Apps
Google Buzz: Already Better than Wave (and Maybe Facebook, Too)
Feb 11th
In the past, I have gone on record as being none too impressed with Google Wave. Since then, I’ve seen chatter about the experimental product from the geniuses behind Gmail dwindle to virtually nothing. Sure, occasionally I see someone claiming that it’s actually been useful for them, but the language used is often so defensive in such descriptions that you know even the proponents realize which way the wind is blowing.
Google, too, seems not to need a weather vane to tell it what’s up with its last major new product. Which is why, in my opinion, the search giant introduced Google Buzz yesterday: a Gmail-integrated product which, at least superficially, resembles Wave. Buzz is like Wave, but better, since people are already actually using it.
Top among my laundry list of complaints regarding Google Wave was how it seemed like a walled garden, cut off from other elements of the social web, most notably Gmail itself. Sure, there were a variety of bots and hacks to get those things into Wave, but why make things needlessly complicated, especially with regards to Google’s existing tools? It just seemed designed to sour entry-level and casual users against it.
Google seems to have taken note of that bitterness, and made Buzz with exactly the opposite in mind. It plugs into your existing social networks quickly and easily, but I can already see that people will end up using it instead of, rather than in concert with, sites like Twitter. Avid FriendFeed users like Robert Scoble have quickly thrown their considerable support behind Buzz, possibly because the Google product is fairly reminiscent of that Facebook-acquired networking site.
At a fundamental level, Google Buzz is already much more functional than Wave, if only because it talks to things outside of itself easily and with a minimum of hassle. Plus it lives in your Gmail, which is where a lot of online workers spend much of their day anyway. And unlike Twitter, it supports threaded conversations, and a variety of different methods of interaction and sharing. It’s like Facebook without the annoying apps, or like Twitter with all the good bits of Facebook thrown in.
From a web working perspective, I can already see how it would be better for interviewing, for surveying public opinion, and for conducting meaningful research. As long as people get behind it, it will succeed, and since they already show good signs of doing so, I think this is one horse you can safely bet on.
Do you think Buzz is better than Wave? Do you ever see yourself using it more than Twitter or Facebook in the future?
Social Media Memes: The Benefits of Participation
Feb 11th
Last week, I was somewhat bullied into playing the celebrity doppelganger game that’s making the rounds at Facebook right now. Actually, my friend merely made a suggestion about who I look like and encouraged me to change my profile photo, which is the whole point of the game. You post a picture of a famous lookalike as your own profile shot.
It’s silly, and kind of stupid, but it’s fun and it brightens up the Facebook News Feed. And it actually gets people interacting on Facebook, which it seems to me was once the whole point of the site in to begin with, although I can’t be certain because that’s a time clouded by the impenetrable fog of so many Farmville updates that my brain has been severely damaged.
And since these kinds of memes put the “social” back in “social media,” I find them quite useful from a web working perspective, too. They help you connect on a human level with people you might not otherwise have communicated much with.
Case in point, with many people who add me to Facebook after finding me through professional channels (i.e. this and other blogs I write for), there is little to no follow-up communication after that initial virtual handshake. Regardless of what we claim this says about our proficiency as social networkers, it does not constitute a relationship by any stretch of the imagination.
Thanks to the doppelganger game, and others like it, I’ve actually begun to have meaningful, non-business related interaction with a few of these folks. Even if the initial back-and-forth is quite innocuous, it’s still a seed that can lead to great things growing. Please note, I’m talking about impromptu memes and interaction here, not the use of Facebook apps like Farmville. If Facebook cut off application support tomorrow, I doubt I’d notice, except for the fact that I’d have to click the “Hide” button much less frequently in my News Feed.
The other benefit of participating in the impromptu online social network games that crop up constantly is that they’re just plain fun. You know as well as I do that you’re already spending lots of time procrastinating on Facebook anyway, so why not procrastinate in a way that encourages community building?
Have you developed any meaningful connections via innocuous social games like this?
Google Buzz: Is Its Real Value in the Enterprise?
Feb 10th
Google yesterday released Buzz, its newest foray into the social networking space — and a direct assault on Facebook. There’s a good overview of the new service over on GigaOM, but basically, Buzz provides social networking features (like status updates, photo sharing, location-aware sharing) built right into Gmail. The service is currently being rolled out to Gmail users.
Personally, I’m not sure I’ll get a lot out of Buzz in Gmail — all of my friends use Facebook and Twitter for online interaction (I’m not sure how many of them even have a Gmail account), while most of my professional social networking goes on Twitter and LinkedIn. However, over on GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d), Liz makes a very good point: Buzz’s true value is for enterprise customers of Google Apps.
Here at WebWorkerDaily we’ve used a variety of corporate collaboration and social networking tools to co-ordinate our efforts on the site, some more successfully than others, but even the best apps never feel truly integrated with the tool that we’ve always relied on most to communicate with each other: email. I find that having to use a separate tool (or tools) for collaboration, document sharing and and status updates feels redundant, especially as you then get email notifications from those tools in your inbox. As we already use Google Apps to manage our email, if Buzz can provide the functionality that we’ve relied on other apps for in the past and is truly integrated into the inbox in a logical way, switching from our current tools is going to be a no-brainer — and I suspect that will be true of many other web working companies, too.
Does Buzz have the potential to replace your current set of collaboration tools?
Portable Apps for the Mac
Feb 9th
I have a keen interest in portable apps (like those covered by Doriano) from my time spent working on client sites. Having a suite of productivity applications on a USB flash drive has come in handy many times in my consulting career, especially when I’ve needed a graphics application.
The Windows portable apps suites seem to better known, but I came across a slew of free Mac portable apps while researching another topic, so I thought I would share them here, as they should be useful if you ever have to “hot seat” on a customer’s Mac or breathe some life into an older Mac that may not have all the software you require. In each case, the install routine follows Mac standards, which makes installation from a Flash drive simple and quick.
Portable GIMP. The popular open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop is available as a portable application, which can come in handy if you work on projects where graphics applications are in short supply. It requires X11 to run.
Portable Firefox. Mozilla Firefox isn’t always available on our clients’ machines, but Portable Firefox is an easy alternative to pack along for testing or other activities. While this version of Firefox is compatible with extensions, you are best keeping it “lean and mean” if running Firefox from a USB drive. Portable Firefox will let you import your local Firefox preferences if they are available on the machine.
Portable Camino. If Firefox isn’t your browser of choice, you can use Portable Camino to meet your portable browsing needs. The good news is that the portable browser’s features are on a par with the full version.
Portable Adium. This portable version of the popular multiprotocol and open-source Instant Messaging client supports AIM, GTalk, Yahoo and Jabber IM. Portable Adium lets you import your local Adium preferences if they are available.
Portable Nvu. The portable version of Nvu can come in handy if you need a text editor for editing HTML and other files.
Portable AbiWord. Portable AbiWord is a great portable word processor for most general word processing uses.
Portable OpenOffice.org. There is a portable version of the popular open-source office suite available. However, the only stable version is for the PPC platform, with the Intel version still in testing and not ready for use yet.
Remember, if you plan to take a USB flash drive with portable apps to a client site for use of one of their machines, you should always check their IT security policy, because they may have security restrictions in place.
Do you use Mac portable apps? Which ones?
ClientShow: Smoother Pitches
Feb 9th
If you’re a creative professional, you’ve probably had to make a pitch to a new client. Unless you’re actually able to walk into your clients’ offices, managing those pitches remotely can be difficult. Email often can’t support the big files designers and other creatives work with, and other tools don’t provide real-time interactions at the level necessary for a pitch.
Realizing there was a gap in the market, ClientShow built a platform for pitching and interacting with clients that just went into beta.
The company offers creatives an Adobe AIR application to interact with, while clients can access the information you want them to look at in a Flex-based app in their browser. Your clients can access the information for free, with no downloads. As long as you’re communicating about visuals — whether that’s a web site design or an architectural drawing or a photograph — ClientShow provides a smooth interaction between you and your clients. Your clients see an interface that is branded with your company logo that they can interact with.
Within the creative’s side of the application, ClientShow is divided into four sections: Pad, Work, Pitch and Vault. The Pad area is essentially a dashboard: it allows you to sort between clients, as well as access pitch sessions and schedules. You can also add new people (known as connections) to projects and review any new notes, approvals or files your clients have added since the last time you logged in.
Inside Work, you can easily upload files — it’s a matter of dragging and dropping them into the Adobe AIR application; rich media files are no problem for ClientShow. Once you’ve uploaded files, your clients can access them as well, creating notes for you as well as approving images.
