Google, Plus a new way to share information and news

I am already pretty pleased with Google Plus.

I learned the happy news that there is an experimental version of Google's Go programming language available. I also added a decent number of acquaintances to my circles, as well as some technology gurus.

The mail thrust of the Google+ service is a stream. That is where you view what others have posted, comment on their posts, and make your own posts.

I would say it is uncomplicated but robust.

I have been using it with Safari 5 today. I imagine it works well with IE. I hear if you use Chrome you can already get some browser extensions to make the UI slightly nicer somehow. I should try it with Firefox, but have not yet -- though I expect no problems there, given what is there under its hood.

I would not torch my existing social web sites yet. I do not see anything that it directly totally overlaps with yet. Twitter is the little hummingbird of messenger services. Google+ is most useful when used with medium sized messages. Google+ streams have a strong Buzz-like feel to them, with a whiff of Waves to them as well perhaps.

Sparks are for the most part just savable searches. Handy enough by themselves and slightly handier being integrated into the social web features.

I haven't tried Huddles yet but hopefully will soon.

I am avoiding putting my precise address out there. Despite Facebook's CEO telling us there is nothing to fear about sharing all our personal and demographic information, I note he now has a stalker who has approached him at his home and elsewhere and consequently has had a restraining order taken out on him.

Google gives Gmail users a Buzz

Google has been trying to facilitate better, clearer, more organized communication for years. Gmail was a step in that direction. It is free, can be easily searched by the mailbox owner, and features unobtrusive and relevant ads on the page. Just like Google search.

Buzz is a mini-blogging/discussion feature available inside Gmail. It lets a Gmail user share information/insights with other people he communicates with from time to time. It also makes it easy to share information with everyone, if they prefer to make a given message Public instead of Private.

The feature was activated for some people a day or so ago. It came on for me right after lunch yesterday (Wednesday). Other people who use Gmail will be getting it sometime in the next 5 or 6 days.

It is a little nicer than Twitter in some ways.

Microsoft came out screaming about it this week. Microsoft has not been right about too much lately. So Google is probably taking this as a positive sign.

Google could probably bind Microsoft's recent "wisdom" related to what Google should not be doing, and make a guide book for managing to be more successful. Microsoft has railed about things that make Google more: popular, profitable, and helpful to the internet/computer using community. Not to mention the business community.

The companies Microsoft has complained about for the past year have good business strategies, unique products and services, and the engineering savvy/determination to get things done that revolutionize computing.

Microsoft saying everyone should just use Twitter and not use/build anything that competes with it tells me that it is definitely time to look for things that will compete with Twitter. Also, given Microsoft's past track record, it seems likely that Microsoft will try to come out with something to compete with Twitter within a year or two.

Google Blogspot dropping FTP support in March

They say it is because not many users use it, which looks correct. But given the timing of it (Jan. 22) coming right after Google announced they and many other Silicon Valley high tech companies had been attacked by industrial espionage agents, I think there may be more to it.

FTP is a notoriously unsafe protocol. It sends a login password as clear text. That means anyone monitoring the network it passes through can steal the password and use it. Not legally, of course. They would most likely be breaking quite a few laws just by obtaining the password that way. But there are a lot of people around the world that do break computers laws for a living.

This reminds me of the fact that about the same week, Google announced they were switching Gmail from HTTP to the more secure HTTPS protocol. This whole thing just seems like a manifestation of the burden hackers are putting on society's use of computer and networking technology.

Blogspot glitch

When I press Return when composing blog entries in some of my blogs this morning, the cursor goes to the beginning of the current line, but it does not go down to the next line. Very annoying.

Finally tried out the new blogspot layouts

I decided it was time to create a couple new blogs last month. So I took the opportunity to try out the new automatic, drag-and-drop oriented layouts that were introduced a couple of years ago.

Let me say, they are quite a bit easier than the old template-based layouts that Blogger (Blogspot's back end) has had for half a decade!

I never minded writing CSS or HTML. I kind of enjoy it, actually. I knew CSS before I started. So the blog templates gave me a chance to test my skills on something pretty complex. Web application pages are actually easier to design, in a lot of ways, than a big blog.

However, the template you had to edit was very big and quite unwieldy after a lot of content got added into the sidebars. The built-in template editor was kind of crude. Compounding that, for some reason my Firefox browser would often select a bunch of text while I scrolled. I think it was due to a dropped mouse event or something. I kind of messed up my templates a couple of times a few years back due to that. Recovering from those situations was a bear.

No plans at this point to go back and re-design my existing blogs here from template-based to the drag-and-drop based layouts. I certainly plan to do any new blogs using these new drag-and-drop layouts, though!

