall speed and quality. While I missed my Firefox extensions, I do realise that extensions and speed tend to be mutually exclusive. Therefore I had mixed feelings that I heard the news that Chromim now supports browser extensions.

I browsed through the list of extensions available and  was pleasantly suprised to see that there are already almost 1000 extensions available. There are two del.icio.us extensions to choose from, but neither are anywhere nearly as good as the Firefox equivalent.

On the plus side, it is possible to install or uninstall chromium extensions without restarting the browser so it is really easy to try out extensions and then turn them off if you change your mind. I now am using 5 extensions and I will try to keep the list of extensions small so I don't get bloated.

One extension which sounded interesting was the "YouTube HTML5-ifier" extension. However, it did not work properly. It got rid of the flash from YouTube, but the replacement player did not work for me.

Beware of XML PrettyPrinting Service

The XML file format has become very popular recently. One of the features that makes it popular is the fact that since .xml files contain plain text, they can be read by anyone using a simple text editor. This is very useful when you are trying to debug a complex system.

Unfortunately, many large XML files are not really readable because the files are too complex to be easily understood. This problem is made worse by the fact that many machine generated XML files try to save space by writing the XML as a single line without any spacing or other nice layout.

Recently I was trying to understand a large complex XML file and was a little frustrated that it was hard to see how the elements had been nested because no indentation had been used to help poor humans like me (software programs are generally unaffected by aesthetic concerns like this). I found this free on-line service for pretyprinting XML. At first glance it seemed to do what I wanted becuase it produced a nicely formatted XML file and displayed it to me in multiple colours.

Unfortunately when I copied the text back into my development environment, I discovered that the nicely formatted XML did not actually match the original and my program started to report XML parsing errors. There were two errors that I saw:

1. The first error (which was easy to fix) was the fact that the XML file was tagged as using the utf-16 encoding while I was using utf-8 in my editor (probably they were using utf-16 on their web site so this was technically correct)
2. The second error (which was tricker to fix) was when I had XML tags which were both a begin and end tag (for example using the syntax ) the pretty printer converted these into end tags (e.g. for my example they used which has a very different meaning and caused the XML parsing errors).
   

So be warned, prettier does not always mean better!!!

Are Powerpoint slides an essential part of every presentation?

There has been a lot of hype recently about the fact that PowerPoint celebrates its 25th birthday this year. The popularity of Microsoft's PowerPoint program has led many people to believe that it is not possible to give a presentation without having a slide show be presented on a screen behind the speaker. Strangely PowerPoint continues to be a big source of income for Microsoft, despite the fact that there are now many alternatives to PowerPoint available which are just as good and many are substantially cheaper (e.g. Symphony and OpenOffice are free).

Although most people use slides for their presentations, I notice that the best and most engaging speakers often don't use any.

• I recently give a presentation to the UK Lotus User Group without the benefit of any slides. Although I would not claim it was a brilliant presentation, it certainly was a much more interactive session than if I had been presenting a pre-prepared deck of slides.
  
• At a recent diversity conference within IBM, I noticed that the majority of the speakers simply used a single slide with their name and affiliation. Since the speakers were mainly speaking about their own personal life story and how they had managed to overcome discrimination it is not surprising that they could speak passionately about the subject without having to rely on reading out slides.
  

Thinking about this, I came up with the following observations about when sideshows are both good and bad.

• The slides can serve a useful reminder to the speaker about what they intended to say and/or they can serve a useful reminder to your audience of what you said if your circulate a copy to your audience.


• People often forget that it is possible to put something different on the screen from what is in the notes shown to the presenter. I strongly suggest that speakers should remember this because otherwise the audience will simply read your slides (quicker than you can speak) and tune out from listening to you.
• Many academics report that students read the slides in advance to decide whether or not it is worth their while to attend the lecture. For this reason some lecturers often deliberately leave out key facts from their notes in order to encourage attendance


• If you need to see the slides to remind you what you intended to say, it is a sure sign that you did not do enough preparation.




• The slides can discourage questions because they give the impression that the speaker has a tightly prepared script and does not welcome any interruptions. If you are presenting to a very large audience this might be good, but in most situations it would be better to encourage the audience to enter into a dialog about the topic.


• The slides help remind you whether you are going too fast or slow. Some people aim to spend 3 minutes talking about each slide. While it is bad to be so rigid in your timing, it is perhaps good to have some indication about whether or not you need to speed up or can afford to slow down (keeping in mind the points above that there should only be a loose relationship between what is on your slides and what you say).
  

