I spent a few hours today setting up websites for a couple of clubs of which I am a member. They both use Google Sites to make things simple for others to administer.
One group is Hub City Toastmasters. You can visit that site at http://hctoast.rgvleaders.com.
The other group is Social Media Club RGV. You can visit that site at http://smcrgv.rgvleaders.com
I had the need to log into my Grandcentral account today and discovered that it is transitioning to Google Voice. Google Voice takes many of the great features of Grandcentral like call screening, listening in to voicemail, call blocking, sms alerts, phone routing, and call forwarding, amongst others; and adds features like voicemail transcripts, personalized greetings… per person, and conference calling.
The big announcement was made yesterday on the Google Voice Blog. Today, they posted some tips on upgrading your account from Grandcentral to Google Voice when your turn comes around. I checked and my account is not ready to upgrade. Still, I can’t help thinking that when it does it will be more awesome.
If you want a quick introduction to all the features, you can view videos that show you what the new Google Voice service will do. Here is one exciting feature of the new service involving Google 411
From what I have been able to find, Google Voice will continue to allow you to make free phone calls in the United States. They will charge low rates for international calls; I have not yet found a chart that shows those rates. According to the instructions, you’ll be able to call your Google Voice number and use it like a calling menu. It does make your calling experience a two-step process; but the benefits of this are significant.
The new Google Voice calling menu will be good for people who have a service like T-Mobile’s myFaves, Alltel’s My Circle, or Verizon’s Friends & Family. You can add your Google phone number as a favorite to send and receive calls without racking up your mobile minutes. In addition, it almost eliminates the need for a smart phone because all your calls are logged. This should allow you to save phone numbers straight to your Google Addressbook. I don’t know that you can, yet. As soon as my account can be upgraded, I will make the switch to explore all the features and think up unintended uses. Overall, I think Google Voice will ultimately be the final piece that was missing for unified communications by Google. OK, never mind; there is no fax option… yet.
BTW, you can receive updates by following Google Voice on Twitter.
Lately, I’ve been messing around with Google Apps. You can see a sample Intranet I created at http://demo.shainemata.com to see what I’ve been doing. Last time I used Google Sites, I didn’t quite get the idea. Now that I have some time messing with the service, the first thing that comes to mind is, Microsoft Sharepoint.
This is effectively the same idea as Sharepoint, except that it has fewer features, and therefore, is easier to manage. But Google Apps is more than just the ability to create websites. It’s a business infrastructure on the web. What I have done is point my other domain, Shainemata.com to Google to run the website, which is still under construction, AND my email. I’ve also done the same with another domain, which has a bit more going on.
The biggest advantage of Google Apps is that you can create email accounts within your domain easily. You can quickly create an account for a new user and have him or her collaborating almost immediately. Each user gets 7 GB of email storage on the Standard Version. The Premier Version includes 25 GB mailboxes.
Your Google Site, from what I can gather, has 10 GB of site storage, standard. Each user then adds another 500 MB to that. Assuming you go premium and have many users, this is a huge hosting package.
There are other features that come with a Google Apps account. For example, when you create a document on Google Docs, you can easily share it with other people in the organization as if it were on a shared drive. Earlier tonight, Luis Sandoval of Tech in Twenty and I were testing the live collaboration features. This is a great service because it makes it possible to work on a spreadsheet or test document together. You see changes to a document appear before your eyes. This opens up a great many possibilities for collaboration.
This discovery of the usefulness of the service came at a great time. I have had a request to set up email for a company. After working with Google Apps, it makes me think that I ought to get my client on the Google Apps system. The ease of use and collaboration features are well worth it. I haven’t even mentioned the Calendar and other features like mobile access. I am really in heart with Google Apps right now. It gives you a lot for very little.
Google can now sync your Windows Mobile calendar and contacts with your Google Calendar and Gmail contacts. They announced this a couple of weeks ago on their blog. Today, I finally got around to trying it. I have to say that it gives new life to my 2 year old Windows Mobile phone. I’ve been contemplating a move to the T-Mobile G1, but with this service, I can comfortably wait for the G2 or some other better-looking Android phone.
It did not take very long for my calendar to synchronize between my old smartphone and Google Calendar. Within minutes I was able to view all of my appointments on my phone. It took a little longer for all my contacts to synchronize, but it worked out. The only limitation that Google Sync has is that it only works for your calendar and contacts. If you want to sync your email, Windows Mobile allows for the use of IMAP. Google’s Sync is not the perfect and complete solution, but it’s good enough that I don’t have to pay for Exchange hosting. One little surprise that I really liked is that contacts that come from Gmail also synchronize the person’s avatar. Of course, this works best for those people who are on Gmail and update their own. Otherwise, you pretty much have to create your own.