The Pitch page is devoted to creating and scheduling pitch sessions. You can choose images to show your clients, proceeding through them similarly to the way you’d use a slideshow. You can conduct your pitch in real time: ClientShow keeps everyone on the same page, as well as allowing threaded discussions. You can also save past pitches, allowing both yourself and your clients to review them in the future. This system significantly smoothes out the pitch process for web workers, especially when you’re in a different time zone than your clients. Old files and sessions are stored in the Vault, where you can still review notes and sessions easily.
ClientShow seems particularly useful for small creative shops, such as freelancers or partnerships with only a few team members: if you already have a well-established pitch process, it’s not necessarily worth changing it up, but if you struggle with pulling together a professional presentation for each new client, it’s very useful. ClientShow just opened its beta, but the application appears quite polished. During the beta, ClientShow is free to use, although pricing after the final app is released is unclear.
How do you manage remote pitches?
Related GigaOM Pro Research: Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
3 Apps For Collaborating on Scripts Online
Feb 8th
Here are some apps that provide useful ways to collaborate online on writing scripts for anything from short promotional corporate videos to full-length motion pictures. Sure, there are many ways to accomplish this task, such as sharing a document using Google Docs or Zoho Write, but these three apps focus specifically on the task of writing scripts, along with the formatting that requires. They each include the ability to invite other writers to join your project and maintain a centralized copy of the material for each contributor to view and update.
Adobe Story
Adobe Labs is currently featuring Adobe Story in preview mode, which means you can create an account and start using it for free (for now, anyway). You can create projects that can include as many scripts as you want. These projects can also include charactor biographies and links to external resources, like blogs or relevant web sites. The user interface is slick and rather intuitive. There’s also an Adobe AIR desktop app (of course) that conveniently allows you and all collaborators to work in offline mode, synchronizing all changes whenever you’re connected again.
Here’s the home page for a fictitious project I’ve created called “The Revenge of The Blog,” which is basically a remake of the classic campy horror film “The Blob.” There’s also a character biography page for Robert Scoble, who will reprise the Steve McQueen role from the original movie (I said it was fictitious!)
Plotbot
Plotbot is a web-based script-writing app that also allows you to collaborate with other writers. The good news is that the web app functions very well just like a desktop app, and automatically formats the scripts as you write it — you just have to come up with the ideas. It’s pretty good at determining what you’re trying to type, such as a scene heading or character dialogue.
There are also some handy tools, such as the notebook area where you can track thoughts and information about the story as well as a forum area to brainstorm with others. You can upload a screenplay if you already have one available. Plotbot is free.
Celtx
Celtx is a little different than the other apps in this collection. It covers a far wider variety of scripts for more types of projects besides film, such as scripts for video, documentary, theatre, comics, advertising, video games, music video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, and much more. It provide a free desktop application that you can download and install, but collaborating with others via the online service (called Celtx Studio) is not free. It provides collaboration for up to five users for only about $5 per month, which isn’t bad.
The Celtx app offers the most features that I’ve seen in this type of tool. Not only can you add dialogue to scripts, it has other functionality such as a sketch tool to draw objects, a catalog to track all props and objects, index cards to arrange scenes and a cool storyboarding tool. Check out Sam’s post on the app for a full review.
So there you go, three different ways to collaborate with others on scripts, whether it’s for an entertainment project such as a movie or a corporate instructional video. These apps make it extremely easy to maintain all related information and help save you time and effort with the medium’s formatting, so you and your team can focus on the creative aspect of writing.
What tools do you use for collaborating with others on scripts?
Related GigaOM Pro Research: Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
Taking a Closer Look with 1DayLater
Feb 8th
This year, in an effort to get a better grip on the ways I generate income, I’ve been looking for a free, simple app that will allow me to track my income easily. I should say that this was my first priority; as a second priority, I wanted to track my time more closely as well.
Although I like feeling organized, I don’t want to spend ages learning how to use software, and one thing that really frustrates me is unintuitive systems with poor usability. Generally, I think the simpler things are, the better. So I was excited to hear about 1DayLater, a new time-, cash- and distance-tracking service that is nothing if not straightforward.
For me to put the words “excited” and “tracking service” in the same sentence is a big deal. I decided not to get my hopes up. But using the service lived up to expectations: 1DayLater seems to be just what I needed.
The Basics
1DayLater is a free web-based service (additional premium features will be added as the service moves out of beta). Create an account, and you can use the clear interface to enter the “values” associated with the activities that you do: money, time and distance. You associate that value with a client and a date. Simple. If you like, you can add notes to that entry; my entries identify what tasks I completed for each client. There’s also a auto-timer that you can use to track your work in real time. Very handy.
From this point, users currently have a couple of options. The first is “Analysis.” The system can provide you with charts that reflect, for example, the time data you’ve entered, providing a graphical overview of where all your time’s going. This should provide some very interesting (or is that alarming?) information once I’ve been using the system for a while.
The second is “Export,” which lets you download data in OpenOffice spreadsheet format. You can select to download data about a certain client, “value” type — time, expenses, income, mileage — or on the basis of search criteria that you define.
The 1DayLater team is, of course, working on additional features which will include invoicing and mileage claims; these features are likely to form part of the paid component of the 1DayLater service. The Export facility was released as I was reviewing the service, so hopefully these extra features won’t be too far away.
Equally important is mobile access to the service. Those on the go will undoubtedly be disappointed that there are currently no mobile or desktop apps for this service. While this may seem like a big oversight, the 1DayLater blog explains that the team is now working to develop these (not surprisingly often-requested) apps.
Who’s it For?
The brothers who developed this service, Paul and David King, describe their inspiration for the service:
At the start of 2008 we were working separately as freelancers and realised that there was a problem common to both of us — we found it hard to keep track of how much time we were spending on our clients, and that this problem was reflected in our invoices.
As someone who’s in exactly the same place, I find the service is just what I want; a lot of the other software and services I looked at were too complex and detailed for my simple needs. I didn’t need to share my data with anyone else, except maybe an accountant — so what some would perceive as the limits of the 1DayLater service are great news to me.
OK, so the service doesn’t sync with my calendar; most of my time is unscheduled, so this isn’t a feature I need. OK, so it’s a one-person-per-account system; there’s only one of me, so I don’t need to aggregate my data with others (though if I did, I could probably do it manually through the spreadsheet export).
I do think, though, that the present lack of mobile and desktop apps is a limitation that would reduce the convenience of this service for a large portion of web workers — fortunately, not for long!
See For Yourself
You can view the demo for 1DayLater without signing up, but registration is free, so you might as well go ahead and see what the service does for you.
Have you tried 1Daylater? What other time, cash, or expense tracking services can you recommend?
Related GigaOM Pro Research: NewNet Went Social with Partnerships Galore in Q4
Photo by stock.xchng user D-squared.
bit.ly.Pro: Create Short URLs With Your Own Domain
Feb 7th
As Twitter has rapidly risen to dominate the real-time web, related applications and services have also come to prominence; many in the field of URL shortening. Foremost amongst these is bit.ly, which today released a Pro edition of the service.
bitly.Pro is, in essence, a “white-label” edition of the public service, where a short URL such as http://bit.ly/bHRDfP can now be replaced by one with a custom domain, such as http://imrn.me/bHRDfP.
As well as the ability to utilise a custom domain, bitly.Pro also provides a dashboard view, enabling users to view analytics on all the links shared from your custom domain. I put bitly.Pro through its paces today by registering my new domain — imrn.me. Setting up the service is surprisingly easy; here’s how I did it:
- I registered imrn.me with GoDaddy.
- I changed the domain’s nameserver settings to point at my own MediaTemple-hosted server.
- I altered the DNS records (A and CNAME) for the new domain to verify and redirect to bit.ly.pro.
- I logged into bitly.Pro with my standard bit.ly account details to link both account histories.
- Used the standard bit.ly bookmarklet to generate my first custom shortened URL: http://imrn.me/90mM9Q
All in all, the entire setup process took me around 10-15 minutes and the new real-time analytics dashboard will prove useful in tracking the “virality” of my shared links. Sadly, your shortened URLs still share their namespace with other bit.ly users, so your domain will still be suffixed by a five-character reference.
However, other than vanity and analytics, there are good reasons for employing a custom domain for your shortening your URLs.
Why use a custom domain?
