Paul Jacobson

I linked to this post on the Google blog this morning from The Daily Maverick newsletter. It is a very interesting story because of what it reveals about what our world will be like in the months and years ahead.

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

…

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

I’m still working on a post about my thoughts about Google and some of its 2009 product launches for another site (its turning into one of those posts which take me forever to finish) but what I found really interesting about this story is the scale of it. Google and a number of other companies have come under attack from within China, very likely the Chinese government, and Google, a private and massive corporation, is taking action against the Chinese government under the guise of sticking to its values and working with the Chinese government.

Google is taking a stand against the Chinese government and is apparently willing to risk turning off the massive Chinese market, practically in retaliation for the attacks on its infrastructure. What I am more curious about is how the landscape will change as Google becomes more pervasive and influential. Will there one day be digital warfare between a corporation and a government?

I haven’t seen this much hype about a Google product since Gmail launched a few years ago. Invitations to use Google Wave have been trickling out to eager users for a couple weeks now and I managed to secure one thanks to Gavin Magid who sent me one of his invites. Like many of you, I watched the demonstration video a while ago and I have been pretty excited about Wave since then although probably not for the same reasons you may have been excited about it.

Wave was touted as a replacement for email and a cure for world hunger almost from the beginning. This has created some really unrealistic expectations, more in the minds of email addicts than people fighting world hunger (unlike the email addicts, they knew immediately Wave wasn’t going to fix world hunger). I know some people have said that the Rasmussens said that Wave would replace email but I don’t remember that (Lars Rasmussen did tell the Wall Street Journal that Wave is a modern version of email though). What I do remember is how they demonstrated that Wave could revolutionise how we collaborate. Unfortunately there is so much hype about this “email replacement” that there has been a fair amount of negativity about the actual product now that more and more people have had a chance to work with it. Scoble initially took a pretty dim view of Wave (also be sure to read his follow up post about how the email metaphor is unhelpful) although I think he pretty much summed up Wave’s value (in my opinion, at least) when he said the following:

See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave.

That’s really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.

But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people.

It also ignores the productivity gains that we’ve gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

His focus on Wave as a social networking tool is representative of a number of perspectives I have come across already. A couple people I have been testing Wave with have commented on Wave’s value as a Twitter replacement (Really? Is Twitter really something every vaguely similar tool has to replicate?). I think those people are missing the point, just like their email focussed colleagues.

That being said, Wave can replace email for our collaboration oriented tasks. I see Wave as a potential Google Docs+ service. While it lacks decent text formatting tools at the moment (ok, remember Google Wave is still very much a preview version at the moment and is actively being developed and improved) I see this as being a terrific way to collaborate in a team on a document or project. Like Louis Gray, I don’t see Wave being suitable for mass communication, it just gets way too crazy and will only take more time just trying to track multiple branches of conversation threads. Here is a quick demo I made which will give you an idea how chaotic a wave can become:

I’m still messing around with Wave and the product is clearly still in early days but I can see this becoming a tremendously helpful collaboration tool in my business. I work with people in different cities and countries and having Wave available through Google Apps would enable us to collaborate both realtime and asynchronously pretty effectively. Bear in mind that Google Docs already has collaboration functionality built into it (heck, Google Docs is designed around collaboration) but Wave just does it so much better based on what I’ve seen.

I mentioned the debate about Wave as an email replacement earlier in this post. I don’t agree with that characterization when it comes to run of the mill email. Email is built on well established standards and is pervasive. Wave is built on a mix of open protocols and what seems to be a new set of protocols (I could be wrong here) and while Wave is meant to be federated, you’re basically asking people to roll out support for a new infrastructure to replace email where the benefits for certain types of email are not clear.

On the other hand I do see Wave as replacing email for some forms of collaboration. Just like wikis had the potential to change email behaviour by presenting opportunities to collaborate on documents and projects on the wiki rather than using loads of emails, Wave has a similar promise. In fact it is probably more useful to think of Wave as being more like a combination of a wiki and a document service than email per se. Email is really a means to communicate ideas, changes to documents and so on. Wave is where you can actually do all that work without using email as an intermediary.

