Online Collaboration (wow, gen-XO is coming)

A really AJAX-talented friend of mine is working at Google Docs now, and I’ve been waiting to see what they do next. I finally dug into Presentations last night, the slide-show solution, and I was surprised by three things:

• It’s got themes that are really quite pretty (from Google?! lol)
• There’s a chat window for viewers during presentations
• But, there’s no way link to a specific page within the deck (http:// …/slide2)

Overall, it’s quite handy and I think I’ll use it. (sample)

Thinking of online collaboration, two other sites I’ve been playing with that are similar experiences / values:

• Pagii – create wacky, instant web pages that are addressable and more graphically rich than anything else I’ve seen out there.
• ScribeLink – a friend just sent it to me this morning, but I’ve already been collaborating with my 7^th-grader step-daughter on a drawing (school’s out today, she’s in the other room watching Tivo, laptop open, listening to music on YouTube and playing games at Build-A-Bear…)

Here’s a list of 60 other tools at Mashable.

Thinking about how to present info online & collaborate on it… online collaboration is sure getting close to great. At work I’m currently blogging project-stuff on a WordPress installation (internal server), using a Wiki (which has an image-tool for screen shots), and uploading Office docs to a SharePoint installation (gets us version control). It’s wacky, but all the needs are met. I link back and forth across the 3 platforms and it works great.

Well, it’s getting easier and easier to imagine solving all these needs even better just using the publicly-available and free tools. My conversations with teachers lately confirm they're sliding slowly this direction as well – evolving from handing in a paper, to emailing it, to uploading it, to just doing it in Google Docs. And, facilitating thoughtful class dialogues with blogging I mentioned before.

What’s next? Consider: digital projectors for slide shows are expensive, but everyone sitting in the computer lab and watching the presentation on Google Docs (and chatting silently in the chat box while the presenter talks) is a solution sans projector. Wacky.

And there it is again – thoughts of the XO generation, the millions of kids who will be exploring these tools in a matter of weeks...

The Widget Wars (have begun)

I posted before about extendability of platforms via “embedability.” As I said there, widgets are a re-think of the web, emerging. I’d add that the lesson of the (miserable) FaceBook aps is that the Last.FM widget could (and maybe should) just replace the Last.FM website itself – who needs a URL when the point is to meet your audience where they are? (Admittedly, creating LastFM’s FB ap was a debate.) The funny thing is that all these companies created FB aps but still don’t get it – they’re not building iGoogle widgets, for example, which have been around for longer and can actually do useful things (not that being bitten by Zombies isn’t useful).

Embedability can be a business model, not just a marketing tool. Netvibes got it, but they need the rest of us to turn around and produce widgets. FaceBook got our attention, but anything you build for FaceBook is useless everywhere else. That’s stupid.

It’s not hard to imagine the Internet not as a network of linked & indexed “places” (websites), but rather, an ecosystem of consumer-product-ish widgets that snap into pages where we get what we need to done.

Check out Pagii. Can’t move your Netvibe widgets over to Pagii, can you? Hmm.

The next time someone says, “Hey, check out our new website,” I’d love to say, “Who cares – how’s your widget look on NetVibes or iGoogle?”

Mint - it *IS* Fresh!

I don’t want to gush over a project a crazy guy I sorta know has been working on, but Mint.com is finally out of beta, and I think it’s the best example of “presentation at launch” I’ve seen in a long, long time. Right down to the “Mint.edu” tab. Clearly, this is top-notch team who did a great job of blending witty (fresh mint?!) with a clear and ubiquitous value proposition. Ironically, I signed up for their beta a while back, liked what I saw but was too busy to upgrade my family finances (from my Quicken ’05 woes). And, embarrassingly, in the last month I allowed myself to get drug back into the Quicken vs. MS Money debate (shoot me now) without considering Mint.

Forget it! Noah, thanks for the reminder.

As of now, I’m moving my family over to Mint.com.

The great branding execution makes me even more excited to see first-hand again how well-executed this concept is under the hood.

Phone 2.0 (like snail mail to email)

At my step-son’s soccer game Saturday, one of the other parents asked my wife: “Can we switch games to bring the Team Treats?” She replied, “Sure, but can you send me an email to remind me?”

