I use a ton of web services that require accounts that you log into.  Most of the time these accounts will be specific towards work or play.  An example being Salesforce.com for customer relationship management for work and Netflix.com for renting movies to watch at home.  However, other accounts cross over into both realms.  Evernote.com and Toodledo.com are two perfect examples.

With Evernote, I can manage most of all the files on my home computer, ideas, photos, etc.  It is cloud-based, backs up to my home computer and I can sync the database to my iPhone for instant access to my external brain.  But it is so handy I like to keep all my work data in it too, such as blog ideas, pricing for our services, proposals, etc.  To access and contribute to my work related data at work I obviously have to login, thus also opening up all my personal data on the job.

Toodledo.com is my to-do application of choice.  With it I can manage all of my to-dos, everything from bill pay reminders, home chores to complete, work proposals to complete and grocery lists of things to buy.  I can set long term goals and assign multiple to-dos that I need to complete before reaching those goals.  It really helps to keep me organized and focused on everything I need to get accomplish and it also has an iPhone app so I can take it anywhere.  But again, accessing this via a web browser at work opens up all my personal tasks on the company computer.

Other services, like Google, can get really deep in mixing home and office – Gmail for home, but Google Docs for work?  Running Google Analytics for business website but have all your family photos on Picasa?  Logging into one Google account can open access to all services you are using with Google.

Now mind you, I don’t have anything to hide, but I do appreciate and respect privacy.  I think that is a common trait most people desire to have as well.

The obvious response someone might say is, “just get seperate accounts”.  Sure, but what complexity that adds to the equation.  Also, you can’t install two copies of the same app on an iPhone and I’m not going to carry around two phones.  On top of that, I pay subscription fees for various web services, such as Evernote and Toodledo – while, these subscriptions are affordable, I have no desire to double my expenses.

To me, it would make sense for web application providers to offer some type of two-tiered login: one user name and 2 passwords: the first password opens only the restricted access data (make this your work data you use in the office) and the other password for full access (for when at home).  Users that prefer just a standard account can still use one password and not restrict data.  Data could be restricted by folders, tags, contexts or any other way an application handles data.  This could also be a premium feature for providers to up-sell.   While I’m not looking to increase what I pay for these services, an extra 10% on a subscription cost to get this added functionality is worth it.

How about  keeping one user name and password for an account but use browser cookies to determine if restricted access is allowed.  Maybe when first logging in you get asked if you want restricted data displayed or not on that browser.  A cookie is then stored indicating what access is available until you log out and log back in.  You could still change the level of access in your profile settings, but would need to re-enter your password before the change takes place.

There are already similar uses of this on sites such as Facebook and Flickr, where you can who gets access to your account postings, but it would be good to have the option for the account owner too.

Ok, Google Wave was just recently released, and I still haven’t gotten my invite.  What is a poor web consultant to do?  Why, search the web for other things that I can play with now.  This is where Zoho comes in.

First of all, Zoho is not new – it’s been around at least a few years now, competing solidly with Google Docs at least as far back as 2007.  I have read a number of articles on it this year, and even ones that proclaimed it to have beaten Google Wave to the scene with integrated conversations, documents and project management.  Additionally, Zoho gets high marks when compared to Google Docs for its more feature-rich and elegant user interface.  But, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of them as they don’t have the household name brand that Google has.  Additionally, Zoho is not an open-source platform, so external developers aren’t going to be paying attention to it like they are with Google Wave.

The first thing that strikes me when visiting their site is the huge array of applications they have.  It is truely amazing.  Ok, I’ve known about the document and calendar stuff – but a CRM service too?  And an online web-conference tool?  Web-email?  Ok, I’m really intrigued and wondering why I didn’t follow up with them sooner.

Just like Google’s applications, Zoho is 100% in the cloud – yes, more cloud computing services.  But unlike Google’s apps, Zoho’s are much slicker – I’m understanding those positive reviews I’ve heard.  While I have very limited hands on to give a formal review, I’ll at least throw out a few visuals that tell their own story:

The main screen for the Zoho word processer

As you can see above in the left side navigation, Zoho integrates all their tools together.

A pretty slick set of toolbars for a web-app

Compare the feature-rich tabbed tool-bar to the more simplistic one from Google below.  To many, simple might be better, but for most business-oriented users, Zoho provides a better web-based replacement to Microsoft Office.

