Google Comments - The Right Way

So I occasionally head over to theciviccommons.com to catch up on some of the conversations and projects they are nurturing.  I like the concept that they are trying to build a community around engaging in civil discussion especially when we disagree.

Today I made a comment on a post and it was cross posted to Facebook by Jill Miller-Zimon. I happened to be logged into Facebook at the time as was pleased to see 4 or 5 comments and responses come in  a short period of time.  All very interesting and informative.  Unfortunately, the comments don't show up on theciviccommons.com.

Google recently announced the availability of Google Plus Comments integration with Blogger, the service I use to host this blog. In a recent post, I tried out this new capability.

Google TV

As I ramp up towards Christmas and getting a large screen HDTV my real question is what exactly does   provide me with that is of any use at all?  Well this post answers part of that question. Via  I can access movies, music, and TV.  That is really handy.

Kinda.  Clearly it is nice since I'm a 'droid user on my cell phone, a Chrome user on my Windows/Linux laptop, the integration with my Google Apps ( and  to start) and  is a benefit.  Similar UIs to my phone and PC is also a benefit.  It's Google so that's cool too, right?

Sharing Links on Google is Hard

Okay, so I was just generally playing around but most particularly because my wife is doing a lot of studying lately. In particular she is studying Hyland Software's modules and things since she now works there with me. But just as importantly, and due to company requirements she is studying ECM, or Enterprise Content Management.

So I was trying to figure out an easy way for us to collaborate on sharing information, notes, and links to various sites. Being a Google fanboy, at least outside of work, I tried a couple of different things. I tried to create a collection in Google docs but that only lets you create "office" like documents, not share links unless they are embedded in the document.

Then I remember Google bookmarks and went there. Then I realized that they had taken away lists, and therefore, the ability to share your bookmarks stored there with anybody else - which to be really blunt makes the whole thing completely and totally useless (particularly since Chrome has such a great bookmark feature that you can sync across machines for straight up non-shared bookmarks that you do not intend to "share")

Now I guess I could go out and create a google site for it which makes the most sense in many, many ways. My document collections could all be presented there, I'd have the ability for straight up content and I'd be able to create a links collection. Like http://www.neohawk.org/home/mylinks

But all of that seems like overkill in today's "social" world. It strikes me that there should be an easy way for me to have "pages", links, documents that are as easy to update and maintain as posting updates to my +Google+ stream. And to direct certain posts certain "circles", or limited group of people.

Or you would think that Google would have a way to share links. But it doesn't which is fairly mind-boggling. So much so that I think I'm missing something, but for the life of me I cannot figure out why it's so hard to share links a la Del.icio.us using Google.

Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google...

Hattip to John Hardy for this Google+ post.

Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google...: Posted by Alan Green, Software Engineer In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re goi...

If you read through that article it seems like a pretty cool thing in that there will be tighter integration between Google Reader and Google+. I like that idea. However,
Google continues, unless there is something left out of the article that we don't know about, to ignore Google Apps. There "improvement" for Google Reader is nothing of the sort, at least for me since I use it with my Google Apps account.

Here is what they said:

Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.
We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ ...

So what they are doing is taking away functionality from Reader. That functionality will be replaced with Google+. So far so good. Read that next line though which says "you can sign up for Google+".

Well, no I can't. I have a Google Apps account and Google Apps cannot sign up with Google+ or anything else that requires a Google profile.

グーグルプラス（Google+)

最近、グーグルはグーグルプラスというソーシャルネットワークをリリースしました。最初は登録を限定していて、いまでも制御しているみたいですが、基本的にグーグルアカウントを持っていて招待があれば入れます。

フェースブックとある程度似ているけど、違う面もあります。僕は結構気に入ったところが携帯電話で握った写真を自動的にG＋にアップロードします。アップロードされている写真が最初は自分しか見えない状態で、どなたに見せるかを決めるわけです。

共有、公開などが一般公開（どなたでも見える）から一人のみということができます。g＋ではサーカル（輪）を他のグーグルプラスのメンバーを入れて整理します。例えば、僕の場合は「Japan」、「仕事同僚」、「グーグル」、「友達」、「家族」などのサーカルをとおして整理しています。

自分としてはがっかりした点がneohawk.orgの独自ドメインでブログ、メールなど、オンラインアイデンテティ（？Identity)を作っています。Neohawk.org はグーグル・アップスを利用しています。残念ながら、グーグルアップスのアカウントでグーグルアップスに参加することができないんです。これがグーグルBuzzと同じ問題です。

結局はプロフィルが問題になっていて、どのようにグーグルアップにプロフィルを提供するかは解決できてないままです。 AppsをBuzzのユーザーに提供するぞといったのが一年前ぐらいですが、まだできていない。同様にグーグルプラスに提供するぞと約束しているのですけど、一切いつごろ提供するかを一言も言っていません。

残念です。

SCOOP: Coming Soon: The G-Slate with Google tablet

Got this from T-Mobile today. They have my interest...