In recent months, there’s been much discussion on the impact short URLs are having on the long-term stability of the web; notably by weakening the web with centralised hyperlinks, reducing transparency, introducing unwelcome interstitials and providing opportunities for phishing attacks.
Delicious creator Joshua Schacter suggests some publishers should offer their own shortening services to mitigate some of the negative circumstances of shortening.
Indeed, we’ve recently seen brands such as Flickr, TechCrunch, WordPress and Google offer short URLs such as flic.kr, tcrn.ch, wp.me & goo.gl.
For such prominent brands, content publishers and even prolific Twitter users, bitly.Pro offers a useful form of transparency and trust to users clicking on shortened links.
Though the service doesn’t address the problem of centralization of links, it’s a step in the right direction. For those who demand more control, installing a hosted URL shortening app may be more appropriate.
Related GigaOM Pro Research: Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
Less is Less
Feb 5th
“If ease of use were the only requirement, we would all be riding tricycles” — Douglas Engelbart
Have you noticed that many web-based services advertise themselves with the premise of “less,” or being “simple?” They say their programs reduce the time and energy that your team exerts using unecessary and distracting features, functions and options, letting them focus instead on just doing their work.
Many people appreciate the loose structure of these tools. We use terms like “agile” and “flexible,” and for a lot of use cases this sort of framework can indeed be very appealing.
For example, let’s look at the typical web-based project management tools. Most are essentially designed to be warehouses for all data pertaining to a project. They integrate basic to-do lists, messaging and milestones and provide a framework to hang our project upon and to make sure nothing gets lost. Their open nature and lack of structure make them capable of accommodating a wide array of projects, and you can essentially make them work for just about anything or anyone.
Conversely though, and what concerns me, is that often the lack of features and perceived overhead can actually introduce more real overhead to your process. At what point does their simple nature become a hindrance to the work that actually needs to be done?
Yes, incorporating something like dependent task assignment adds complexity. Yes, introducing advanced message routing can require some thought and set up time. But these features provide value and are worth it in some instances, because working around the lack of some useful functionality causes users additional real — and ongoing — overhead.
The concept of overhead in this context was introduced to me in a recent chat I had with Hamid Shojaee of Axosoft, developers of bug tracking/project management tool OnTime, which I’ll be reviewing in the next day or so. His comments really got me thinking about the way that web applications are developed and marketed.
I certainly recognize and accept that some products and services naturally offer too much or too little functionality and that a single application won’t work for everyone. Needs, goals and requirements vary across the board and I’m glad that there are the multitude of options available to us. Being mindful of our decisions when choosing these applications and accepting the trade-off that “simple” may bring with it other consequences down the road when your needs change.
I always say the best thing about doing what I do is having the chance to interact with smart people, and talking with Hamid and others is always a fascinating and enlightening process. It is my pleasure to also have occasional chats with self-proclaimed “interface radical” Amy Hoy, designer for the Freckle time tracking service. We rant about the state of user interface and interaction design, and I always appreciate her candid comments.
In our most recent chat we talked about the concept of “simplicity,” and how as a mantra it provides a nice warm fuzzy feeling and a compelling argument for use, but is “less” or “simple” really the issue? She says an application can be complex, or introduce complexity and still be powerful, enjoyable and surprising. “Way too much of the usability talk on the web focuses on first run experience, says everything should be obvious, but that’s oversimplifying the issue.”
So what concerns me is if this quest for creating simple software is hurting us. Are we creating a culture of users that require a dumbed down experience, at the expense of the increased efficiencies and productivity gains we can realize with more complex tools? Are we also stifling the creativity of the designers and developers who are afraid to provide useful features because of the fear that they may be complex or not immediately obvious?
Hoy says, “A tool you use a lot should offer opportunities to grow and learn,” and I love this concept. We as business owners, entrepreneurs, web workers and freelancers are smart, naturally inquisative, resourceful and creative. We are capable of using software that challenges us; in fact, I believe we could benefit from it.
Are you afraid of your software doing less?
Sendible Relaunches; Now a Powerful Social Media Marketing Tool
Feb 4th
Sendible, a service for scheduling and posting messages to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, has recently relaunched with some great new features that should prove very useful for social media marketers.
Unlike many of the services that Doriano mentioned in his free Twitter automation tools roundup, Sendible lets you schedule and send messages to a myriad of services, including Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Plurk, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Brightkite and a host of others.
It’s much more than that, though. Since we that we last wrote about it back in 2008, Sendible has relaunched with some significant upgrades. These changes make it a much more useful marketing tool, allowing you to reach all of your contacts from one interface, no matter what services they use.
New features include the ability to import contacts from other services, a content discovery service that helps you find interesting or useful content to share, the ability to automatically share content from a blog, email marketing and newsletter tools, as well as social media monitoring, tracking and analytics tools.
If you’re involved with social media marketing efforts, Sendible looks to be an extremely powerful tool that’s worth checking out. A limited free plan is available (it doesn’t have many of the cool features I mentioned above), while paid plans range from $5 to $40 per month.
Do you use Sendible for social media marketing? What do you think of the new version?
Related GigaOM Pro Research:
Collaborative Note Taking 101
Feb 3rd
Note taking can be a personal exercise. Look around any conference table today and you’ll see a wide spectrum of note taking techniques, ranging from people writing on paper to folks tapping away at laptop keyboards.
But the notes themselves are also often quite personal. For example, when I go into a client meeting, I am there from a technical documentation standpoint, and my notes reflect that. Likewise, I would expect not to get much from the notes of a programmer. The result is that “knowledge islands” can form as everyone hoards their own notes.
Applications like OneNote, Evernote and WikiTouch offer collaborative note taking features, enabling teams to access each others’ notes for collaboration, and help distribute that knowledge within an organization by capturing meeting, research and project notes in a centrally accessible location.
Here are some tips for implementing collaborative note taking on your project team:
- Define the benefits. Moving your team to a collaborative note taking platform shouldn’t be a cause for more work, especially if note taking is already an integral element in your work. It is important to communicate the benefits of the move to the entire team. Is it to capture important project information like requirements? Is it to better document decisions? Is meeting and research information falling through gaps?
- Choose the appropriate application. Moving your team to a standard platform for note taking shouldn’t be a daunting task. However, you need to factor in team member note taking styles and security considerations into the decision. If your organization is hesitant about keeping private notes in the cloud then I suggest taking a look at OneNote, which enables you to keep your note taking and collaboration inside the firewall. If the cloud is OK, then Evernote or Evernote Premium (with its SSL security encryption) would also be an option.
- Set note taking guidelines. Moving note taking to a collaborative app may require some initial guidelines to enable a seamless transition. Depending on your needs, your note taking guidelines may include templates to use (OneNote includes note taking templates), and directions about things like the use of fonts, numbering and bullet points. The aim of your guidelines should be to ensure some consistency across the notes your team takes. The end goal is to have a repository of notes that is accessible and understandable to all those on the project team.
- Set note taking roles. While collaborative note taking removes the need for a single “scribe” to take meeting notes, I might recommend that you still pay some attention to note taking roles when moving to a collaborative note taking environment. For example, you may want to make sure that project related notes are recorded by the project manager.
Do you use collaborative note taking on any of your projects? Share your experience below.
Related GigaOM Pro Research:
Photo by stock.xchng user wagg66.
TimeSvr: On-demand Virtual Assistants
Feb 3rd
Moving from the well-oiled corporate environment of personal assistants and friction-free expense accounts to arranging my own travel and doing my own accounts was jarring; I’ve long toyed with the idea of engaging a virtual or remote executive assistant to help with administrative tasks. However, the pioneers in this field — Indian companies such as Brickwork, YourManInIndia and Get Friday — all seemed a little too expensive, requiring a commitment to buying large regular blocks of time. Essentially, what I needed was a virtual assistant provider with pay-as-you-go billing rather than subscription plans — which is why I was interested to see the offering from TimeSvr.
TimeSvr allows you to purchase the time of a dedicated “aide” for $85-350 (ten to fifty hours) or a flat rate of $69/month for a shared aide.
To create a task, you simply pull up the “dashboard view” and describe what you need in a few sentences; clicking “Do It” sets the task in motion with your TimeSvr aide.
I spent an hour or so queuing up a trio of tasks for the TimeSvr aides to work though on my behalf. The company CEO, Zaki Mahomed, was CC’d on my tasks, without the aides knowing that their work was under review. Here’s how they did.