Now what Wave may have been intended for and what people actually use it for are two very different things. Twitter wasn’t meant to be a chat service and yet that is exactly what we have been using it for (well, in addition to the other stuff). If you are planning to use Wave to replace Twitter or have rampant email conversations with loads of people you are going to become pretty frustrated pretty quickly. If you are planning to use Wave for focussed collaboration then you are on to something.

Ultimately we are going to have to wait a little longer to see how Wave impacts on our activities online. The “new, shiny” quality will fade soon enough and if it doesn’t help us become more productive it will quickly fall by the wayside. I don’t think it will but I do think that, despite all the hype, Wave will probably become a little like Gmail and Google Docs and part of our workflow wallpaper. Its probably better that way too. I don’t want to focus too much on the tool but rather on the work it helps me get done that much better.

Google just pushed out what some may regard as the Holy Grail of sync … if it works. Here is the customary tutorial video:

Google Sync offers two way synchronisation for a variety of mobile devices ranging from the iPhone to Series 60 devices to Blackberries (and a couple in between). It offers the ability to keep your Gmail contacts and Google Calendars in sync although not all devices support Google Calendar just yet. Installing the service on my Nokia E71 involved creating a new synchronisation profile which was easy enough. The first time I attempted to synchronise the 1 796 contacts in my phone the processed bugged out with an “Invalid host address” error. Hopefully second time is a charm.

The one big challenge with these services is handling duplicates so I hopefully won’t have too many duplicates jamming up the works because what Google Sync doesn’t seem to have is Plaxo’s De-Duper technology which is, for some, enough of a reason to subscribe to Plaxo’s $49 a year premium service.

Google Sync will also give MobileMe a run for its money. MobileMe has very limited device support and costs about €65 a year (in SA the currency switches to Euros and works out more expensive that the quoted $99). Compare that to broader device support, offline access to Gmail and Gcal and $75 to add double the amount of storage space to your Google Account (20GB on MobileMe versus 40GB on Google).

The next contender is Nokia’s Ovi service. I have seen Ovi as a MobileMe competitor, at least a potential competitor mainly because it creates that link between my Nokia phone and an online service.

Ovi supports contacts, calendar, files and media although synchronising with a desktop is limited to a Windows PC. The interface isn’t quite a slick as its competitors but it does present an alternative to Apple’s beautiful yet limited offerings. Ovi’s pricing is a little high ($80 a year for 10GB or $150 a year for 30GB storage for files), especially when compared to MobileMe but a tussle between these two offerings is more a tussle between the iPod/iPhone/Mac combination and Nokia/Windows PC devices.

Google’s Sync has the potential to overtake these other services very quickly. Gmail and GCal are already widely used and even if you don’t have some level of integration between your desktop apps and these two services (already possible on the Mac due to Google Sync integration into Address Book and a script or something for iCal), all you really need now is a browser and a supported mobile device to keep your contacts and mail in sync and, if your mobile device supports it, your calendar too.

My one big concern, even more so now than before, is whether it is desirable to have a single provider so involved in so many areas of our lives and pretty much in control of this key data we run our lives on? I took a look at my Google Account profile and saw this plethora of Google services I subscribe to:

I didn’t realise I was subscribed to so many Google services. Thankfully my daily work and personal lives only rely on a couple of these but those few key services include my email! That already is a lot of control I have given to Google and even more trust I have placed in that foreign organisation to respect my data and “do no evil”.

Leaving aside the Big Brother fears, Google is fast becoming part of the wallpaper. Google Sync makes my Google Account a pretty compelling alternative to its closest competitor, MobileMe, and at a lower cost. I am already a Gmail user (Google Apps too, several times over) so there is no change of email address there. I can probably switch my extensive photo albums from MobileMe to PicasaWeb when my MobileMe subscription ends in October (which would unfortunately involve needing to introduce my mom and other family members to PicasaWeb just when I had them used to MobileMe’s Galleries) and otherwise carry on as usual. It would cost me a lot less to pay for the extra storage for my Google Account that it will to renew my MobileMe account and should the rumours about the GDrive prove true (after a couple years in the making), that would take care of basic file storage to compete with iDisk (which I rarely use anyway).