More info HERE

Hodge Podge of Results - Google Profile

So the other day, Google announced it's "+1" service which sounds pretty much like any other "like" type of feature except that is provided for Google Search Results. Which is pretty big deal I guess since Google is close to monopoly status on search - at least in the U.S. Your plus ones are going to show up on your profile page - this one below is for my gmail google account.

Robert Hawkins - Google Profile

New UI For Google Groups

Two people I follow on Google Buzz, Andrew Maxwell and Chris Lang posted about Google Groups new user interface. Which finally got me off my duff to take a look at it. I had been wanting to revisit Google Groups as a possible service to provide for our JANO members to share information. Then around the same time that the transitions to new infrastructure for Google Apps I noticed that Groups was showing up in the pull down of the navigation menu.

グーグルアップ世界が広がる

先週ぐらいからグーグルアップの世界が広かっています。グーグルアップは独自ドメインでグーグルメールなどを利用するサービスですが、ビジネス、学校、政府、個人むけのサービスです。もともとはグーグルドック、グーグルメール、グーグルサイトなど六つぐらいの基本サービスに限定されていました。ピカサとかリーダーとか他のグーグルサービスを使いたかったら、グーグルアップと全く別のアカウントを作る必要がありました。先週木曜日（18日）にグーグルエントプライズブログでグーグルアップアカウントで使えるサービスが大幅に増えたと発表されました。６０以上のサービスを利用することになりました。

Testing from my Neohawk.org Account

I am testing the email posting capability  of blogger from my neohawk.org email account.

This weekend I am looking around at some of the changes related to the Google Apps infrastructure change that I took advantage of for the Neohawk.Org domain.

For example, I logged into my Google Sites site that I use to play around and see what's up with sites this morning.   It has been a really long time since I have logged into a google sites.  One of the first things I notice is that the "announcement" content type now provides an RSS feed.  The lack of an rss feed was one of the major reasons I never seriously considered Google Sites a serious solution to anything.  It was simply a toy.   Now that it has rss feeds at least for the announcements content type that may change.

I can certainly think of possiblities for using sites now.  Since one use case I have certainly doesn't require any serious effort to provide a nice look and feel (sites ability to customize look and feel still sucks, but I guess that's the price you pay for an easy-to-use, highly google apps integrated site).   Unfortunately, that use case requires that we get JANO re-classified as a 501c3.

Gauging New Google Apps New Infrastructure

So I have a domain registered with Google Apps that I use for testing and development. It's a Standard Edition with only a few users, all of which use English. So basically, this domain met the criteria for becoming an early adopter of the transition to the new Google Apps infrastructure. The infrastructure that basically makes a google apps account operate just like a regular Google Account.

So I transitioned this domain. And sure enough I get the "Organization" tab in the dashboard that allows me to turn services on and off for accounts in an organization of the domain. Unfortunately, at least for my purposes, since a Standard Edition account can only have one organization, I cannot test creating multiple organizations and creating access privileges to certain users based on their organization.

 

Since the Standard Edition only allows one organization, while the dashboard is certainly "cleaner" and more intuitive to turn services on and off, from a functionality perspective there is zero change. It's on or off for the whole domain. Hence the infrastructure change is pretty much irrelevant - though again the interface is much, much better. (It would be nice if Google would allow the creation of one organization with Standard Edition rather than just on/off for the whole domain. )

The other thing you may notice is that the services you can turn on and off are the same core services from prior to transitioning to the new infrastructure. I was hoping to be able to control which Google Services, now that accounts from my domain can register for a whole host of google services. I was hoping that this lack was just part of being an "early adopter". But no, apparently this is all there is and all that is planned although Google has left the door ajar for adding other services later.

"Any other Google services (not listed above) can't be restricted at this time. Note: Other Google services might be added to this list in a later release. Please refer to this article for updates.'