Task 1: “Could you identify the best venues to hold a 2-day, 200 delegate conference in the city of Leeds (UK)“
TimeSvr aide Irfan found the city’s official bureau for conference venues and suggested Hillside and Weetwood Hall as candidate locations. The task was completed quickly, but the suggestions lacked range and depth. This could perhaps have been mitigated by a little back-and-forth conversation between myself and Irfan to narrow down my requirements.
Task 2: “What would be the total cost of flights, hotels & registration for me to attend this year’s SxSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The festival takes place March 12-16 and I’ll be traveling from Manchester, UK, and I’ll also need accommodation near the Austin Convention Centre”
Ammar provided me with a pretty comprehensive a range of flight options from $600-700, along with a table of all SxSW registration packages and details for three hotels. Sadly, the hotels all seem to be quite far out and seemingly not drawn from the festival’s own hotel finder. What I was really looking for was a ballpark figure, so I could make a decision about attending; perhaps something I should have been more explicit about.
Task 3: “Other than Knight Foundation, are there any other funding bodies for journalism ventures in the United Kingdom or overseas?”
Ammar also picked up this task and did well to identify three organisations, one of which appears to be a great lead.
On the whole, I was impressed with the clean user experience and task submission interface, which felt almost Twitter-esque in its simplicity. Where I was specific and detailed with a request (as in Task 2) I got satisfactory results; where I wasn’t as specific, the responses were less useful.
Responses are delivered via email, but strangely aren’t displayed next to the “Previous Tasks” view in the application interface, making it difficult to gauge how long a task took and to keep tasks connected with their outcomes. Tasks are also flagged as completed by the aide, rather than the requester, so the opportunity to create an ongoing conversation or dialogue around a request is limited. Completed tasks do have ”feedback” and “response” options, but they seems to be articulated with an assumption that a task is closed, rather than being an ongoing dialogue.
Overall, I certainly got the feeling of being looked after and that the aides themselves communicated well. They’re fast, but perhaps taking a little more time with a task would give better outcomes. I’d really liked to have seen a little more initiative from the aides, and perhaps a preamble conversation before they attempted to tackle the tasks.
A great assistant can take initiative, anticipating their employer’s needs; such initiative perhaps only comes with time as aides and employers build a rapport and learn to read each other. With that in mind, my experience with my aides Ammar and Irfan was pretty good, and I’m sold on experimenting further with a personal plan.
Have you used TimeSvr, or a similar service? How did it work out for you?
Plaxo Releases Improved Social Address Book
Feb 3rd
Plaxo, the contact synchronization service that we’ve covered previously, has released a much-improved version of its address book, the bread and butter of the app. The first thing you’ll notice is the speed. It’s now so much faster when searching your contacts. It actually starts displaying results as you’re typing the names in the search box in real-time, which is cool. Opening the contact record is also faster, without no delay after double-clicking on a contact.
The other new feature involves categorizing your contacts into groups. Yes, it’s really just another way of creating distribution lists which comes in handy when corresponding with large groups of people at once. You can add your contacts to more than one group and send emails to the group.
Also new is the ability to mark your favorite contacts with a star, which makes them appear on the front page of your address book. All of your top contacts from Gmail automatically get the gold star but you can easily unselect it.
Plaxo has also renamed its social streaming “Pulse” service to “Stream.” All of the same functionality remains, it’s just a new name.
These changes point to a good future for one of the elder statesmen of the Web 2.0 era. Plaxo has listened to its users, improved performance and added some useful features. It’s still the best when it comes to importing contacts from other address books such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. By the way, you might have missed this feature but you can also import all of your LinkedIn contacts. Just perform a LinkedIn address book export and upload it to Plaxo here.
It’s going to be interesting to see what other socially-aware address book services like Gist and Soocial will do in this space. I think it’s surprising to see that Google still hasn’t done much with Gmail’s address book; I want contact information synchronization and other social networking features to get added, but nothing much has changed. Not yet anyway.
Do you use Plaxo? What do you think of the new address book?
Related GigaOM Pro Research:
- Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
- Threats Loom Large for Microsoft’s Email and Collaboration Platforms
Photo by PhotoXpress user Andrey Zyk
Black Tonic: Present Your Slides Live Online
Feb 3rd
Wolverine, Portland-based design consultancy firm, today launched Black Tonic, a web-based app that helps presenters deliver a presentation to their viewers — live and in real time.
There’s no shortage of web-based applications for authoring and publishing presentations (Google Docs, Slideshare) or screen-sharing (Yuuguu) in real time, but Wolverine has chosen to orient its Black Tonic app around a handful of basic principles that differentiate it from existing services:
- Instant “experience sharing,” synchronizing browsers for all those watching a presentation.
- Placing control in the hands of the presenter alone.
- Stripping back the interface to give prominence to the slides’ content, rather than the app itself.
After signing up, presenters’ accounts are provisioned with a custom subdomain, and they can begin to upload their slides as a series of GIF, JPEG or PNG images. Once uploaded, presenters can invite viewers to their presentation simply by issuing them with the unique URL automatically generated by the application; for example, http://webworkerdaily.blacktonic.com/izu2ar9.
The synchronized presentation sessions — powered by the company’s innovative XS technology — work great and require minimal explanation to viewers; they just click and watch. However, despite my fondness for simplicity in application and service design, the stripped-back, minimalist features of Black Tonic’s suggest a great, albeit unfinished service.
Critically, Black Tonic is missing a mechanism to directly import Keynote or Powerpoint slides, or even batch upload slide images; this raises the barrier to entry for new users. Though the XS-powered synchronization works very well, presentations need an additional medium to provide context — such as a conference call or real-time chat. Providing built-in features to set up, for example, a Skype conference call, though reducing simplicity, would provide value to users and even a route to future revenues.
Less crucially, it’s unclear if the generated URLs are permalinks. If so, should a downloadable collection of slides be available alongside privacy controls? And why not also shorten those URLs by default for further flexibility — http://bt.nc/zu2ar9, for example.
Black Tonic shows great promise and it’s worth experimenting with. I suspect that the creators — David Price and Phillipe Blanc — will be adding features rapidly as they learn how users are responding, so do register and give your feedback!
Tried Back Tonic? Let us know what you think of it below.
Related GigaOM Pro Research:
“Report: The Real-Time Enterprise“
Augmented Reality Apps Will Change the Way We See the World
Feb 3rd
Augmented reality (AR) apps (like WorkSnug, a neat app that helps you to find good places to work nearby that I wrote about last year) are becoming more commonplace. GigaOM has published a great set of infographics summarizing the main AR apps, how they work, and the benefits they provide.
See the full set of graphics over on GigaOM.
Related GigaOM Pro Research: “Report: Mobile Augmented Reality Today and Tomorrow“
LinkedIn Offers Users Increased Control Over Profiles
Feb 2nd
As of today, according to the LinkedIn Blog, users of the popular career-oriented social network can rearrange the order in which elements appear in a member’s profile — the page on the site that displays information about one’s background.
In the past, profiles have been structured like standard résumés, with elements appearing in fixed order: a header, a text summary, optional applications like blog links, experience, education, recommendations, and an “additional information” section with web links, awards and such.
Now, when you click on “Edit Profile,”you’ll see a four-way arrow to the left of the section names. Drag it to rearrange the sections. Check out the video to see how it works.
This will be a boon to students, who may wish to make their educational backgrounds more prominent, as well as to entrepreneurs and career changers, who may wish to highlight other parts of their backgrounds besides their “day jobs.”
LinkedIn plans to offer more enhancements to LinkedIn profiles soon.
Will you rearrange your LinkedIn profile? What other editing abilities would you like to see on the site?
How to Use Location-based Social Networks For Business
Feb 2nd
I just started using Foursquare. I know, I know. You hate it. Or you love it, and you can’t believe it took me so long to get onto it. Foursquare just became available in Alaska so I’m on a mission to visit and list as many places as I can with tips and reviews so that by summertime, Alaska businesses will reap the rewards.
My feelings about location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite and the like have been mixed. I’ve avoided them to date because of that knee-jerk “it’s too creepy” reaction that one gets when thinking of letting others — especially strangers — know one’s exact location. Maybe it’s because, frankly, many women I know (myself included) have been stalked.
But lately, because of Fourquare, I’ve been looking at location-based social networks in a different way. I recently wrote about Foursquare on my personal blog and concluded that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.
Here’ s my take on the benefits of location-based social networks like Foursquare from a work standpoint:
- Connecting. With business travel, particularly to conferences, I find that I often don’t even know some of my friends and colleagues are in the vicinity. Foursquare notices that appear from friends on the network allow serendipitous discovery and can lead to impromptu meet-ups that can prove fruitful for work.
