Mozilla borrows from WebKit to build fast new JS engine
Its about time, Firefox has been getting its butt kicked by Chrome and Safari for months now. Many users have given up on Firefox specifically for this issue (including me). Let’s see if this is just hype or really something to look forward to.
First Look at SnapGroups: A Delightful Tool For Lightweight Discussion
Looks like a great service akin to Google Groups (only a little nicer interface).
A New Way of Working: A Two-Month Recap – 37signals
A New Way of Working: A Two-Month Recap – 37signals.
The above linked article is part two of 37Signals journey down a new product development cycle/process. It is encouraging to see that their radical departure from traditional “waterfall” approaches was so successful. I especially appreciate the fact that they make these processes (whether they succeed or fail) transparent and public. Good stuff and a great approach to product development.
Do You Follow Too Many People On Twitter? Use ManageTwitter.
This is an awesome tool. Very helpful, especially the “who is quiet, who is talkative” filter set.
The Challenge of Social Media
I may strike a chord when I say I have had enough. Don’t get me wrong, I am addicted to my networks. But I really can’t say that if you took one of them away, I would be devastated. The reason is probably because there is so much darn overlap. Facebook is for my real world friends (the people I know face to face and who have an important meaning in my personal life). Recently, Facebook has added features that make it a news hub, a customer to business and business to business communication tool, and a chat client. It’s added real time, filtering and search. Ugh. No more, stop. I don’t want Facebook to be the social hub – my friends aren’t all techies and the last thing they want to see or hear is this post. There are enough negatives with Facebook to make it feel like the butter knife in the toolbox – sure I can use it to screw flat head screws, but I have a really nice screwdriver for that, so why bother?
Then there is LinkedIn, the step child of social networks. My contacts there started out as business contacts – people I worked with and worked for, who could share a recommendation or job idea. People I could turn to for business advice, problem solving help, and the like. LinkedIn gets this and has not tried to be the next Twitter or Facebook. My LinkedIn connections are just over a hundred of some the brightest people I have worked with. And that is perfect. I don’t feel pressured or annoyed by the feature-creep. Because there is none.
Now, Buzz and Friendfeed are fighting for my attention. These networks had the potential to be aggregators for lots of services, but what is happening with Buzz (and what already happened with Friendfeed) is that people are choosing sides and in the process creating more parallel networks instead of one connected one. Like Facebook, the original mission is lost. In its place is the attempt to create a holy grail of networks. I really don’t understand this. It’s counter productive and a waste of everyone’s time. Tools are tools, and unfortunately we are now stuck in an internet “virtual garage” with a toolbox half full of metric and half full of American socket wrenches. And nothing fits together on the first try.
What we need right now is for someone (Google?) to step up, hand over an open platform (the actual square toolbox, not the tools inside of it) and let us bring the tools (all of which can be compatible if they follow the standard). Then and only then will the promise of social networking become reality and we can finally stop discussing social media ON social media and use it for the real work of talking to each other.
Has Google Reader Just Gone Real Time?
Pubsubhubbub is something I have been playing with the last few weeks and excited to see this announcement. I have been using Feedburner to accelerate my feeds but the results have been spotty. I originally attributed this to a configuration error on my part, but I after some testing, I think it has more to do with the hubs I am pushing to/pulling from than the config itself. This is a good article from my friends at The Next Web.
Making Buzz Better
Its been a couple of days now and Buzz is starting to turn into something powerful – more people are using the service and surprisingly, some of the naysayers are converting over to the service as their primary social vehicle. This is interesting on several levels as it shows the power of Google’s reputation as a tools provider and it shows that people are starting to trust the tool after only a few days whereas the adoption of Twitter and other similar products seemed to take longer to gain traction.
But like any 1.0 product, there are some glaring omissions in the toolbox, some of which are cosmetic and will come with time. But a few are so necessary to basic usage that I wanted to point them out here along with my suggestions for fixing the problems. I am posting this to Buzz as well with the hopes that we can get a chain of ideas going to send on to Google. So here goes…
Expanding and Collapsing Comments
Probably one of the first “problems” you will encounter when using Google Buzz is the sheer magnitude of the comment threads. If like me you follow prolific writers/industry pundits, you quickly will become overwhelmed and find yourself scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to get to the bottom of things (literally). This seems like such a glaring omission and something that even Gmail has already. My suggestion is to add an expand and collapse menu choice right on the Comments menu.
Liking a Post
Another weird interface “glitch” is with the “Like” UI element. In addition to this sometimes not being at the top of the thread, there is no way to collapse the Likes once you have “shown” them. There is also no provision to “Unlike” something if you change your mind or clicked Like by accident. I propose the following inline options attached to the Like UI area as follows:
This area should always be at the top of the thread for consistency similar to the way it is handled in FriendFeed and Facebook. And we should not be forced to scroll all the way to the bottom of the thread to like something. I think the current like at the bottom of thread should still be there in case you happen to be at the bottom (to spare you the hassle of scrolling up), but we need one at the top of the thread.
Stacked Thread Handling
The way Google is handling a stacked thread makes no sense and is so unlike Gmail that you might wonder if you are even in Gmail when reading Buzz comments. I am not really sure what causes items to be bunched together like this as expanding them reveals unrelated Buzz comments. Maybe this is just Google’s way of putting a bunch of comments from the same author together when they hit some magic number of posts. Who knows, its a mystery. But regardless of why, the functioning of these “layers” should mimic Gmail’s expand and collapse functionality.
Documentation?
And finally, please please please provide us with some documentation. The little bit that is available is horrible. If you are targeting this service at all Gmail users (I assume you are since you pushed this out to all users and not a subset of industry and developer types), at least give us a glossary of what the interface elements mean. Like the little triangle (that after a few hours you figure out points to the active Buzz you are viewing), or the bar to the left of a Buzz thread’s comments that I still can’t define with any authority. I realize this is a 1.0 release, but we have to assume you did not whip this up on Monday for the Tuesday release, so a little basic documentation would be nice.
I have to admit that initially I was worried about Buzz and how I would use it. So far I have been pleasantly surprised and I am very excited about this product’s future. I spend the majority of my “me time” in Gmail and other Google products like Reader, so this is a nice natural extension to my online activities. And the addition of Buzz to Google Apps will be an exciting development that will allow me to consider recommending Apps with Buzz to my daytime work team.
My next challenge will be determining which service I want to keep and integrate into Buzz and which i will be ditching. I missed being a part of the early days of Twitter as I mistakenly avoided the service thinking it a fad and not very useful. I am glad I have learned the value of social media tools this time around and can be a part of the early adoption phase of Google Buzz. As long as this adoption of Buzz by the people I follow on other services continues, it should be a no-brainer to move to Buzz full time. Goodbye Twitter? Probably not, as Twitter will still have a place for short “broadcast” style messages. And Facebook? That will still be the place for personal friend updates. But I am afraid FriendFeed’s days are numbered for me, as they have been for a few months now as I find I use that service less and less. It’s going to be interesting.
Agile Management Software – Serena Software
Freakin awesome online scrum workflow toolbox. Definitely the best one I have located and first 5 users are free.
Dear Google…
Google Buzz Again
Great comprehensive article on Buzz along with the full press event/rollout from Tuesday. There are still holes in the documentation of this service (such as what certain graphic elements in the interface actually do), but hopefully those holes will be filled soon. Posting this to Buzz too.