Here's the list of services currently available under the dashboard:

• Email
• Chat
• Calendar
• Docs
• Groups (all except standard?)
• Sites
• Video(all except standard?)
• Mobile

So what this says to me is that Google is going to open the flood gates to their services without providing me the control of that for accounts I issue. Even if they add services later that's an administrative nightmare to start denying services to users that have already signed up/registered for a service. I have to qualify that for now as I'm an early adopter so those services may be in place by the time google apps users will unilaterally be transitioned. But I also have to assume that, and this is partially based on my experience with Google services up until this point, that in fact other services won't be ready for control on the dashboard. And if that's the case, and if I were anything but a Standard Edition user I would not be a happy camper.

Granted the infrastructure change makes it easier to register for other Google services with my Google Apps account, and that for Neohawk.org this is a great thing! However, this typical Google tendency not to think things through makes my life much harder. For example, the reality is that prior to the infrastructure change you could "associate" a google account with a google apps account making for pretty much seamless integration with other google services. So the transition means that I need to go to the effort of dismantling all of that. Again, for neohawk.org, not a big deal. For JANO though, that becomes problematic. And if I were a Premier Edition user I'd not be a happy camper.

Luckily, I've had enough experience with Google that I never had the rest of the folks that use the JANO domain and Google Apps to "associate" their accounts. Moreover, I'm not sure I'll tell them that they can use their Google Apps account to register for other services. It's all useless if I can't control what they can and cannot use with MY domain. Typical Google, though, where everything is in motion and not perfected to start with but improved over time regardless of the impact to users and administrators. So as an administrator of a google apps domain, while the change in infrastructure opens up a lot of possibilities and opportunities, it is still only half-steps at this point. Not enough for me to go all googly eyed over it. (Sorry, couldn't resist)

However, one of the main reasons I did not have my JANO users associate their JANO google apps account with a Google account was that if you logged into a service that required a Google Account, the Google navigation menu changed to Google account menu. What that meant is that when you clicked on "Calendar" you would be sent to the Google Account calendar, not the Google App account calendar. Talk about end-user confusion!

I am happy to report that the navigation upon transitioning to the new infrastructure works as I would expect. The navigation menu sends you to your Google Apps calendar. This is clearly an upgrade and makes the transition highly welcome if I'm not being a stickler about being able to control which Google services my domain users can use outside of the core listed above. For the Neohawk.org domain, I'm a happy camper.

For the JANO domain, I'm still not convinced that the migration to the new platform helps me in any significant way. I won't really know that until the transition is forced upon me whether I like it or not. The JANO web team will be able to use their JANO accounts for logging in and posting to the blog, but they already have that capability with the Google accounts they had to set up to begin with in the first place. I should mention that JANO is also a Standard Edition until we can, if we can, change the status of JANO from a 501c4 to 501c3 to take advantage of the Not-for-profit Edition.

So I'd have to say I'm glad for the change as it relates to Neohawk, completely ambivalent as it relates to JANO (disappointed really since I had higher expectations), and I would be pissed if I were a paying customer due to the lack of control over other Google Services. Again, with the caveat that I'm basing it on my test, standard edition Google Domain and I'm an "early adopter". Things may change over the next month or two as they gear up for the real transition.

 

Google Priority Inbox, Google Apps, and Random Thoughts

So I can't really talk about Buzz. But I can talk about other items of interest about Google products and services.

As most GMail users and Gapp (Google Apps) users are aware, Google recently deployed Priority Inbox. Nifty little filter and I like the idea that it gets smarter, much like the spam filters get smarter with more data. So I think its a great feature. Just a tad bit late.

Google Trusted Tester

I signed up to become a Google Trusted Tester after seeing this post on Buzz. Much to my surprise, I was actually chosen as a tester.

Social Wok

I posted a tweet today that suggest that Social Wok had problems. Social Wok replied to my tweet asking for more information. Now that's the way to follow up! Take note of that folks. Responding to complaints is a good thing as I went the extra mile to grab some screenshots(see below) and am creating this post. If they hadn't responded I probably would have removed Social Wok and just moved on.

update: And they wouldn't have fixed it already making their product better, this user happy with them, and all that before I could even finish this post (granted there's a lot of fluff in this post).

Damn You Byteflow!

U5AA7KUEJQ7U

As many of you know, I've been using Byteflow for this site and blog. Byteflow is a blog system built in Django. The glorious design(sarcasm) is mine. I should also add that the News and Links are little modules that I created. Which I'm pretty proud of as I'm not a programmer/coder, and even though they are real simple and pretty featureless (no RSS for example).

