Weaver’s Loom

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.

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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Since last week, I’ve been immersed in coding and development education about various cloud applications.

First there were a couple of meetups about the Google Wave product that gave me a overview of some of the capabilities and requirements for developing applications around the Wave product. Google Wave is an interesting piece of social media that is a bit like chat and MediaWiki combined with WebEx.

The first talk on Monday, was about the federation server, which is the open source implementation of Google Wave. The idea is that you could have a Wave server inside your firewall that could protect your data, while also allowing for communication and interaction with other federated servers. The code is so new, that it is actually using a different protocol than the Google Wave servers are using. (more…)

I’ve been using some of the more interesting “cloud” applications recently: Google Apps, Live Mesh and a few others.

I’m really impressed with the capablities and use of these free web applications. It’s a really interesting marketing tool as well: give away the low end product to build user acceptance, and then add a bit more to give value to the enterprise.

My first foray into the personal cloud was Google docs. This product has to be the coolest idea ever: create your documents on a web site, and let them be shared and simultaneously editable. The concept is awesome, and works really well for some documents (most notably spreadsheets). I can share a spreadsheet with any number of people, and they can all edit it at the same time.

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If you’re like me, you eventually end up with too many identities. I haven’t figured out how to associate different email addresses with a single account, so I have to maintain several different Google identities.

For example a client invites me to join his Google group using his company email, so I have to set up a new account to access and manage that group. At some point I try to consolidate these to use my GMail identity, but that isn’t always possible (the client may for instance have decided to restrict their group to only allow access by people using their corporate domain addresses for instance).

Eventually though, I do end up with accounts that I’m no longer using (and sometimes I just would like a fresh start). Google actually has a link in their help about deleting an account, but it took me a bit to find it, so I thought I’d post a step by step guide. (more…)