Moved dictionary widget for this blog to sidebar

I wanted to shorten the length of the word-reference tools at the bottom of the blog pages. So I moved the dictionary look-up widget to the sidebar.

I shortened the maximum length of the field that words are input in order to get the widget narrow enough. I did not really like doing that but it was necessary to get it to fit.

I think it looks pretty good.

Blog nicely

There was an article in the news at lunch time today that made me think what guidelines a person should set for themselves when blogging, even if they are not under any formal rules from employers or others.

First, let me say straight off that I think that manners we adhere to from tradition and empathy with others are one of the unsung cornerstones of civilization. In our society, little problems stay little and can be solved with a little effort in no small part because of manners and common courtesy.

By the latter, I basically mean do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Good manners take it a step further, giving you a framework to deal with situation where someone was less kind than they should have or you would have been.

There are certain things I do not disclose at or about work. I think this is a common, good practice.

I do not tell coworkers my salary or wage since private employers compensate people differently. I do not want coworkers being envious of feeling sorry for any of us based on how much we make per hour or per year. I want us all focused on the job at hand. It is a private company, in most cases, so let the boss worry about how he compensates each individual.

I do not blog about my company. I figure if something happens in my office, people who work outside it do not care and it is none of their business. And when it comes to products, I know companies pay advertisers and have their own marketing departments and salesmen.

I do not dream to know how do do their job better than those public communicator professionals do. And as someone who benefits from their hard work, I do not want to make their work harder. It is up to them to formulate the message for the company and its product or service. Right?

I do blog about technology in my field since it is a reasonable, professional thing to do. There are a couple reasons for this.

Without consumers and users talking about technology themselves, we would all be swallowing and mouthing the opinions fed to us in ads and publications that accept advertising money. Those two things being largely the same, more often than not. Also, sometimes advertisements hit the nail on the head with their pronouncement and when that is the case I think that should be pointed out and discussed - meaning agreed and/or disagreed with.

When one expresses an opinion, sometimes one gets back information that changes one mind and educates one better about the subject of their comment. Quite often, in fact. Such feedback is not always helpful but often it is.

The news story about a Texas Tech coach banning players from blogging kind of struck a chord with me. I am sort of on both sides and neither of this issue, as you may have guessed.

I understand that some people feel the need for a diary and the comment twittered in this case would have been more than fitting for a diary. The mechanism for Twitter and an online diary are very similar with one important difference: Twitter is published.

Moreover, the coach is a public figure. The opinion of the public, not just his boss and his performance, largely determines how he fares professionally. That in turn reflects back in how fellow players perceive themselves and their team - and how others perceive them.

The coach who had several unflattering things said about him banned Twitter after this happened.

To his credit, it sounds like he did not lay down this edict after a single incident. And in defense of the players, they are very young men and this is probably the first time they are in the spotlight themselves or work for someone that is.

I think that both these things support the decision that the coach made if it is a temporary rule and later it is replaced with a more limited but permanent rule.

The rule I think should be in place is that the players do not Twitter or blog about people on the team.

Doing so undercuts PR professionals at the school, the coach, their teammates, and so forth. While yes, the Consitution does make free speech legal and protects that right, that does not make uninhimited publications good for business.

The ball team has a budget, it has costs, and it produces revenue for the school - it is a business.

Even though the players do not get paid they are very much in an apprenticeship situation at a business. In exchange for their labor they are gettng free training, including invididual attention.

The US press, which benefits professionally from freedom of speech used to carefully present both or even several sides of an issue, except on some cable stations and tabloid newspapers.

People using a blog like a diary are not likely to do that. They are not a journalist reporting a big picture or an overall scene. Just isolated events from their day.

People using Twitter from their portable electronic devices, even more so. They are unikely to have an impartial relative or professional proofread and approve/disapprove each entry. It is candid, on the spot information.

It puts the littlest things into a spotlight, potentially makng a mountain out of a molehill. Chances are, that molehill is somebody else's problem and making it into a mountain might not be fair.

Tact, manners, and empathy are all social skills. They take time to develop. Some people have peer groups and famiies that instill them from an early age. Just like grammar and good conversational skills they pick them up from a few individuals in their home and neighborhood.

The best censor is to think how things will affect other people and let that rule what you say and write. Everything does not have to be nice but not everything that is not nice has to be said.

The news story itself if not that big a deal. This happens every day somewhere. To me, the topic to mull over is the subject of courtesy. It is something that we as a nation need to dust off, even more so when it comes to the new types of personal communications that have been inroduced.

Features added to Blogspot in 2007

The list of features that Google added to their Blogspot-driven website, Blogger.com, is pretty long.

So, they posted a blog entry to identify them all and each item is linked to a web page explaining it.

Pretty smart use of the technology they are made out of, if you ask me!

See 2007 Roundup if you are interested in what those improvements were.