That's one of the things I like Byteflow, which is really a blog system, is that I can build other "apps" and include it into the blog to make it a "cms". And Django is fairly easy to get your head around to do so, at least for the easy stuff.

Anyway, as I posted in "New URL", I was planning to move everything over to Google, particularly the blog over to blogger - this one in particular: robataka.neohawk.org. For one reason, it's free. Free as in no charge, not the FLOSS free. It was a cost saving measure as I run this site one a vps, from VPS Village. Now it's not terribly expensive, in fact it's inexpensive. I'm sure I might find even cheaper ones. But if I'm going to move my site for cost reasons, it'll be to free rather than for just less money.

More importantly though, I was going to switch simply because it was easier to post to blogger than it was to a Byteflow blog. My number one "complaint" or dissatisfaction with Byteflow was simply the inability to post to my blog via ScribeFire (what I'm using now) or other blog editor/tool. I always had to go in via the web admin interface. Where as with Google's blogger, I could use a blog tool like ScribeFire to post to it. It just makes it easier to post which means I'll post more often. Or that's the idea anyway.

So here I was getting ready to move. I updated my dns so that you could see robataka.neohawk.org, and I posted all of the entries from here to my blogger blog. I was playing around with Google Sites (useless for my current needs), App Engine Site Creator (cool, and usable, but just not quite right for this - I do use it elsewhere). But I was going to bite the bullet since every decision involves trade offs. I'd be getting a blog that's easier to post to, but a weaker solution for non-blog stuff. And less control, or more work really, to control the look and feel of the site.

So what do the developers of Byteflow do? They fix Byteflow so it now can handle the MetaWeblog API, and therefore using blog editing tools like ScribeFire(apparently Echto works too). Damn you! Stop making Byteflow so usable!

So now I'm back to using Byteflow at least for the foreseeable future. I may end up posting in both blogs until I finally make up my mind. But for now, Byteflow wins again.

Damn you Byteflow!

Technorati Tags: byteflow, django, blogger, google

Google Apps Account as Google Account

Wow. I discovered this morning that I can use my google app private domain account as a google account. Perhaps I am slow, but what I had been doing is associating my gmail google account with my google app account. However, today I received a google wave invite to my private domain. In the process of muddling around I discovered the ability to create a google account using the google app domain. So for example, now that my rbh at neohawk.org account is also a google account, I have a google profile, picasa account, etc. Until today, I need to use my gmail account to login, but now I can use my neohawk.org account. See below:

You can see my profile below:

This is huge. One of may largest complaints with google has been the two different logins I needed. One for my google apps, one for google accounts. Now that they are the same, I'm a happy camper. I did have to remove my neohawk.org account from my gmail google account to make this work.

Did I just not know this or is this new?

One Down, One To Go

So I've been thinking about what to do with this site. Simply put, I'm thinking of moving it to google in some form or fashion. The main motivation is money. I don't get enough access to warrant paying any money for "hosting". I currently pay a small fee to GrokThis, VPS Village actually, for a xen virtual host. But anything at this point is too much.

I have had a test blog up on Blogger for quite a while now. It's been mostly for testing things like email posting, blog editors, gadgets, etc. So last night I finally broke down and tried to see if I could get blogger to look something like this site. While not exact, I'm close enough. Check it out.

Actually it was fairly easy to modify to make it look like this site. It's not done, nor perfect but was close enough for me to figure out what else was necessary. It also helped me figure out what I did and did not like about blogger. At least partially anyway.

What's to Like

Okay, so here's an incomplete list of what's to like:

1. It's free
2. It's linked to my google account
3. You can easily add gadgets
4. It's fairly easy to customize design
5. You can email posts to the blog
6. You can use blog editors, like ecto, scribefire, or google's Sidewiki
7. I can use my neohawk.org domain if I wish
8. Blogger itself generates traffic to my site
9. I can create a multi-author blog (me and arisa, if arisa ever posts
10. Posting in Japanese is no problem
11. Can use feedburner
12. Easy to implement Google Analytics

So that's a fairly good list of things it does for you. Here's the list of things I don't like about it

What's Not to Like

1. Miserable on html validation: the template I used had 636 errors on it. That's not even close.
2. I can not use my google apps account to use it
3. To really customize it, you have to be very careful with the built in widgets and code built in or I'll probably break the site
4. No concept of "static" pages, so it is only a blog
5. Fairly convoluted process to add Disqus which I like as a commenting system
6. CSS and some javascript is in the template -> I'd prefer them separate
7. Does not provide a way to show posts for a given author(that I can find

Based on that, you would think it's a no brainer to move to blogger. Actually thought, I'm not feeling the love for blogger. The fact that I cannot use my google apps domain (neohawk.org) to login to the site is huge, as is the effort to customize it to the point where the html, etc., is valid - and I'm still not sure I could get there because of code that Blogger needs.