I speed dialed Jott, said her name and, “Switch soccer Team Treat days with…”

The next time she checked her email, there was the reminder – my words, transcribed to text, with a link to the audio if needed.

I mentioned briefly last week how what I’m calling “Phone 2.0” tools are poised to change everything. I don’t think I did it justice.

In short, it’s reminiscent of when we started seeing free email accounts that weren’t linked to our ISP providers – giving us freedom and choices.

Well, consider:

1. Is your (cell phone) voice mail owned by your (cell phone) provider? (Kinda stings, like when you couldn’t take your AOL email account to Netscape in 1995, eh?)
2. Is your phone number tied to a piece of hardware, such as a cellular handset, a house or a city? What’s an area code, after all?
3. Maybe you can forward calls from your cell phone to your house – manually. But can you schedule when you want to receive calls, and where they should be routed? (11pm – 6am, directly to VM, M-Th)
4. Are voice mails and text messages one in the same? (Can you get an audio of any text, or a text of any audio?)
5. And, what’s a distribution list? Why not determine that independent of what phone you’re using?

Answer: Phone 2.0 is emerging.

Here are a few favorites:

• GrandCentral: purchased by Google (Sterling’s thoughts). As I said previously, get a free phone # online; route calls from it to any combination of phones (your cell, home & work can ring simultaneously); customize voice mails per incoming line (“Hi, honey…” for a spouse’s cell); and, get your voice mails transcribed to text and SMS’d or emailed to you (audio file attached). Wow. My GrandCentral number made me want to “drop” all my numbers for this one.
• YouMail explores the “custom voice mail – independent of provider” biz model.
• Jott: mentioned above. Create an account, register your phones, then create distribution lists. Speed dial it, and caller-ID drops you into your account. “Who do you want to Jott?” (Answer: Self) “Go ahead.” (“Don’t forget to log into our credit card account and see what happened today with…”) It gets emailed to you, with a link to the audio clip.
  One friend realized he could use this to record melodies he’d thought up, while driving.
  I also noticed on Twitter today an add that you can Jott to Twitter.
• Pinger similarly creates a voice-to-text (and vis-à-vis) communications platform out of ordinary phones. Better for groups, in some ways, but I suggest trying both for your needs. They have a nice video explaining it, too. (See homepage, “Watch The Video.”)
• Simulscribe: converts your VM to text… great reviews and I don’t know if it’s different from the others here yet.

I keep a del.icio.us list of “Phone 2.0” and welcome suggestions.

Google Maps' Progress on International (...XO)

Closing the digital divide is obviously more than just having international maps on Google – but at least that little piece continues to see progress.

Google announced adding 54 more countries:

Afghanistan, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Mexico, Myanmar (Burma), Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Timor-Leste, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen

The announcement points out these two maps, which really have great detail: “…the flavor of an energetic metropolis like Mexico City or scope out the relaxed vibe of a small island like Aruba…” Flip to Satellite and zoom in… pretty fun stuff, though not as relevant if you don’t live there.

Well, I’ve been speculating what the children of the world will first browse, as the $100 Laptop, called the “XO,” nears DEPLOYMENT NEXT YEAR. The governments of Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay have ordered 1 Million for their children already. (Uruguay is on both lists.)

I have long suspected the map mashups may be the most interesting thing of all, with native-language blogs right there, too.

By the way, thanks Nick Negroponte, you’ve got my vote for a Nobel prize. Nick founded the One Laptop Per Child program (and MIT). By the way, his father Dimitri emigrated from Greece.

ThoughtMapping (online, collaboratively)

Years ago, my Writing 121 instructor required a thought-map for some assignments, and once I tasted the ease of moving from map to outline to page I never wrote papers any other way.

When naming products or companies (or characters, pets, kids – okay, TMI), the thought map is still my tool of preference.

Bubbl.us and MindMeister are two online tools that bring the AJAXy interactivity I mentioned in the yesterday’s post to a “thought mapping” interface – where you can actually construct these things as big as you need as you go, letting the linked nodes bounce around and rearrange themselves for you.