The Google word processor toolbar by comparison

Zoho is one tough competitor to Google in the cloud computing realm, but it will be interesting to see how Google Wave impacts things.  I expect Google Docs to become more Wave-oriented, but Zoho should also benefit from Wave as it brings more attention to cloud computing platforms in general.

Do you have experience with Zoho that you can share?  How do you think it stacks up to Google?

Since Google Wave is expected to have a limited release on September 30th, it is time to get an understanding of what this tool is, how it works, why it is revolutionary and how we might use it.

What it is?

Announced by Google on May 27th, 2009 as a “personal communication and collaboration tool”, Google Wave is the next big “death of email” hype storm.  As an open source application, it is available for others to develop it out via it’s API – much like Twitter with it’s endless supply of third party apps or add-ons for your Firefox browser.  File sharing is native to it so you can drag photos and docs right into conversations – no more email attachments.  Everything is real time with threaded conversations, wiki-style editing and the ability to embed a Wave into your own website or blog.  While definitely a tool that can define the future of online communication, it also could be another layer to the social media onion.

If you want to make waves, you need to get in the pool!

How does it work?

Users create “waves” and add other users to it – much like starting an email to a friend or group of people.  But instead of a back and forth volley or text with attachments to upload and download, everyone shares a common pool of media – text, photos, videos, documents, RSS feeds, gadgets, etc.  New users can be added to the pool and continue to contribute in real-time.  And if you’re added to the pool late and don’t have the foggiest idea what everyone is currently talking about, you can replay the wave from the beginning to watch the timeline of events unfold before you.

Why is it revolutionary?

Currently, our online communications are very fragmented – Email, Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, file sharing websites, social networking sites and more.  Some of these technologies, like email and instant messaging are pretty ancient in their technology.  Newer communications, such as Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites provide a richer experience, but are still spread over a diverse landscape.  You can use third party tools to aggregate some of these web 2.0 tools together (Ping.fm, Seesmic Desktop and FriendFeed to name a few), but none of these wrap the whole enchilada within their tortilla.  Google Wave is the whole enchilada served straight from their coding kitchen.

How will we use it?

The primary use for it of course, is for online communications and file sharing.  Whether you are creating a wave to discuss the football season with friends, share photos with family members or collaborate on a project with a client, it could be the go-to tool that truly does spell the end of email.  However, since it is open sourced for the developer community at large, new uses not yet imagined are sure to be developed – think iPhone apps.

The Google Wave web app

The key is adaption.

The biggest hurdle with any new technology is that it has to be adapted by the general public to succeed.  Just being better doesn’t guarantee the public will embrace it.  Google Wave has it’s own lengthy list of jargon terms and from-scratch approach to the user interface.  While Twitter has gained a huge following with it’s unique approach to communication, it only requires a small learning curve and a few silly-sounding jargon terms to learn such as “tweet” and “retweet”.  Google Wave is a bit more complex and abstract.  There are still lots of people who haven’t figured out Twitter (or email, for that matter), so I see a high rate of avoidance being inevitable.  And if someone isn’t using Google Wave, then you obviously can’t communicate with them via the tool.

So what about this new jargon?

Wave: Since this term mirrors the name of the product offering, it makes sense that it is the primary element of the new technology.  A wave is the full history of a conversation thread or project collaboration.

Wavelet: A subset of a wave – basically consisting of related elements of the full wave.

Blip: Single elements of a wavelet, such as individual messages.  Blips can be private or publically shared.

Children: Blips that are attached to other blips.

Document: A blip’s content.

Extension: Applications that extend the functionality of Google Wave.  There are 2 extension types that can be used: gadgets and robots.

Gadgets: This would be like add-ons that you can install into your Firefox browser to increase it’s functionality and to customize it’s usability.

Robots: Yeah, really – robots!  Basically extensions that provided automated processes.

Google Wave: a stand alone tool or embed it elsewhere.

One of the things that increased the popularity of YouTube is it’s ability to provide embed code that you can use to post YouTube videos on other websites and blogs.  This dramatically helped to spread the brand awareness and site content to thousands, if not millions, of URL’s throughout the internet.  Similarly, waves can be embedded elsewhere on the net.