I can easily see a day when Google is everything on the Web. It will effectively be the Internet for a great many people and those same people should spare a prayer for its leaders and the hope that they never lose their way and turn on us. That could be very bad. We may have to go back to Yahoo! Mail (I still have my account there … just in case).

Technorati Tags:
gmail, gmail for mobile 2.0, google, google calendar, google mobile, mobileme, google sync, ovi

This is a cross post from my personal blog. The idea isn’t so much to use social tagging but more to apply tagging technology in a very pragmatic and useful way.

Here is a thought for the likes of Standard Bank and FNB (the two banks I use at the moment): add tagging functionality to your Internet banking services to improve their usefulness.

My thinking is that it would be great to have the ability to add descriptive tags to line items in my bank statements/transaction listings. My bookkeeper often has to check with me what various transactions are for and it would be really handy to be able to go in and tag various line items with references or even add descriptions to items.

Just a thought …

Technorati Tags:
internet banking, tagging, descriptions, utility

One of the issues with some microblogging services is that you can’t really comment meaningfully on posts. Meaningful comments, to me, are comments which are linked to the source post and which can be viewed with the source post (so the ‘@’ convention in Twitter isn’t a meaningful commenting method as far as I am concerned – it is just too easy to miss out on responses and too time consuming to try draw them all together into a coherent comment thread).

A pretty good example of this is Tumblr which doesn’t allow for comments at all. That being said people are increasingly running their microblogging feeds into lifestream services like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed which do have commenting functionality for incoming feed items. What seems to be missing is some way to link to a series of comments on a source post in, say, Tumblr which can be found in, say, FriendFeed. It seems to me that we need some sort of add-on (like the “Share This” plugin in WordPress) that can either be added to microblog templates or overlaid in a similar way CoComment can be applied to commenting forms on blogs.

Using this sort of add-on, people can read a post, click on an icon of some kind (or activate a bookmarklet) and link to the lifestreaming service of their choice to leave a comment which can then be made visible to the next person who visits the post. Perhaps this could be a sort of CoComment meets StumbleUpon type service?

Heck, this could even be applied to service that have commenting options available. The point is to make those commenting features of lifestreaming services more useful and to focus more attention on a lifestream than on the source content.

Technorati Tags:
lifestream, lifestreaming, comments, commenting, tumblr

You are going to hear a lot about Huddlemind’s new site in the coming days (if not already) and for good reason.

Huddlemind.net runs on Ning, the fabulous and easy to build and customise social networking template/platform. What is great about Ning is that it is basically a social network in a box and what Dave Duarte, Huddlemind’s founder (or at least one of), has done is create a niche social network using a freely available tool. In Dave’s words:

It’s a network for people interested in collaborative learning, new teaching methodologies, and organizational development through Education.

Through it we hope to directly connect members with other leading thinkers and doers in business education.

It is also a space to explore questions and issues of importance around business education, teaching methodologies, and learning technologies.

I think it is fantastic. I have been thinking about Huddlemind as an ideal platform for anyone wanting to establish a community orientated site for a little while now and while I had a couple questions about things like domains and ease of use, Huddlemind pretty much clears those issues up for me.

I played around with Ning a little while ago and discovered how easy it is to add Google Gadgets and all sorts of other customisable bits and pieces. I didn’t spend too much time because I didn’t see the value of having my own social network (do I even have that many fans??) but there is tremendous potential here. Maybe I should play some more …

Oh, did I mention Ning is part of Google’s OpenSocial?!

Either way, Dave has done a great job.

