Category: Uncategorized

Google Reader Sharing Replaced by Feedly

It’s insanely interesting to me how quickly people are replacing the “sharing cred” feature that once made Google Reader very valuable with Feedly…

Tips for Google Reader users migrating to feedly | Building Feedly: “When you hover on an article or inline it, you should see a bookmark icon. We call it the save for later icon. It functions similarly to the Google Reader star mechanism.”

When Google Reader was in its prime, one of the most fascinating features was seeing how many times an article had been shared or favorited etc… now Feedly is picking up that slack and it’s really going to take off as a result.

Google missed a huge opportunity by shutting down Reader.

Nexus 4 and Porting My Number to Google Voice

Screen Shot 2013 02 02 at 4 40 43 PM

Like a number of others, I couldn’t wait to get a Nexus 4.

As a recent Android convert, I have been jealous of those with stock Android installs on their mobiles. My Samsung Galaxy S3 looks and acts mored like a Samsung phone than a “Google phone,” and rightly so. Samsung is making those devices so that’s their decision. Of course, there are ways to root and flash mods to get a more streamlined and stock Android experience, but as someone fresh from the Apple orchard, I was hoping for a little more ease.

The Nexus 4 is also an unlocked phone. That means I can sign-up with TMobile or ATT here in the US and pop in a sim card without a worry for carrier fees or a 2 year contract.

That’s a scary proposition for most folks. I’d make the correlation between deciding to “cut the cord” with your cable tv and go the route of using an AppleTV or Roku or a laptop or Mac Mini or XBox or PS3 etc as the main source of your entertainment. I “cut the cord” back in 2003 and haven’t looked back. I’ve loved the freedom of using an AppleTV for some content, my beloved Roku for other content, an XBox 360 for some things and finally a laptop with an HDMI connection. I have a state-of-the-art huge TV and it feels right to me (and simpler) to use those boxes to get the shows I want to watch.

The same goes with cutting a connection to a mobile phone carrier. As an experiment with this new Nexus 4, I signed up for a $30 a month pre-paid TMobile 4G plan. I can ramp that up or down as needed. I can go grab an ATT account if I want. There’s no commitment and that’s awesome. I rarely “talk” on my phone so 100 mins for me are probably too many. However, the unlimited texting and unlimited browsing (4G speeds up to first 5 gigs) are the real winners for me. There are more expensive plans, of course. I’m assuming most people need more than 100 minutes of talk time for their phones. However, with Google Voice on my laptops and Skype, I don’t do much in the way of using a phone as a phone.

That takes me to the final part of this transformation… porting my number over to Google Voice. With a $30 a month plan in place that I’m really enjoying, I’ve decided to take the plunge and get away from my Verizon account by porting my number over to Google Voice and using that as my main telephony.

I love Google Voice and have been a long-time user of the service since it was called GrandCentral back in 2005 and not affiliated with Google. When Google did acquire the service in 2007 I was hopeful about it’s future and how Google could reinvent texting and telephony just as it changed email forever with GMail.

It has been a slow progression, but as a steady Google Voice user over the years I’ve been waiting for the right set of circumstances to make the leap to using the service as my full time provider (in a sense) rather than just the extra number that some of my closest friends have.

With this awesome T-Mobile plan, an amazing Nexus 4 device that I’m literally head-over-heels about and the always-there passion to cut the cord to Verizon, now’s the time.

I just started the porting process and will keep updating on how things go.

Way of the future.

Reminiscing About What the Web Was

From 2008:

The vanishing personal site – Jeffrey Zeldman: “Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments.”

From this week in 2012:

The Web We Lost – Anil Dash: “The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.”

We’ve lost a great deal indeed.

Lots to ponder between these last four years and these two complimentary bookends on the handing over of our namespaces and personal sites to venture capital funds, eager stock buyers and corporate silos.

And yes, I miss Technorati as well.

Solving Multiple Email, GMail and iOS Problem

I’m noting this here for my own needs as I’ll certainly have to follow this breadcrumb trail again.

If you are looking or have consolidate a bunch of email addresses into one Google Apps account, there’s nothing more sweeter than having that account work just as well on iOS as it does in your browser app (or Apple Mail if you will):

Handling Multiple Email Addresses with Gmail and iOS: “When I started adopting Getting Things Done and Inbox Zero, I decided to consolidate my numerous email accounts. For a few, this meant wrapping them up or forwarding them along, never to think of the account again. For others, like my personal and work email, as well as various customer service and sales email accounts that I monitor, it meant that I needed to find a way to receive everything in one inbox, while sending my replies back from the proper account.”