I find Bubbl.us more consistent with my own creative process, but MindMeister allows more detail per node and I can see some people would probably like it more. Color-coding the nodes is enough for me. I have a few other “ThoughtMap” links in my Del.icio.us.

Update: Just ran across the Bubbl.us page "about us" - drinkin' the cool-aid is nice. Great use of their tool, too.

The Ocean of Streams (life-, friend-, reply-...)

I haven’t posted on this yet, but this summer I fell in love with “Streams” – a new and very different way to think of aggregating and managing your personal communication flows. It’s a fascinating space. I thought Grand Central, Jott and these “Phone 2.0” offerings were revolutionary – get a free phone # online; route calls from it to any combination of phones (your cell, home & work can ring simultaneously); customize voice mails per incoming line (“Hi, honey…” for a spouse’s cell); and, get your voice mails transcribed to text and SMS’d or emailed to you (audio file attached). Wow.

But that’s merely the “Streams” revolution being applied to phones. There’s more.

The interoperability of platforms (from phones to email to FaceBook) and standardization of formats like RSS is opening a big door of possibilities wide. Fuser is just one example: manage all your social platform communications in one place.

…It’s also interesting to witness these technical products mirror the behavior (also evolving rapidly) of my pre-teen step kids, as they casually utilize 4+ communications platforms simultaneously.

Here’s a great post summarizing this chaotic and interesting area of streams.

Ultimately, it seems all communications (from voice mail and incoming calls to email to social platform shout-outs) become one layer, identity becomes separate (yes, Dick), and the variety of spots you plug into it is a third. I suppose that means consumers will expect any “quality” communication platform (such as a phone) to support video (hyperlink or embedded), robust enough in-box management (my MySpace friendings to my “MasterOfNothing” identity), and let go of proprietary (solo-) account structures akin to how email editors can POP multiple accounts.

Interactive, animative relationship links

Been trying to wrap my head around what really happens when people click around in big websites, lately… a navigation conundrum (I’ll post that later) and it lead me back to an old favorite… VisualThesaurus and a similar VisuWords. The later has had an upgrade since I last looked at it, and it’s pretty neat. Maybe only for grammarians (hey Leigh!) (or purists of any persuasion), but wow…

Two features you have to love: click on a dot (node) and drag it to rearrange the …output, and it responds; wave over a dot and a fly-out appears with details.

Someday, desktop software and Internet search (…results…) will work like THIS (and we won’t miss the prior paradigms).

Quicken vs. Money (shoot me now)

I've spent a few days attempting to buy an electronic solution to our “Family Financial Management.”

To be clear: I have an MBA, and still have the CD for Quicken ’97, which my wife and I originally depended on weekly.

So what's so hard, right?

Upgrades got us further and further from comfort. Quarterly attempts to get us acclimated to Quicken 2005 yielded only usability gripe-sessions, our credit union doesn’t support Intuit’s recent proprietary (fee-driven) .QIF strategy, and my distrust of marrying all our finaincial data with a Windows Live ID (security risk) has perpetually left me with …seemingly no options (since mid-2004).

After a few days of research, I think one glance at Amazon’s reviews (for the 15+ products) says it all: the most common rating is two starts out of five.

Bad software product management has ruined our family’s finances.

So far, no solution in sight.

Video-Editing Future: Telling the Story

Sometimes, seeing the future of the Internet requires no more than imagining less use resistance. YouTube was all about turning home recordings into publishing plays (unimaginable, for the faint at heart). SMS was email with no computer and no keyboard – lordy!

Video went through a (commercial) transformation in Q1 ’07 – when companies like SpotRunner proposed plausibly that small businesses would upload video, edit it, publish it (to web), and potentially buy TV broadcast minutes (even on local cable). Web video became (blink twice) a plausible commercial platform for expression, and online self-procurement the plausible, primary channel.

Well, this is Q3. I haven’t noticed any local (Park Hill, Denver CO) businesses on my Local Cable programming. But it’s true, I amm noticing more and more people (non-SME’s) figuring out the (free) tools for expressing themselves in video. It’s not online editing just yet, but freeware and uploading is looking good. (My Lily Allen CD even arrived with software for cutting up the music & making my own versions…)

As a user of the Web, you gotta be excited about this addition to The FrontPage Paradigm (trifold brochures trapped in templates). If the Web is about “access to information,” video from ordinary folks (and, an ability to sculpt them to tell the story) is a valuable addition.