Google Sync is also supposed to work with the iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia S60, and Sony Ericsson. Of course, I could only test on Windows Mobile.
There are other sync features for PC, Mac, and Linux on the Google Sync page.
You may have heard that Google released a utility called Latitude a few days ago. What Latitude does is use cell tower triangulation on phones without GPS, or at least tries to do it, to figure out more or less where you are. It then puts your face up on a map to show people where you are. On phones with GPS, this should be a bit more accurate. Currently, the accuracy of my position has been between 2 and 4 miles. My current phone has no GPS. In other words, it shows where I am not almost all the time.
Nobody wants to try it
It is funny that with over 1,000 twitter followers and I don’t know how many people read this blog, only four people have cared to share their location with me. It makes me wonder how successful the utility will be in the long run. I think, like social media, most people just “don’t get it”.
There are levels of trust
Here are a couple things to clarify about Latitude. First, you only share your position with people you choose; this means only people you trust will be able to see where you are on their Latitude phone app. You can trust them a little, so that they know in which town you are in; or you can trust them a lot, so they can know approximately in what neighborhood you are in. You can also choose to not share your location with specific people from time to time. Of course, you can also turn off the app completely. In other words, you control who knows your location at any time.
They’re watching you! No, they’re not.
The biggest concern I hear expressed is, “I don’t want Google knowing where I am.” I seem to recall the same argument about Gmail and contextual ads years ago when it was first launched, “I don’t want Google reading my emails.” Here we are many years later and millions of people have Gmail accounts, some even multiple accounts.
I think what happened was that people realized that nobody is reading your emails. A server out of many thousands at Google scans your email for context and matches the right ads to it. Nobody at Google has time to look at your email account riddled with forwards, bacn, spam, real messages, and email verifications. The manpower is not there; especially now with cutbacks The same is true with Latitude.
Raise your hands in the air, like Google just don’t care
Google doesn’t care where you are. The people you ought to be worried about knowing your location (see those black vans?) can already track your mobile phone without Latitude or GPS, and without your permission. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t benefit from knowing where you are; what do they care? The people who benefit are you, your friends who participate, and the coffee shop where you’ll meet up after seeing your friend nearby.
What is Google really doing?
Google’s aim is to create a platform that will open up social media in new ways. The fashion in social media these days is the Tweetup. You agree to meet with a friend or two at a predetermined location through Twitter. Other people then see your tweets and jump in. Latitude eliminates the pre-planning. Let’s say you see a friend in the neighborhood and start up a chat to maybe get together at the park or a cafe. Maybe you’re out of town and don’t know that a friend is also visiting the same town, instant meetup. Perhaps you saw a big news event on twitter and see that one of your friends is out near where it happened, you got yourself a first-hand witness (wait for news organizations to realize that one).
Latitude’s real value
The real value of Latitude has not sunk in. Latitude can help create social experiences that you might otherwise miss. There is only so much socializing you can do from your keyboard at home through social media; doing it in person adds a whole other dimension. You’re more likely to get together with people while you’re out and about. It’s like Second Life; except it’s real life (and you can’t fly or teleport).
I am a big fan of cloud computing and collaboration. I saw this video and could not help posting it. It is a great way of showing what can be done with online tools. The use is a bit frivolous in the video; but it does show the power of collaboration that cloud computing brings. Google Docs is a service that allows you to create and store your work documents online. They take that a step further by allowing multiple people to work on the same document without having multiple versions emailed back and forth. Everybody has the original. Google Docs is only one of many online tools available to help your team work together and avoid work bottlenecks.
I upgraded my WordPress template recently and forgot to add my Google Ads back to the template. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to splice the code back in. I don’t mess with the template often enough that I know exactly what to do every time. It takes a little trial and error. In any case, they are back online.
I don’t make a killing off of the ads, but it’s nice spending money every once in a while. At the minimum, it offsets my hosting cost.
Tonight, I have been checking out some of my favorite blogs and found that they have OpenID activated. Naturally, I took the opportunity to comment on a couple using my OpenID account. A few days ago, I activated OpenID through draft.blogger.com on all my blogs. I don’t know if my favorite blogs activated OpenID on their blogs, if blogger added it for everybody, or if the feature was added because of my google account settings transferring. I don’t care. All that matters is that I can now comment with my blog URL as my login.
Shaine 