Weaver’s Loom

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I’ve been playing with the beta of Live Mesh from Microsoft for some time now, and find it a very useful technology. So far the only problem I’ve run into has been some bug that was introduced when I upgraded to Snow Leopard.

For some reason, after restarting or hibernating my machine, Live Mesh gets left in an odd state that leaves it unable to connect to the mesh, leaving it in a weird state where the login action is greyed out:

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I love Google Voice. It’s an inspired system that gives me a permanent number that I use as the way to get in touch with me.

It lets me have calls ring at multiple numbers, deal with voice mail as part of my normal email, and gives me some nice attempt at transcription that is sometimes useful.

Usually I can figure out what the caller was saying from the weird transcription note that I get, but occasionally I get one like today’s gem. The caller said “Call me back and I’ll fill you in”, and Google Voice gave me: “15 minutes and I’ll kill you” ….

Of course both of those would get me to call back, but I think they need a little more work to get this right.

…Or, how to  reduce email without leaving the group…

I work with a job search group called Job Connections (http://www.jobconnections.org) which connects to members with a Yahoo group. It’s a moderated group whose membership is generally restricted to people who have actually attended a Job Connections meeting.

It’s a pretty busy group, so there are a lot of emails that get sent out (mostly about job postings that somebody received and is not interested in pursuing). As a result, the most frequently asked question to the group is: “How do I reduce the amount of email I receive from the group without leaving the group?”

Fortunately, Yahoo groups have preference settings that you can use to control the level of email you get sent.

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I recently switched from DSL (which I’d had since it first was invented) to Comcast Cable for my Internet connection (and TV and phone). By doing so I saved about a hundred bucks a month over AT&T and DirecTV. Of course as soon as I switched, AT&T started calling me with a bundle that was roughly the same price, but that’s a different story.

One of the things that happened a while back was that Plaxo was bought by Comcast. I have always been a premium Plaxo user, feeling that I wanted to support them since I find the product so incredibly useful. What I learned was that if you are a Comcast subscriber, you are automatically a Plaxo premium user.

Now, being a premium subscriber used to only mean you got VIP support and access to a couple of tools (like the address and calendar deduplication tool). But now Plaxo has announced that the Outlook synch is a premium member only tool. While I worry that this decreases the value of the service (since there will be fewer reasons for people to sign up, therefore fewer members, and decreasing the number of automatic updates I get), what is interesting is that every Comcast subscriber gets access to these premium services.

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I recently attended the Google Technology User Group Campout at the Googleplex in Mountain View. This was a three day sprint to build something interesting with the latest Google product: Google Wave.

Google Wave, as it turns out is a very interesting experiment in social interaction. Google is trying to reinvent collaborative communication with a piece of software that is one part chat, one part Wiki, and one part WebEx.

I’d seen this product at the Google I/O conference a few months back and was impressed with the demos. Basically you get these shared documents (called Waves) that all of the collaborators can update at the same time. You can watch the hour and a half demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

The demo included things like interaction with blogs, Twitter and other web technologies, as well as interesting programming doing things like on the fly grammar checking. I signed up for a sandbox account the day of the presentation (using my iPhone of course), and got set up a week or so after that.

Wave was written by the brothers Lars and Jans Rasmussen, who are the architects of the Google Maps API. In some sense, this is an experiment in building software caused by the lessons they learned with the immensely popular Maps API. By giving the developers access early in the build process, they hope to build a more solid platform that will serve the developers needs.

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