Technorati Tags:
dave duarte, opensocial, social network, ning, huddlemind, niche

One of my new favourite services on the social web is Plaxo’s Pulse. Plaxo is one of the few companies that seems to be putting out updates every few days. I have had the rare experience of asking for a feature only to be told that it is there already, baked into the service (not that I am the most attentive of users, mind you). Anyway, Plaxo announced a new public profile for users which is developed using Google’s new Social Graph API. One of the things that struck me about my updated profile on Plaxo is its similarity to my Facebook profile, at least in terms of it structure and appearance. Here is my Plaxo profile:

And here is my Facebook profile page:

There is an obvious similarity between the two and aside from a couple layout issues, the real difference between the two is that there is more content and more applications on my Facebook profile, thanks to the Facebook application platform. I don’t think this status quo will persist too long because Plaxo is part of Google’s Open Social initiative so it is really only a matter of time before I should be able to start adding Open Social widgets/gadgets/thingies to my Plaxo profile.

So one question that comes to mind is whether Plaxo is hard at work mimicking Facebook or whether Joseph and the lads are aiming for something more? The one big thing about Facebook that detracts from it, at least for me, is that I have to jump through a couple hoops to get some of my content imported into my profile and to create a lifestream in my Facebook profile as opposed to a steady stream of application updates. I don’t use many of the native Facebook services like its photo sharing service or notes for my blogging mainly because that stuff is all intended to be used in-house. Sure there are feeds for certain items that I can publish and pass around to my friends but the portability of my Facebook lifestream is pretty limited.

Plaxo, on the other hand, is taking a different approach. Plaxo doesn’t dictate to me which services I have to use to share my photos or blog posts in my and the public activity stream (aka my Plaxo “news feed”). Instead Plaxo gives me the opportunity to basically add anything with an RSS feed and then decide who gets to see it (business contacts, friends, family, specific groups etc). It is also worth mentioning that Plaxo enables users to create distinct personal and professional profiles which is sorely missing in Facebook. This is what the Plaxo activity stream looks like from my perspective (like Facebook it depends on who I am connected with):

By comparison, here is my Facebook news feed:

Again there are similarities but one of the main differences is that the Plaxo activity stream/news feed/public stream takes advantage of incoming feeds and streams to populate it and uses finer controls over who gets to see what to ensure that incoming content is more relevant to the person seeing it and privacy is respected (items shared with friends are only shared with friends, they don’t appear in the public stream). I am not a fan of the relatively closed system Facebook is to me. The recent hubbub over Scoble and the Plaxo script he ran serves as a reminder that despite the apparently open nature of the Facebook application platform (especially with recent reports about Facebook opening up even more), I am still forced to use approved Facebook services and not the services I am using anyway (at least not directly).

This is pretty much where the similarities end. It is also important to look at the bigger picture and at what Facebook and Plaxo offer holistically. From Facebook’s perspective, what you get is a profile and the ability to connect to other Facebook users as well as to take advantage of the Facebook applications. It is all about the Facebook experience. The way I see Plaxo, it is a facilitator and not your entire social ecosystem. Plaxo began with the ability to synchronise your address book and keep up to date with your Plaxo contacts’ changes in their address and contact information. Since adding Pulse to the mix the whole Plaxo experience opens up completely and becomes more of a base for your social experience. Plaxo doesn’t make any claims to own your information and your content (explicitly or implicitly) but rather seeks to facilitate your sharing of that information with the people you choose to connect to.

To me, my address book is the focal point of my social experience on the Web and this is borne out whenever I see a service invite me to tap into my address book to find my friends and contacts. Plaxo didn’t add that service after establishing the social network, it started with that and the social network is an overlay on top of my address book. What I really like about my Plaxo profile is that I can comfortably use that as my “home page” because it contains my public contact information as well as a sample of what I am doing. My Facebook profile also has my contact details but I want to be able to present that information in an uncluttered environment and also present the appropriate information to different groups of people. With Plaxo I can show personal information to my friends and family and my business info to my business contacts. I like being able to do that.

So while there are similarities between Plaxo Pulse and Facebook at some level, I don’t see Pulse as a Facebook clone but rather an illustration of what Facebook just can’t be for me – a really useful and fun service that appropriate in multiple contexts, not to mention more open and flexible. Now all I need to do is figure out how to expand Pulse’s functionality with OpenSocial …

Technorati Tags:
data portability, facebook, opensocial, plaxo, scoble, public profile, lifestream