Is Google Wave the next big thing?

There seems to be a lot of excitement at the moment about the release of Google Wave. Unfortunately I did not get an invite so I didn't try it out myself. I read an excellent review on Lifehacker. So I have a good idea of how it works (although it is complex). I think that there are several great ideas implemented in the Google Wave product. However, the major issue that will stop its adoption is the fact that everyone involved in the wave must be using Wave.

I know you might think that this is an obvious restriction, but that need not be the case. Gmail was a radical overhaul of the mail interface. Although I am a big fan, I would never have switched over if I could only send and receive email to people also using Gmail.

I think Google needs to give some consideration to a mechanism to allow non-Wave users to participate in a Wave (e.g. by receiving email summaries and being able to contribute by sending email to a special address to update the wave.).

I don't want to have to update my status several times

I have accounts on several different social networking sites (mainly just to try them out). As a result it is a major pain for me to keep an up to date status message on each of them. What I would really like is to be able to update my status on one site and have that updated status automatically propagate to all of the various sites which provide a status tracking service.

I haven't (yet) found an ideal solution, but I have at least found two different ways to update my Facebook status without ever having to directly launch Facebook.

1. I installed the Twitter application on Facebook, by following these instructions. Now each time I update my twitter status I can have the status update automatically propogate to Facebook by simply appending #fc at the end of the status message
2. I linked my Plaxo account to my Facebook account by logging into Plaxo and clicking on "edit my profile", selecting "websites" tab and then clicking on the Facebook icon and entering my credentials. Now any time I update my Plaxo status it automatically generates a Facebook status update with the same text and visa-versa.
   

Am I the only person who thinks it is a major pain to keep updating my status on all these sites? Does anyone know of a cool solution that they can point me to?

[Update 26/May] - It turns out that the Plaxo/Facebook connection is bi-directional and not one way as I originally stated (the Facebook to Plaxo update just happened very slowly so I thought it wasn't working)

[Update 4.June] - Robi Brummer pointed me to ping.fm which is a great site for updating several sites at once. The list of services that work with ping.fm is truly amazing

Comparing Picasa Name Tags with Flickr Notes

The Dogear-Nation team picked up on the fact that I bookmarked a description of the Picasa Name Tags feature for their episode 73. During the podcast the guys seemed to be a little confused about how this featture work and so I thought I ought to explain a little bit here.

For some time now, Flickr has had a feature called Notes. This works by allowing people to highlight a section of their pictures and then attaching a piece of text which will appear whenever somoene hovers over that part of the picture. This simple but powerful feature can be used in many different ways. One of the most common usages is that people use it tio record the names of people who appear in group pictures (e.g. see how I used notes to record the names of my former class mates in an old school picture).

Google's Picasa product is in many ways an attempt to immitate the more popular Flickr service (which belongs to their arch rival Yahoo). Until recently Picasa did not have an equivalent of the Flickr Notes service. Instead of simply copying the Flickr service, google decided to implement a service which is optimised for this use case of highlighting who is who in your pictures.

If you enable Name Tags on your Picasa account, then Picasa will automatically analyse all of your uploaded picture and search for any faces appearing in your pictures. Any picture containing faces will automatically be given a Flickr note type highlight attached to each of the faces.

The first advantage of the name tags service is that it automatically finds the faces and saves me the bother of having to highlight them myself. I find that it does this almost perfectly when people are facing the camera, but does not get things right when people are not looking at the camera (e.g. many of my pictures are action shots from football games). However, it does not matter if it makes some mistakes because I can always, edit the highlights and add more manually if I want to.

When reviewing my Picasa pictures, it prompts me to identify the people whose faces who have been highlighted. It provides type-ahead assitance based upon the names of the people in my Gmail contacts list based upon the assumption that the people towhom I send emails are also likely to appear in my pictures, but of course I can easily type any different name I want.

The really cool part of Picasa name tags comes when a person appears in more than one of your pictures. Picasa automatcially builds an index of your photographs based upon the people who appear in them. So if I need a picture of Joe Blogs to illustrate a story about him, I can just click on his name in the index to see all of the pictures in which he appears.

The documentation from Picasa seems to indicate that if I have enough pictures of Joe Bloggs in my photo collection it will then automaticically recognise Joe in my pictures. However, I have never actually seen this working (perhaps becuase I have only recently started using name tags and so I have not trained it enough yet).