In conclusion:

Google Wave has the clout and resources of Google, the anxious anticipation of millions and a fresh (if somewhat different) approach to online communication going for it.  It may not be adopted by all – or in my opinion end fragmentation of online communication totally – but it does give us a chance to explore the next evolution of the web.  Even in the unlikely event that it fails miserably, it is already setting a new course that other online applications will follow.

Additional Resources:

Here is a highly abridged version of the video presented by Google on the waves.google.com website.  The original is long – very long.  This 10 minute abridged version sums it up:

Here is the link to sign up with Google for an invite to use Google Wave: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

They may be good at being social, but they need to work on their bookmarking features.

Ok, here is the setup of my premise:

I’m primarily a Firefox web surfer and for the last year or so I have been a big fan of the the Fast Dial add-on.  If you don’t know what it is, basically it adds a bookmark page to your Firefox browser.  Every time you bookmark a page to Fast Dial, it grabs a screen capture of the page and places it on the Fast Dial grid.  The grid can contain as many or as few rows and columns as you want.  Plus you can replace the screen shot with any image you want to use.  I tend to use the logo of the site I bookmarked, so if I want to go to Facebook, I open a new tab in my Firefox browser and from the Fast Dial grid that pulls up by default, I quickly see the blue Facebook logo and click to be on my way.  It’s fast indeed as it is visual.

Now you wouldn’t use Fast Dial to bookmark all the sites you visit as there is only so much room on your computer screen.  That great recipe for peppered porcupine pie that one day you to plan to make, or the interesting blog article you’ll one day get around to reading are not the things you would bookmark to Fast Dial.  The day-to-day sites you use on a regular basis are what you would put on your Fast Dial grid.

For everything else, you can bookmark them to your browser, but then you have to go back to that browser on that computer to access them.  Yes, I know there are ways to sync, port over and mishmash bookmarks in browsers now, but let’s not pull out all those ‘many ways to cook a porcupine’ recipes right now.  I have looked into Delicious.com a few times over the last few years, but always found their user interface a bit cryptic.  I have tried other services too, but they were way more social-oriented than bookmark-oriented.

Example screenshot of Fast Dial

Now, after building up a pretty big grid on both my work computer and home computer in Fast Dial, recent upgrades to Firefox 3.5 yielded blank grids.  Gone.  All my bookmarks vanished.

So, now I’m back to considering a good web-based bookmarking service.  I have a Google account and have used their bookmarking service, but I don’t like the idea of logging into my Google account at work and leaving all that personal data from the entire Google suite open, plus it’s not visual like Fast Dial.  Hey, it’s a Web 2.0 world, I’m sure some 15 year old has a startup site that will fit my needs.  So off a Googling I went.  I even Binged.  Nothing.

Looks like I need to look into Delicious again.  So I gave in and setup an account.  Guess what – it’s still cryptic.

Here’s my problem with social booking services:

I am a website consultant by trade.  Website usability is a big part of my consulting.  To me, the goal of a bookmarking service is to quickly get to the links I need quickly… did I already say “quickly”?  Yes I did, but let me say it again: quickly.  Start building up a bookmark list in Delicious, or any other bookmark service, and you get lists.  Text lists.  Yippee.

Now with Delicious.com, I can customize the bookmark name, add comments and tag the bookmark, but it’s still a text list.  And tags.  If I can only remember what tag a bookmark is listed under.  Tags are great, but give me some good old fashioned categories too.  If we dropped a site visitor into a website with a large number of pages and said “here’s a tag cloud, have at it”, we wouldn’t have a successful website.  With bookmark tags, there’s too much thinking on the data entry of the bookmark side and too much thinking on the link picking side.

Here’s my solution:

There is no reason a visual experience can’t be achieved in today’s web environment.  And to show you I’m not just here to criticize, here are my ways to allow users to organize their data visually.

But first of all, just to get this out of the way, if you’re going to provide user accounts, allow a custom user profile image.  Why is every person on Delicious a pointy-nosed icon.  There is no meaning for the icon if it’s everyone.  Look at other social websites with user profiles for a clue.

Ok, let’s organize our bookmarks visually.

There are a number of ways to organize visually: image icons, size, color and location.  Let’s start with image icons.