A few links:

• A friend made this video in an afternoon, expressing her conundrums while planning a trip to Detroit (it was a conference). She used the free version of Camstudio.
• My own “Best of YouTube (& Online Video)” page on LocalGuides.com. The “Home Product Reviews (The Experience)” video is a good illustration for this post.

Hablais Mole?

We were in the mood for mole tonight – you know, the Mexican dish, tomato sauce meets chocolate.

It’s a hard dish to find--and often disappointing. I turned to social software.

I searched yelp for it.

We ended up at a hibachi place. ;-)

Compartetive Analysis (se moi)

In product craftsmanship – or any market offering – the importance of feature analysis and competitive awareness is a no-brainer: these are the lifestyle. If not, you’re in the wrong job.

Yet, it seems like I watch good people driving good products excuse themselves from “competitive analysis” (“It’s too much work, and not enough value”) as well as meaningful “feature analysis” (oddly, identical reasoning), and they swim in that middle-stream naiveté that “smart people” and “great execution” can prevail.

Like the bank teller at home, counting his own cash on the kitchen table, I was recently reconciling my own “competitive analysis (with feature breakouts)” and my “master feature list (with competitive footnotes)” when it dawned on me, that I am in the business not of “product management” but rather, “compartetive entrepreneurship” …derived from comparative – competitive. No feature idea lives in a competitive vacuum, and vis-à-vis.

Compartetive? Hmm.

Okay, I’ll be the first to say it lacks the poetic intrigue of “coopetition” – yes. But now that I’ve begun writing it into my document titles (as of 5:15 pm, in place of comparative feature analysis / competitive analysis)… "compartetive analysis" is capturing it for me in a new way, and opening my eyes to the whole point of the exercise. This is what we’re in the business of doing – the essence of the commercial competition. Or, user-experience sculpting. (It's a sculpt-off...)

Comparison and competition merge exactly where analysis lives. I guess this is where an Internet entrepreneur lives, too: like an apple-orange, fishing for any bite.

[photo: Worth1000.com, Chris]

Main Stream, Wild Mushrooms & Hitwise

Here's a post-modern post. Labor day was lovely - hope everyone got some time off. I finally made it to the mountains of Colorado to get in some mushrooming. (That only took me 4 years...)
Was lovely to bag some "Kralovksy Hrib (King's Bolete)" and "Brezovy Kozak (Birch Bolete)." The birch bolete signaled a full circle: it grew regularly under the birch in my back yard in college (Eugene), and I remember reading it also grew under aspen; finally, I found one under an aspen. Nice.
Even though I learned to mushroom in the Czech Republic, where it's a mainstream activity, I'm always hesitant to admit to it in the US. People do a double take, like you said "breast milk" or something.
So, it was funny to be peeling and slicing wild boletes while catching up on Bill Tancer's Hitwise blog, this morning. Bill's has become one of my top five favorite blogs, though I admit that feels a little like becoming a tabloid junkie. Is it really news that there was a spike in Internet searches for "toy recall?" Isn't this a little like watching the news about people watching news? (Where's the substance?)
I suppose if the Internet is all about "access to Information" (my mantra), then Hitwise is in some ways the score; all our collective business plans, product releases, SEM budgets, etc., etc., are reduced to a collective score board. Or something.
Highlights from Bill's blog:

• Bill revisits their "tipping point" observations, building on Heather Hopkins' earlier post.
  Still seems one of the valuable tools Hitwise has brought us (ability to see & monitor this when launching & managing a new site or media campaign).
• "I also Love Food" is silly & fun, but how frickin' COOL that we can see this. Brings some accuracy questions to mind, but hindsight is 80/20...
• "Free, Discount, Cheap..." is a glance at language. Sandra Hanchard's original treatise is more meaty and interesting. (I knew Sandra in a former life & it's no surprise.) Language is the original democracy, and as usual, commerce, currency and the Internet have only accelerated that and made it more clear. How many (SEM) budgets are out there, for flavors of the word "vintage?" LOL