In general, I'm quite annoyed with the shortcomings of google apps and it's integration with other google products and services. Picasa, blogger, google reader, openid provider, friend connect, google analytics, etc., require use of a google account. I don't want to use a google account, I want to use my google apps domain.

Granted, I can not complain too much since it is all for free. No, that's not right. I can complain because it's not "free". I'm providing information to Google as their stated goal is to index everything, I'm making it easy for them. So I may not be paying money, but I'm paying.

One of these days I'll do a serious post about Google's ineffectiveness. But for now, I've checked out using blogger. I now need to check out Nick's posts on creating a blog with google app engine.

One down, one to go.

IE7 and Google Spreadsheet Form

Ah, so I was planning on posting a form related to JANO, and happened to be using my laptop from work(kids are using mine right now). The JANO board meetings are open to any member of JANO, but we do need to get some kind of head count since we hold the board meetings at Shuhei in Beachwood.

By happenstance, I am using google docs spreadsheet to create the rsvp form. In IE7. I make the changes and go to take a look at the form and all there is are question marks where text should be. I whip open the same url in Firefox and it renders perfectly. No wonder we've had no rsvps before; they can't read the damn form (the majority of access is via IE). I only have two thoughts:

1. Come on people, use Firefox
2. Why does Microsoft have such a hard problem making a good browser

Unfortunately this time around it's not the browser I don't think. At a minimum, Safari on Windows has the exact same issue as IE7. FWIW, on Linux using FF, Chrome, Konqi, Opera, and Flock all work perfectly. Could it be something about the windows platform? Just maybe?

Nah, couldn't be.

Anyhoo, Google really needs to make these forms html valid. While I will give them it's awful close, there are errors. And they provide you with no way to "tweak" the form, i.e, specify the character set or language. And the place < br> everywhere, particularly places that per the spec are not allowed to be. Granted the idea is that you can easily create a form on the web where the responses are automatically saved in a spreadsheet. If the form become unreadable though, regardless of how easy it is to create it's useless. And all I would need would be able to pick a character set or language for the form and the browsers would render it perfectly, regardless of the operating system and/or browser.

Additionally, it would be really nice if you could create links in the text. I can imagine that may be a security thing though.

So this time around I can only blame another google beta quality service. Not that I'm really complaining since it's all free anyway.

Google Connect for Comments

For the time being, nevermind. It didn't work like I thought it would.

I am trying something new on this blog. I am giving Google Connect a go for commenting. I have also added a "social bar" on the right side of the blog, but that was really part of my testing to make sure that Google Connect was working.

This site is powered mostly by Byteflow with some minor code added by me (news and links), and a couple other pieces of Django code/modules. But I wanted to give Google connect a try. With Byteflow, in order to comment you need to register with this site either with an OpenID account or a email address and password. I'm pleased with the OpenID support, but not many people actually know what it is. They do know their google, aim, or yahoo accounts and can use those to register and then comment.

Of course, there actually needs to be somebody reading this blog before any comments are going to happen. But I know I'm talking to myself here in the ether. But I think this may be easier in the long run.

I'll need to tidy up my templates since there is still some stuff left over from the byteflow templates. I'll need to nix those when I get around to it.

Techmeme: How Google Decides to Pull the Plug (Vindu Goel/New York Times)

I saw this article yesterday.

Vindu Goel / New York Times:

How Google Decides to Pull the Plug — GOOGLE recently set the blogosphere abuzz by announcing that it was pulling the plug on several products. — The victims included Lively, a virtual world that was Google's answer to Second Life; Dodgeball, a cellphone service aimed at young bar-hoppers …

View Original Article

It's where I found out that Google is pulling the plug on Notebooks. This ties into a post or two that have been in my head for a while. Posting this as a test of Flock's ability to post to blogger, but also as a reminder for when I finally write those posts.

Blogged with the Flock Browser