Image Icons: I don’t know what browser you are using, but chances are there is an image icon to the immediate left of the URL in the address bar.  This is the site’s favicon – the site owner has picked an image icon to represent the site.  Since it is a small image, it might be only a part of the site logo or other element, but it presents enough visual feedback for you to know what site it represents.  Now if the site owner didn’t use a favicon for their site, you would just see a generic icon, such as the blank document icon.  Why am I bringing up the favicon?  In many bookmarking tools, the favicon will show next to the bookmarked link.  For example, viewing my Firefox bookmarks (yes, I have bookmarks everywhere) I see all the favicons next to each bookmark name.  This makes it much easier to quickly find what I’m looking for instead of just looking at text links.  Additionally, I have a bookmarks toolbar that I have customized to only view favicons for bookmarked sites (kinda like a mini Fast Dial).  As long as every site bookmarked has a favicon,  I can open a site by visually just by finding it’s icon.  Social bookmarking sites should at the least show favicons for bookmarked sites.  Even better, they such allow displaying a screenshot of the site and allowing users to upload their own images for each bookmark.

Size: While I’m not a big fan of tag clouds, I respect the fact that they recognize that size helps to determine importance of a keyword.  The same would be good for a bookmarking website.  Take the Fast Dial grid idea (which really is the same idea as the iPhone’s icon navigation grid) of arranging your most important bookmarks on your main login page – sizing them according to importance. Not drastic differences, but enough to show certain bookmark links have more weight to them.  Or if you can paginate the bookmarks based on certain criteria, you can view one category of bookmarks and quickly see what items in the category are the most important.   Optionally, you could select a setting that instead of you manually selecting sizes, it increases icon sizes based on how often you visit the bookmark.  I can see a friendly reminder pop up now that says “Hey, this bookmark is getting so small it’s about to become invisible.  You sure you still need it?”

Color: Many online tools let you arrange items by color.  Google Calendar lets me setup different calendars to organize events.  Each calendar can be a different color.  Why not a color coding system for bookmarks?

Location: Whether by category, tag, or individual bookmarks, placing items in particular places is a way to determine the importance of a bookmark.  In Fast Dial or my iPhone, I can arrange my navigation however I see fit.  Certain categories always show on the right and another group of tagged bookmarks show in the bottom left – cool.  Work-related bookmarks always show up on main screen at login and personal bookmarks always require a click to a seperate page – awesome – now users can use one bookmark login for both work and personal.  Or, to take a quick sidebar, how about work-related bookmarks always show up on the main screen and personal bookmarks requiring a seperate, or a reconfirmation of the password to access.  This way, you can login with your same bookmark account at work that you use at home, leaving it open throughout the day without worrying about co-workers checking out your obscure 80’s band video links on YouTube or your vast array of porcupine pie recipes when you head to lunch.

Ok, so I’m ending on a sidebar.

Have I missed a social bookmarking site that does more than I’m giving them credit for?

Screenr is a new online application is available that makes it easy to share screencast videos via Twitter.

“What’s a screencast?”, you ask.

It is when a user can create a video of what is happening on their computer screen while providing a voice over dialog via a plugged in microphone.  They are typically used to create training videos, but they can serve other purposes too.

The service is quite ingenious in it’s ease of use.  Just go to the site and click the “Record your screencast now” button.  Once complete, the site connects with your Twitter account using OAuth and sends a tweet to all your followers with a link to the video that Screenr hosts for you.  Oh, and it is web-based, so there is nothing to download.  The web just keeps getting sweeter!

The sun is rising to light up the skies of cloud computing. And it looks like Google Chrome OS.

Cloud computing is on the horizon.  And despite the jargony term, it’s more familiar than you think.

“Cloud computing”, you ask?

Well, you could consider this blog article cloud computing.  Although you see the article on your screen and you are reading these words, this article doesn’t exist on your computer – unless you purposely copied it to your computer or are reading it from your computer cache.  No, it exists on a server… somewhere… heck, I don’t even know where.  And really, that is the case with all websites – you are pulling up website that exist somewhere… out there… in the CLOUD.

“So if the internet can be consider the CLOUD, then what’s the big deal about cloud computing?  We’ve been on the internet for years.”

Yes, but we are still grounded by our interface – hardware and software that makes that fluffy internet accessible.  However, more and more of the software and content has already been slowly moving to the cloud.