- Socializing. A few years ago, Twitter took SXSW by storm, with attendees utilizing the microblogging system to track people down. I’m wondering if Foursquare will be this year’s Twitter at SXSW, or maybe it is already over in those more techie circles and everyone has moved on to the next app. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing when someone I know is at a nearby cafe or restaurant. I’m assuming it would then be socially acceptable to just show up and say “hi,” since they’ve publicly announced their location.
- Discovering. Gone are the days of being on a business trip and having to rely on the concierge for restaurant suggestions or the wait staff for meal recommendations. I’m already enjoying the Foursquare tips that show up for establishments nearby. I’ve also used Around Me on recent trips, but Foursquare’s recommendations of friends popping up when I’m in a new area is far more compelling than simple listings.
- Promoting. What is really interesting about an application like Foursquare is how local businesses can leverage it to attract more customers. The concept that Foursquare members can get discounts and perks from businesses by becoming “mayor” or frequenting a place often is genius.
In an age of marketing when consumers are digesting information in new ways, taking advantage of hybrid applications that combine online and offline elements is smart business. For example, Yelp’s Monocle mode augmented reality feature is dramatically changing the ways we think of “online,” “offline” and “location.”
While privacy and safety issues still exist with any GPS-enabled application that lets you broadcast your stats to your friends or the world, I think we are going to location-based apps continue to become more mainstream. And I, for one, am eager to see where else this can take us, and how it will affect the way we network and work.
How do you feel about location-based social networks, and how do you leverage them for your work?
Related GigaOM Pro Research: “Call it Real-Time, Squared, or NewNet, The Web Is Changing“
Free Twitter Automation Tools Roundup
Feb 1st
There are several tools available that can schedule tweets to post at a specific time on Twitter; they can be handy for a number of reasons. For example, you could create several tweets for Monday through Friday with a list of the guests that will be appearing on your podcast or radio show. You could also schedule tweets at different days of the week announcing special promotions for your small business, restaurant or whatever. These scheduled tweets could also simply be reminders for your followers about anything else going on in your life such as a tweetup, convention or other event. Scheduled tweets can also be good for those that want to post something for their international friends or clients in different time zones.
With these tools, you are no longer required to send your tweets in real time, because you can write them in advance, making them a perfect solution for those of us who can’t find the time to jump on Twitter on a consistent, regular basis. Whenever you find a pocket of time for Twitter, you can sit down, write several tweets, and queue them up to post at a later date.
Here are some of the better free Twitter automation tools that I’ve seen. There are a few good tools that require a paying a fee, but the selections in this roundup are all free, with some of them offering a more advanced premium package, should you want or need it.
Twuffer does one thing only: sending tweets you place in its queue at the times you schedule. Nothing fancy, just a simple calendar-based interface to pick when you want your tweet to go live.
SocialOomph (an app formerly known as TweetLater) provides a suite of tools, including a free edition that includes the ability to schedule your tweets.It also provides a premium suite that includes additional tools for Twitter and Facebook automation. However, if all you want to do is schedule your tweets then the free version will do the trick. There are a couple of extra perks that I’d like to mention here. Besides scheduling tweets, the free edition of SocialOomph also lets you create and save drafts of tweets that you can reuse over and over again. While that might smack of spamming, it could actually provide some non-nefarious benefits as well, particularly if you often end up writing similar tweets. The other features I like is that it lets you use your own URL shortening service such as Bit.ly, and you can also schedule tweets to publish to multiple Twitter accounts.
FutureTweets doesn’t take the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach that SocialOomph does but it does schedule tweets rather well. If that’s all you need, than this one will work for you.
HootSuite is a popular Twitter client that happens to include the ability to schedule your tweets for future posting. You can access HootSuite via its web site or any number of special desktop apps and browser add-ons. You can view, edit or delete scheduled tweets from a column called “Pending Tweets.”
Twaitter (soon to be renamed Gremlin) is another powerful suite of free services that includes a scheduler for tweets. The thing I like about this one is that it also connects to Ping.fm, which means you can not only schedule posts to Twitter but also to many other social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. It also includes an option to save drafts and includes follow management tools.
CoTweet is designed for organizations with multiple Twitter accounts and/or multiple Twitter members that work as a team to manage their online presence. Included in its arsenal of useful tools is the tweet scheduler, which has a calendar that helps schedule your tweets. Another handy tool is the ability to assign tweets as if they were tasks, thus giving your account a project manager (of sorts) for Twitter. 
There you have it, just some of the free ways that you and your organization can schedule to Twitter, and some other social networks as well. Some of these services include an option to schedule recurring tweets, which could violate Twitter’s Terms of Service. Both Twitter and its members frown upon such behavior because spammers have abused this kind of feature; think twice before setting up recurring tweets too often.
Do you use any of these tools, or any others, to schedule your tweets?
Image Credit: PhotoExpress user Adam Borkowski.
Secunia Online Software Inspector Scans for Missing Patches
Jan 29th
Out-of-date, unpatched software can leave a computer open to attack from malware and hackers. Secunia, a leading provider of software vulnerability intelligence, provides a few free tools that you can use to scan Windows machines, such as the Online Software Inspector. It works via Java, so there’s no need to download anything.
The scanner checks that Microsoft patches are applied, then makes sure 70 of the applications commonly targeted by hackers (Flash, Acrobat, QuickTime, etc) are up-to-date. The scanning process is quick — on my laptop it took less than a minute, and revealed a number of out-of-date apps.
If you’re looking for a deeper scan of all of the apps on your hard drive, I’d recommend using the Personal Software Inspector instead (also free). But for a quick check-up of the software health of any Windows machine, the Online Software Inspector works well. And anything that prevents your PC from getting hacked is a step in the right direction.
Are all of your apps and patches up-to-date?
(via Techie Buzz)
Find Somewhere to Work With Laptopfriendlycafes
Jan 28th
Last year I wrote about WorkSnug, a neat augmented reality app for the iPhone that can help you find good places to work (coffee shops, coworking spaces, libraries, etc) nearby. If you don’t have an iPhone, you might like to try Laptopfriendlycafes.com. It’s an easy-to-use web site that also has a database of cafes; you can search on a location name, zip or postal code to get a listing of places nearby that might make good locations from which to work. Laptopfriendlycafes’ database lists whether each cafe has free or paid Wi-Fi, its address, whether power is available, the availability of 3G reception, as well as user ratings and comments.
Unfortunately, like WorkSnug, Laptopfriendlycafes.com’s database outside of the major cities is fairly limited. Searching in London returns plenty of results, for example, while searching in my home city of Bristol (which does have plenty of laptop-friendly cafes) reveals none. As it’s free, however, if you’re looking for somewhere to work nearby a quick search using the web site won’t cost you anything — just don’t assume that because it’s returned no results that there are no good cafes nearby.
Laptopfriendlycafes also has a companion iPhone app ($0.99, iTunes link), which covers New York, London, Sydney and Melbourne, and can use GPS to get your current location to find nearby places to work.
How do you find places to work when you’re in a new city?
Ember: An Online Design Scrapbook
Jan 28th
Back in May 2008, I reviewed Scrnshots, a great web-based service enabling designers to share their inspiration and a kind of “social network for screenshots.”
Along with its desktop uploader, Scrnshots has become a regular part of my own workflow, keeping a public articulation of the digital designs and elements that inspire my work elsewhere. Scnrshots has been ticking over nicely, though few features have been added recently, and the Mac edition of the desktop app isn’t compatible with Snow Leopard.
So when I recently came across Ember, a service similar to Scrnshots but with more contemporary features, a smarter interface and cleaner design, I was keen to try it out.
Like Scrnshots, the basics of Ember are really all about uploading images, and adding some descriptive metadata for future reference. However, Ember offers a few extra capabilities:
- The ability to flag an uploaded image as private.
- Every metadata element of an uploaded image’s page is directly editable with a simple click.
- Images can be added to collections, to help theme and organize related imagery.
- Every page has an integrated URL shortner that generates URLs such as http://embr.it/gW — handy for the integrated Twitter support.
- Integration with desktop and iPhone tools such as LittleSnapper for offline use and mobile capture respectively. Though these don’t appear to be as sophisticated as Scrnshot’s desktop app.
However, unlike Scrnshots’ free offering, Ember is a tiered service, with both free and paid service plans. The free plan allows thirty uploads a month and up to three collections, but to get the most out of the service, you’ll need to upgrade to the $25/year option.