Who here uses Outlook or Outlook Express to view their email?  Or are you using Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or some other online service?  More and more of us are utilizing web-based email.  Instead of using a piece of software (Outlook) that we paid for and installed on our computer to access emails that get downloaded to our computers, we have webmail where we setup a free account and view all our email online.  And it stays online – forever (in theory, anyway).

“Ok, I’ve been using Gmail for years – I’m a cloud computing expert”, you say.

Well, you may be – I’m not here to judge – but we’re still left with hardware.  You know, that big box with the hard drives and the OS installed.

“But I’m on a netbook”, you respond.

Ok, you sipping the expresso, take your rain cloud computing over there please, before somebody gets wet.  But, um, leave the expresso please. Oh, and we’ll get back to you in a moment.

So now that I have hopefully lifted the… well the cloud on cloud computing, you are probably thinking that it seems pretty familiar after all.  But if we’re not entirely there, then what is the next step?

Actually, Google is.

You see, back in July they annouced a new operating system that they are currently developing, Chrome OS.  Now, it had long been rumored that Google might jump into the operating system wars that is currently dominated by Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X, but this OS won’t run on your hardware – it will exist in the cloud.

“But how?”

Well, again, all those servers that house your Gmail, your Google Docs and Picasa photos will also house your Chrome OS.  And that also long rumored Google GDrive, well most predict that when Chrome OS deputs it will do so with GDrive as the online storage solution for everything you do via Chrome OS.

Now, you just need a basic device that has an internet connection and the Google Chrome browser.  No spec’d out processor, no multi TerraByte hard drives, no maxxing out on RAM cards, no OS.  Oh, and here is where you netbookers can join us again – you’re actually the first primary market Google will tap.  But they’ll want some of you expresso in return – they love Caffeine.

As excited as I get by the concept, there are definitely pros and cons to cloud computing.  First off, it is dependent on the internet and the internet’s bandwidth and availability.  Where I live, I can only get high speed internet via satellite.  If you have never had satellite internet, be thankful.  And believe it or not, a decent percentage of internet users are still using dial-up.  I don’t see power users like those that do graphic design, video editing and 3D modeling to be on a cloud computer anytime soon, but for the casual and business user, it just might do.  After all, Google Docs and Gmail is proving that business can be done online without Microsoft Office and Picasa and Youtube can be used to manage large media files.  And having all that content available wherever you have an internet connection is tempting.

Although we have probably hit a point already where we have the best of both worlds – powerful local hardware with unlimited cloud-based applications already online – the simplisity and affordability of cloud computing mixed with the clout of a name like Google, could make total cloud computing mainstream.

My goal for next year is to not have to worry about coming up with goals.

Seriously, it is kinda fun to plan out your new year, but the typical scenario is we have all these great ideas at the beginning of the year and if we stumble upon those ideas and goals at some point later, say around December 15th, we say “oh yeah, remember that goal – forgot all about it.”

So, I have been reassessing my methods and work flows to actually find a way to “stick to it” the whole year through.  Now days there are so many great online tools to help you with your productivity, some of these, such as Toodledo.com and Evernote.com I have discussed on this blog.  Plus, there’s CRM software, blogging tools, online data storage site, social networking applications, browser add-ons, widget applications and on and on.

We use a really nice online CRM tool called Salesforce.com which covers the bulk of my work and customer related tasks, plus we have some extensive in-house produced management applications that handle a lot of our infrastructure.  While Salesforce is web-based and has task-list management like using Toodledo for the speed of managing to-do lists as well as keeping merged lists of both work and personal tasks to do.  While Salesforce has calendaring built in, I still like merging data with my Google calendar.  And I love the concept of Evernote that lets me collect ideas and random content and store it in one location for future use.

But, it’s a new year and time to shake the tree and see what falls out and what stays.

First off, I’m changing the way I’m setting goals for the year.  In the past it was “I want to make this much in sales”, “I want to have this many new customers”, “I want to build this many relationships”, etc.  Now my approach is more incremental.  I’m looking at laying out my year based on what I need to do today or this week as opposed to this year.  This means a whole lot more little chunks of data that all has to be tracked.