As a long-term Scrnshots user, I find it unfortunate that there’s no way for me to export data as a single batch from one service to the other. Indeed, both Scrshots and Ember illustrate a pressing need to include data portability by default in all web applications.
Ember’s a great service that’s actually pretty good value for money, though I find it hard to invest time into another app that doesn’t let me at my data without resorting to using an API.
Where do you keep images for digital inspiration?
Sustainable Printing: The Environmental Impact of Your Printer
Jan 28th
Despite the friction-free transmission of documents that the web has brought us, and with the ubiquity of PDF files, the rise of e-book readers and perhaps an Apple iPad, we’re still a long way from the utopian vision of a paperless office.
Printing is still an important part of every web worker’s workflow, and though it’s quite arcane, much of our communication and documentation is still conducted via a paper trail. Not only does this leave piles of paper to manage, there’s the economic cost of all of that ink and paper and, importantly, there’s also an environmental cost involved with printing that we all bear as a society.
In a recent issue of Wired UK, Thomas Counsell from the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing speculated that up to two percent of greenhouse gases are a result of paper consumption, largely driven by the production and disposal of new and used printed paper.
Counsell’s research is focused on technologies that use a combination of ultrasound and chemical solvents to remove toner from printed documents, enabling paper to reused. Though Counsell’s research is still very much in the labs and somewhat fantastical, there are alternatives, available today, that can help us make environmental and financial judgments about the paper and ink that we use.
The Paper-Less Alliance’s web site not only provides handy advice on how to reduce paper consumption, but also provides free software, in collaboration with PaperCut, to help individuals and companies visualize their paper consumption in terms of a carbon footprint, trees, energy use and financial impact.
GreenPrint offers an inexpensive software solution that adds a new printer profile to Macs and PCs. As documents are sent to the “virtual” GreenPrint printer, they’re analyzed, and attention is drawn to wasteful or unnecessary areas, which users can then choose to remove from the final printout.
For example, many documents often have a page with just a few words or lines on the last page; GreenPrint automates the discovery of such inefficiencies.
Adobe’s Tools for Sustainable Design are yet to be released, but were previewed by Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch last Spring at ETech 2009. Lynch demonstrated some great demos, including:
- optimizing a box pattern to use less paper
- tools that show the toxicity and chemical impact of various ink colors
- embedded guidelines from organizations such as Greenpeace
- calculating the number of trees or soy plants required for a print job
- suggesting digital rather than hard copy outputs
More recently, designer Matthew Robinson conducted a somewhat unscientific project entitled “Measuring Type,” which explored how much ink commonly utilized typefaces tended to use. Robinson discovered that Garamond had the highest ink efficiency.
Though I tend not to print much anyway, preferring the flexibility of digital documents, these four initiatives have forced me to understand the true cost of printing and show that software can help us make value judgments about environmental issues.
A year ago we saw controversy and ridicule around one researcher’s carbon calculation of a Google search, yet our various applications and tools still aren’t doing a great job of reporting their environmental impact to users. As we see software emerge to help us understand the environmental impact of printing, I hope we’ll start to see other categories of software and hardware reveal their environmental impact and cost.
Coincidentally, the Daily Beast just published a great article on the advantages and disadvantages of going paper-free, entitled “My Paperless Life.”
Are you mindful of the environmental impact of your printing? Which strategies do you employ to reduce waste?
JobDeck: Twitter Work Search from the TweetDeck Team
Jan 27th
If you’re looking for a job online, you could go to Workopolis and Monster and try your luck, but those tools seem a little outdated. Sure, they’re probably a step up from just checking out your local newspaper’s classified section (do those still exist?), but they haven’t kept up with the times very well. If you’re looking for a modern and exciting job, there are better options to explore.
One of those better options is Twitter. Twitter has the advantage of being a great way to open a direct line of communication between yourself and a potential employer before you even forward your work history or even any professional information at all. It’s almost the virtual equivalent of landing a job based on a conversation with a seatmate on an airplane.
JobDeck aims to make the process of looking for work on Twitter even easier. It provides a refined search that allows you to drill down and find job offers and information about prospective employers and employees, and it does it all in the familiar environment of TweetDeck, so as long as you’ve used the popular Adobe AIR-based Twitter client in the past, you won’t have to go learning a new interface all over again.
In fact, JobDeck really isn’t much more than a standard install of TweetDeck with some colorful rebadging and a couple of very special unique columns that will help you in your job search efforts. All the regular features are there, too, so you have access to your main timeline and all the time-wasting fun that could potentially go along with that. My advice? Create a new Twitter account devoted solely to job hunting in order to keep your focus and avoid distraction.
As mentioned, there are two new columns introduced in JobDeck, which is powered by TwitJobSearch, a site that provides search results from Twitter pre-filtered and tailored to job hunters. The first is a “Job Search Experts” user list. It’s a good way to pick up tips and find interesting articles about the job market and career development in general, and it has the benefit of allowing you to keep these people out of your main Twitter feed, where they might not be as appreciated or could get lost.
The other column is a dedicated column that returns results from the TwitJobSearch main feed, which searches the web, returns relevant job search results and organizes them into a single stream. As of right now, a lot of the traffic is related to the JobDeck app itself, but scrolling through the feed reveals that it does do a decent job of collecting career hunting info. Unfortunately, it’s also hit or miss, including info for jobs ranging from KFC front-line employees to iPhone app developers.
It’s nice, but it isn’t yet impressive enough to merit its own dedicated client in my opinion. It reminds me more of the Blink-182 branded TweetDeck release than a new and unique tool. The TwitJobSearch site itself is a much more useful tool, with customizable advanced search options and an experimental job map feature. Not to mention that the interface is quite attractive and highly usable, and there’s a browse function that lets you see job tweets by category in case you aren’t yet sure what exactly it is you’re looking for.
If you’re already using TweetDeck and you’re looking for work, using the JobDeck special edition isn’t going to cost you anything, and might provide you with a few useful links and/or tips. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for something that will dramatically change they way you look for work, skip this release and just use the web-based or iPhone version of TwitJobSearch, especially if you’re not a fan of the TweetDeck interface.
Landed a job through Twitter? Tell us about how you did it!
New Silverlight Client for Facebook: I Can’t Believe This is Facebook
Jan 27th
Facebook is, more or less, something unpleasant that I tolerate. It used to have the advantage of at least comparing favorably to MySpace, which I find a user experience nightmare. But with the gradual decline of that network (except among reality TV stars and bands, and reality TV bands), Facebook stands on its own and doesn’t fare nearly as well.
Luckily, Facebook recently opened up its API to allow third-party developers more access to core features, which gives them a chance to rework the web app and deliver something a little easier on the eyes and potentially less frustrating. That’s exactly what Microsoft’s done with its new Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook, available for Windows and Mac. It’s also demonstrated that Microsoft can sometimes make something I actually like.
As you can see from the screenshots below, the Silverlight Facebook client does something visually striking with the content it pulls from Facebook itself. It uses a fairly sparse dark theme with big, easy-to-read type that borrows just enough from the standard web-based Facebook layout that you won’t find yourself hunting for commands and interface elements.
Your main view shows your news feed (the live feed, not the “News Feed,” which is completely useless and should not be the default for any reason). You can filter your news feed results using the same filters you’d find on Facebook.com, which appear down the left-hand side. Commenting and “liking” is enabled in the news feed, and you can post status updates by clicking the “what’s on your mind?” link at the top. Clickable selections from your friends’ photo updates appear slightly blurred on the right-hand side, providing even more functionality.
You can also switch to either “grid” or “photos feed” modes. Grid displays your news feed in a columnar view, so that you can see more at once. Photos feed brings the partially-obscured photos backdrop to the fore and displays a mosaic of your friends’ recently uploaded images. It’s quite nice looking, and it provides a way of looking through your contacts’ images that’s far more appealing than Facebook’s standard method.
The photo browsing in general is very cool, and it feels much better checking out albums than it does on the web. The only downside I’ve found is that some albums, for whatever reason, aren’t browsable in the app, because of some setting the uploader has used in creating them.
What really puts this client over the top, in my opinion, is that it gives you access to both Events and your messages. Thanks to the inclusion of both of those features, I no longer have to visit the web-based Facebook at all. You won’t be able to use Facebook chat through the Silverlight app, but there are other solutions for that, too, including some web-based clients and multi-client apps like Beejive for the iPhone (which is what I use).
Other limitations include some control issues –you have to click on a column’s arrows to scroll, instead of using a mouse wheel, for example. This may be a limitation of Silverlight itself, or it could just be because the client is still in an early beta stage at this point, but it does get a bit annoying. You also can’t hide things you don’t want to see without visiting the Facebook web site, and some types of links will take you back to the web, though I didn’t encounter this very often because those are mostly Facebook app links, which I don’t generally use anyway. There are also some obvious bugs, but again, this is an early beta.
By far the most useful aspect of the Silverlight Facebook client is how it treats Facebook more like a CRM system and less like something to use for idle distraction. For example, whenever you view messages between yourself and someone else, it populates the right-hand side of the app with the latest updates, links and photos posted by that person. That way you can refer directly to that contact’s recent activity. It isn’t providing you with any information you can’t get on the web site, but it is combining and presenting it in much more useful ways.
It’s a solid Facebook client, and it makes the service feel much more professional. If you use Facebook during the course of your work, and you aren’t happy with how it works on the web, the Silverlight Client is definitely worth checking out.
Post your thoughts on the Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook below.
SmartDraw 2010: An Easy-to-use Diagramming Tool
Jan 26th
Drawings and diagrams are playing an increasingly important role in creative, marketing and technical communications. If you are an independent web worker who needs to create diagrams, you need to choose your drawing tools carefully, especially if you’re like me — not a skilled artist.
SmartDraw 2010 from SmartDraw.com offers an easy-to-use drawing and diagramming solution for Windows, targeting those of us who aren’t professional graphic designers. It integrates with other tools, and has built-in features for creating diagrams for pretty much any business purpose: charts and graphs; floor plans; flow charts; matrices; mind maps; network diagrams; org charts; storyboards; project charts; timelines; and maps.
The application is available as a direct download from SmartDraw.com and costs $197 (for a single-user license), with a 30-day trial available.
Integration with Microsoft Project
The Project Chart feature includes the editing, formatting and management tools that you might enjoy in other full-featured project management applications. You also have the option to import and export Microsoft Project files. Once you’ve imported a Microsoft Project file into SmartDraw 2010’s Project Chart, you can continue modifying the overall project including time frame, tasks, milestones and properties. You also have the option to view your project chart as a Gantt chart, mind map or time line.
My import tests seemed to hang while SmartDraw 2010 was formatting the charts. Not a good sign, but despite the time it took, I was able to get very clean imports from Project into SmartDraw 2010.
Mind Mapping
Once thought of primarily as a brainstorming tool, mind maps are now used for communicating project requirements, process flows and creating other visualization artifacts. SmartDraw 2010 supports mind maps, though you may find the level of support basic compared to full-featured mind mapping applications like MindJet MindManager 8. I do like how SmartDraw 2010 includes a Mind Map view in its Project Chart feature.
Integration with PowerPoint
PowerPoint presentations do power many business meetings, even though the application lacks robust drawing tools. With SmartDraw 2010, you can plan out your PowerPoint presentations with the PowerPoint Storyboard feature, then import your storyboard directly into PowerPoint to give you a jumpstart on creating your presentation. You also have the option to send many of the charts and diagrams you create in SmartDraw 2010 directly into PowerPoint using a menu option.
Collaboration with Visio
SmartDraw 2010 includes a Visio import filter, which should assist collaboration between Visio and SmartDraw 2010 users working on the same project.
While I tend to gravitate towards Visio for my Windows-based drawing needs, I found SmartDraw 2010 to be an impressive tool with a well-rounded feature set. It should appeal to users who aren’t graphic designers and who need a diagramming tool with a short learning curve.
Have you used SmartDraw 2010? Share your experience below.
MeetingMix: Get Your Meetings in Gear
Jan 26th
Managing meetings when you’re not actually in the same building as the folks you’re meeting with can be difficult. Not only do you have to determine a time that works for everyone, no matter what time zone they’re in, but you have to determine an agenda and figure out how you’re going to keep the meeting on track. MeetingMix speeds up the process of setting your agenda, as well as helping you keep the meeting flowing and managing minutes.
Setting up a meeting in MeetingMix is a matter of giving it a name and assigning it to a time and date. At that point, you can begin to set an agenda by adding topics, as well as subtopics as necessary. You can also assign presenters to speak about each point on the agenda. Once you’ve added everything you want on the agenda, you can send it out to those individuals you need to attend the meeting. You have the choice of using MeetingMix’s email tool or emailing each attendee a link to the agenda yourself. Once you’ve invited other attendees to see the meeting agenda, they can review it, suggest additional agenda topics and review any minutes that have already been added if your meeting has started. You can also upload relevant files, which meeting attendees can download and review.
When you’re ready to start the meeting, you can activate MeetingMix’s live meeting tool. It integrates your agenda with a timer and a minutes tool. Anyone attending the meeting can log into the minutes tool and add their own notes on what’s happening in the meeting, as well as details like next steps. Because you can easily tell who wrote which note, you can keep the meeting on track and revisit individual questions and concerns at a later time. (If necessary, you can disable your fellow attendees’ ability to add, edit or delete information.) The minutes tool is particularly easy to use — just enter text and hit “save.” You can add some rich text formatting as needed, as well.
During meetings, you can also create action items and assign them to attendees. You can also add “parking lot” items. At any time you can change topics, check the full agenda or stop the meeting timer. You can see at a glance how much time has been spent on a particular topic, as well, telling you whether you need to speed the meeting along. When the meeting is over, you can review minutes and send a copy to any attendees, as well as save it to PDF or print it. You can also check which of the individuals you invited actually made it to the meeting.
If you hold multiple meetings through MeetingMix, it’s easy to import information from past meetings, allowing continuity between meetings. Your minutes for past meetings are also available for review if you need to go back and check what was said during a past meeting.
MeetingMix offers a free 30-day trial, after which the web application costs $4.95 per month. For that price, you can have unlimited meeting pages, file uploads, attendees and customer support. Your meetings are also protected with SSL data encryption.
What meeting tools do you use to keep meetings on track?
Tracking Your Expenses: Ready for Your UK Tax Return?
Jan 26th
January is traditionally a time of renewal, as the New Year carries with it new perspectives, promise and ambition. Here in the UK, it’s also the time of year when the dastardly Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs come to take your hard-earned sterling!
With the self-assessment deadline for the 2008-2009 British tax year looming this coming Monday, it seems like an opportune moment to round-up some useful tools and services for managing your business expenses. Each year, I find that I’m missing a receipt, I can’t account for a crucial purchase or that paper receipts have literally faded.
Though too late to help my preparations for filing my own tax return this year, the selection below is driven by what’s caught my eye lately and my preference for web-based, iPhone and Mac applications. For the 2009/2010 tax year, I’ll certainly be employing one of the following:
Cha-Ching
Midnight App’s beautifully crafted Cha-Ching almost makes me want to do my expenses! With a playful name, Cha-Ching is very much designed with Macs in mind, employing a gorgeous, intuitive interface and integration with iSync (for scheduling bill payment reminders) and an iPhone edition for mobile use.
I found Cha-Ching’s real strength to be the ability to tag individual expenses, and — like iTunes’ smart playlists — create dynamic standing searches that can, for example, pull out anything you bought from tagged as “Apple” and “business expense.”
ReceiptFarm & Shoeboxed
We covered receipt organisation service Shoeboxed a couple of years ago, finding it to be a great solution for uploading, storing and organising your paper receipts, via a mail-in service. In the time since we last wrote about them, they’ve added a DIY “self-scanning & data entry” plan to their service, along with an iPhone app.
More recently, ReceiptFarm has begun to offer a similar Shoeboxed-style service, based here in the UK. Both services are almost identical, feature-for-feature, though ReceiptFarm appears to be slightly more expensive than its competitor. Also, where Shoeboxed is confident their stored receipts meet IRS guidelines for taxes, its not clear whether UK authorities accept scanned copies of expenses.
Expensify & WebExpenses
We reviewed Expensify early last year; it’s a comprehensive solution for managing and tracking expense reporting. The service is oriented around importing expenses, scanning receipts and generating reports. The service’s killer feature is the ability to generate tax authority compliant electronics receipts for expenses below $75. Recently, Expensify also launched integration features with bookkeeping service Outright.