First off, Salesforce and our in-house online managaement applications work great – no changes there other than maybe utilizing some of the additional features it offers that I’m not using yet.  But goal tracking for the year with mobile access from my cell phone and integration of personal non-work goals is the big picture here.

I have been using the free version of Toodledo.com but if I really want to track goals for the year, I explored the paid version (starting at $15/yr).  Running the trial version now.  Funny, but the advanced version just isn’t doing it for me and a great all around tool for handling to-do lists (still the best for that) is just not good for what I’m trying to do.

With Evernote, I have been using the free version too, but it is a very different tool and really not setup for goal tracking.  Ironically though, my need for Evernote is growing so I will be upgrading to the paid subscription ($5/month), just not using it for this task at hand.

I have been researching the internet for other options – I can’t tell you how many other online tools I’ve tried – which explains while I’m still in the process of goal setting for 2009 on the 12th day in January.  But I came across a tool called Springpad that is now starting to really win me over.  It is true life management that has features beyond what I was even looking for.  It is a new Beta application that appears to only have been out about 4 months, but it is already at an amazing feature set.  It syncs with Google Calendar, it has an amazing collection of “notepads” that you can setup on your account to manage anything, you can customize it and you can build your own lists.  Plus there are so many template notepads that it really can be called a life management tool.  I’ve been setting up a map of my goals and activities for 2009 with it and so far I’m impressed and it is the leading application I’ve found to handle my goal-mapping needs.  A Twitter exchange with one of the staff members with Springpad assured me a mobile version of the product is due soon – the only drawback I have been able to find with it.

http://www.springpadit.com

If you are like me you have notes in a million different places, a voice recorder when on the go (that you always forget when you need), a gazillion internet bookmarks, a stack of scribbled note pads and folders in and out of your “My Documents” folder and on 12 different color coded thumb drives.  That is not counting the older CD and DVD backups of your computer’s last hard drive as well as the various external hard drives that are hiding somewhere behind that tangled mess of of network cables.

Now there is one place to put all your ideas where you won’t forget them – Evernote.  Evernote organizes all of you ideas in one central location online so you can access them anywhere.  And when you’re inbetween computer access, you can use your mobile phone to access your Evernote account, take and upload photos, make and upload a new voice memo as well as send a text note.

Organize your ideas into folders, search by keyword tags, convert photos of text documents into searchable text, take snapshots of web pages you want to remember for later, geo-code the information you gather and so much more.  I gather a lot of ideas for work in Evernote.  I tend to also take photos of things using my mobile phone via Evernote, I tag it, give it a description, assign it to a folder – it is then automatically uploaded to my Evernote account where I can access it later.

Give it a try to see if it works for you: www.evernote.com

You have spent a lot of time building and protecting your reputation, but do you know what your online reputation is?  Do you know what others are saying about you – good or bad?

There is a number of tools out their that let you find out what others are saying.  At a minimum, be familiar with our old friend Google.  Sure, you probably have already Google’d yourself, or your company name, right?  But have you setup a Google Alert (or two)?

Google Alerts are part of the overall Google services that they offer.  How it works is you type in any search term you want to be kept up to date about – such as your name or company.  Then, each time Google tracks a new web page with your keyword term or terms, it kicks an email to you with a summary and link to the page so you can see first hand.  Very handy as it is a set it and forget it service.

Twitter.com is a fast growing website in the sea of social media websites.  I’ll be honest in that I didn’t pay it too much attention until more recently – always thought of it as instant message type of service were teenagers talk about who they have a crush on or what they ate for breakfast.  But to keep up the current trends I have been using it more recently and setup a business related account – “netsourcebrent” is my Twitter handle.

For the most part, it doesn’t gel with my type of communication on a business level, but I am seeing more of the value in it.  It is a quick and dirty way to get news about your company out to a large number of people.  Of course, the trick is getting a large number of people to follow you that might actually be interested in what you do or sell.  I’m not looking at Twitter so much now as a place to make sales – I just don’t see lead conversions happening there.  But it definitely has some serious networking potential that can help with establishing creditability.

The hardest part about it is learning to speak and act “Twitter”.  It is kind of like walking into a room full of people and just talking out loud until you generate interest from someone.  But if you don’t talk to anyone, then most definitely no one will talk to you.

As I Twitter more, I’ll share tips and tricks that I pick up.