WebExpenses also offers a similar service here in the UK, and with the likes of E*Trade and Heineken amongst its clients, it appears to have traction within large as well as small organisations. Features are broadly similar, though the service offers an innovative SMS expensing feature, which enables users to expense items as and when they occur.
inniAccounts
Finally, recent weeks have seen the launch of inniAccounts, a comprehensive accounting and bookkeeping service designed specifically for UK-based freelancers.
inniAccounts was created by a pair of engineering contractors, frustrated with the minutae of managing their fiscal data using Excel or complex accounting software designed for large organisations.
The service helps manage timesheets, invoices and payroll, but also include some features for compiling, completing and settling tax returns as well as mileage and expense claims. Uniquely, the service also provides a real-time tax calculation, helping users understand their financial position immediately, rather than waiting to the end of the year.
With only five days to the 31st January filing deadline here in the UK, it’s likely too late to adopt and employ any of the applications we’ve covered here, but they may help streamline your accounting for the coming 2009/2010 tax year, with greater productivity and accuracy.
Personally, after tinkering with each of the options above, I’m leaning towards Cha-Ching, simply because of the playful interface (it makes a difference for such a dull task!) and the immediacy of booking expenses via an iPhone app. However, I suspect something like inniAccounts will be a better long term solution, though I’m concerned that much of this space is occupied by startups rather than established companies, raising questions and doubts about the continuity of your financial data if the company ceases to trade.
Do you have preferred services, applications or methodologies for tracking and managing your expenses and receipts?
Tips and Tricks: Making the Most of Google Docs
Jan 26th
I’ve been using Google Docs for a couple of years now, for both professional and personal tasks. To be honest, I was hesitant to try it at first. After all, what does Google Docs have that other, more feature-rich office suites don’t have? But I have to say that its trademark simplicity has won me over.
That simplicity doesn’t mean that it’s limited in functionality, though. Let’s take a closer look to find out what else we can do with this seemingly lightweight tool.
Take Advantage of Templates for Quick Document Creation
Like any other office suite, Google Docs allows you to use document templates. This is especially handy if you’re in a hurry to make a document such as a schedule, business card, resume or invoice. Looking for something a little more esoteric? Google Docs has a wide variety of templates available, because most of them are user-submitted. They include a life checklist for your long-term plans, an online contact form, and even legal documents such as living wills.
Create File Redundancy and Backups
Google Docs can batch download documents into a ZIP file (via More actions > Export) if you want to make local copies in your hard drive. Personally I don’t find this method practical, especially if you want to retain the folder structure of your files.
Over on TheAppGap I wrote a tutorial on how to backup your files and retain the folder structure with a Greasemonkey script and DownloadThemAll. Just make sure that you assign the files to the right folders when you download them, so that they mirror the folder structure you use in Docs.
Apart from native Docs files, you can also upload and store other file types into Google Docs. This new feature can come in handy if you want to backup some files online. For those who use multiple computers, you might no longer have to carry around a USB flashdrive. Free users are limited to 1GB of storage, but you can buy more if you need it.
Use Google Docs to View Documents from Search Results When PDF files come up in Google search results, you have the option to “Quick View” them, which automatically opens them in Google Docs. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Microsoft Office files. If you come across them a lot when you’re searching for reports and other documents, you might want to install the Import to Google Docs add-on by Srikant (there are versions available for both Firefox and Chrome). If you use this add-on, whenever an Office file appears in search results, an “Import as Google Document” link can be seen next to it, like the one below:
You won’t have to download those files or open another program just to view the contents — they’ll automatically be uploaded in Docs.
Web Publishing
You can use Google Docs to create online polls and surveys, as well as analyze the data via Google Spreadsheets (see this handy tutorial by Chris Pirillo). As I mentioned earlier, some templates are meant for online publishing, such as the contact form, client questionnaires and event registration forms.
For those who love metrics, you can track the visitors to these pages (as well as other publicly viewable files) via your Analytics account, too. Just go to Settings > Editing, then input your Analytics tracking code.
Do you use Google Docs? How do you customize the way you use it?
Kindle Apps: What They’ll Need to Be Useful for Web Working
Jan 25th
I’ve already expressed my opinion on what would make the Apple tablet a significant part of my day-to-day web working habits, but Amazon seems keen on positioning itself in or around the same space in the market, so it’s only fair I turn my attention to the Kindle, too. The recently announced apps for Kindle could potentially open up the platform to more than just reading.
As of now, the Kindle — although I find it professionally beneficial in the sense that I find myself reading more — doesn’t have a direct and measurable impact on my work life. I can think of a few ways apps could change that situation and make the Kindle a valuable tool in my web working toolbox. After all, the Kindle has always-on 3G connectivity and extremely good battery life, both very desirable things in a mobile platform.
A Twitter App
It’s an obvious pick. Basically any device that can have Twitter on it almost inevitably will have Twitter on it, eventually. But Twitter on a Kindle would be a good fit because it requires very little in the way of resources and processor power. It’s basically text, and if there’s one thing the Kindle does well, it’s text.
Sure, there are lots of images, videos and web links on Twitter, too, and some might feel that that was the most important aspect of the service. For my purposes on the road, though, I’m less concerned with deep engagement and more concerned with basic access. As long as I can read my stream, and, more importantly, post updates from my Kindle, I’ll be more than satisfied.
A Gmail App
Another mostly text web-based tech that would work on a Kindle is Gmail. The ability to browse your text-only email with a simple, light interface via the Kindle would actually be preferable to reading it on a computer, in my opinion, since it would make it that much easier to actually concentrate on the content of your messages.
It shouldn’t be that hard to include a simple composition component, too, since the Kindle has a full keyboard. The key to making this app really useful will be keeping it simple, so let’s hope all parties involved keep that in mind. For instance, just because the Kindle can now read PDFs natively, doesn’t mean a Gmail app needs to be able to display PDF attachments. Basic email is all I’m looking for.
A Word Processing App
I want to use my iPhone to write things on the road from time to time. I don’t want to have to get my laptop out just to jot down a basic idea, but I can’t, in all honesty, use the iPhone’s virtual keyboard for anything longer than a text message or a very brief email or tweet. It’s functional, but nothing more.
Despite the small size of the keys, I definitely prefer the hardware keyboard the Kindle makes use of. I use it all the time to make notes in the books I’m reading (a favorite Kindle feature of mine), and after an initial adjustment period, I now find it quite comfortable. A basic app that allows me to create even basic text files that I can then transfer to my PC for further editing and use in other documents is exactly what I need from a Kindle word processing app.
A To-do App
I know the iPhone (and other smartphones) sort of has this covered, but since my to-do needs are very basic, I think I’d actually prefer to do this sort of thing on the Kindle with its basic, paper-like e-ink display. It might not be as easy to navigate without a touchscreen display, but I might actually be more inclined to use something attached to my reading platform than to my phone.
No iPhone, But Not Without Merit
The Kindle isn’t an iPhone; it’s designed to be a single-purpose device. I don’t think Amazon ever foresaw a future in which it would begin offering apps for the platform when it conceived of the Kindle, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful. As a mobile device, the Kindle has a lot of advantages over media players and other platforms, and with the right kind of effort in the right directions by developers, it could be a very handy little web working tool.
What kind of apps would you like to see on the Kindle?
Related GigaOM Pro Research: Evolution of the e-Book Market
10 More Must-have Google Chrome Extensions
Jan 25th
Since you liked our list of 10 must-have Google Chrome extensions so much, and seeing as Google today released a stable version of Chrome that includes extensions, I’ve decided to share another 10-pack of useful extensions. Many of those in my list are from Google itself for working with its services, while some of the others might be new to you. In any case, they’re all worth a look.
Google Wave Notifier provides quick access to your Google Wave account and displays the number of unread waves you have.
LastPass is a password manager that remembers your usernames and passwords, and lets you add notes about each account, too. It also imports databases from many of the password manager apps available today.
GMail Checker displays the number of new emails in your GMail account.
RSS Subscription Extension is one of the most handy extensions you’ll see — you’re able to subscribe to any site you’re reading with a single click.
Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer displays previews of any PDF files, PPT presentations and many other types of documents in Google Docs Viewer.
Facebook provides quick access to your facebook account in a dropdown window from the toolbar.
Amazon Universal Wishlist is one of my favorites because it allows you to add just about anything you want from any store to your wishlist on Amazon.
Google Voice Notifier displays new voicemails in your Google Voice account.
Google Tasks is a quick way to display your Google Tasks.
Google Similar Pages displays similar pages to the one you’re visiting once you click its browser button.
What are your favorite Google Chrome extensions? What extensions would you like to see for Chrome?