See also:

Solved: Gmail, iPad, iPhone, and multiple from addresses – Modern Nerd: “After much Googling, dribbling, and head bangering, I’ve managed to get around this in a way that works great on the iPad and iPhone. I thought I’d combine the various hints and tips I’ve discovered to put them in one place, then add some screenshots to make it more useful to others who’ve been driven nuts by the same issue.”

Then:

James’ Ubiquitous Blog – Journal – Making multiple ‘From’ email addresses on iOS my bitch without adding extra accounts: “This all came about because of work. I got a call from a client that we regularly work with asking if it’s possible to consolidate his some 20 email accounts into one of his Google Apps accounts (this also works with regular Gmail accounts too) while still being able to reply and send from the individual addresses. As it turns out this can be quite tricky but I managed to find an article that outlined the steps perfectly, or so I thought to begin with.”

Sounds geeky, but it’s a great 5 min solution to an otherwise incredibly annoying workflow issue for those of us with too many email accounts.

The Next Step

You can’t argue with this type of closure…

Closure « Steve Blank: “Fast forward 15 years. Retired for a year, I ran across an article that said, ‘$35 Million Dollar Supercomputer For Sale for Scrap.’  It was the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Cray Y-MP that had beaten me at Ardent.  It was for sale on Ebay.

I bought the Cray.

It took two semi-trailers to deliver it.”

Great story (read the links as well).

Twitter as the Poisoned Coral Reef

So sad… Twitter was once that coral reef service we could all bet on:

LoopInsight: IFTTT to End Twitter Triggers: In an e-mail sent to users, IFTTT’s CEO Linden Tibbets said that the service will be removing all Twitter “Triggers” on September 27, 2012 – a direct result of recently-published changes to how Twitter is allowing third-party developers to work with their service.

As goes selfishness, so goes the web.

MarsEdit and Squarespace 6

Disappointed, but hopefully the Squarespace team will listen to Daniel…

Red Sweater Blog – State Of The Squarespace: “It came as a surprise when Squarespace 6 was released earlier this year, that support for 3rd party editors such as MarsEdit was dropped from the service.”

We use Squarespace (6) for the HarrelsonAgency site and I’m hopeful they’ll follow through on his first suggestion.

Paperless 1.2

Paperless is one of those books that I thought would be enjoyable for reaffirming what I already know but has turned into a constant reference guide for how I get things done and process info.

Paperless, Version 1.2 — MacSparky: “It always made me a little crazy with my prior books that I couldn’t update them. I was in Barnes and Noble just the other day looking at a copy of iPad at Work on the shelf. By and large, the book held up pretty well. However, there are a few areas in it that I would desperately like to update. Of course that’s not possible given that most of the copies are sitting on people shelves and I don’t have control over the digital copies either. The ability to update a book was one of my big motivations to self-publish.

I’m particularly interested in the ability to update books on the iBooks Author platform and am in the middle of some pretty exciting things with it myself at the moment.

More on that soon 🙂

Evernote Amoeba Takes in Skitch

I’ve been a long time user of Skitch (since the early beta days… ’07 or ’08?) and a user of Evernote for just about that long.

Both have become integral parts of what I do as a teacher and with my work at Harrelson Agency.

It’s very cool and promising to see something as core to my workflow as Skitch get its proper due in the rapidly expanding Evernote ecosystem.

Evernote is Bringing Sketching App Skitch into its Core Service: “Evernote is moving to integrate its annotation and sketching product Skitch into its core note-taking product,which it says will strengthen the service by bringing syncing, searching and sharing features to it.”

I wonder when they’ll do the same with Penultimate?

Why Apple Really Ditched Google Maps in iOS 6

Google Earth is the single most important property for Google’s position as market and thought leader of search and discovery. That’s always been the case since they purchased Keyhole Tech in 2005.

Apple knows this as well and that’s why they are going on their own in iOS 6 with a mapping technology that’s in house.

Mapping (discovery) is the new search:

How Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us | Technology | The Guardian: “There is a sense, in fact, in which mapping is the essence of what Google does. The company likes to talk about services such as Maps and Earth as if they were providing them for fun – a neat, free extra as a reward for using their primary offering, the search box. But a search engine, in some sense, is an attempt to map the world of information – and when you can combine that conceptual world with the geographical one, the commercial opportunities suddenly explode. Search results for restaurants or doctors or taxi firms mean far more, and present far juicier opportunities for advertisers, when they are geographically relevant. And then there’s the most important point – the really exciting or troubling one, depending on your perspective. In a world of GPS-enabled smartphones, you’re not just consulting Google or Apple data stores when you consult a map: you’re adding to them.”

Mapping/Discovery will be the verb akin to “searching” of the next five years.

We’ll have “Discovery Optimizers” just as we have search engine optimization and “But are we appearing at the top of people’s discoveries?” questions as we have “Are we on the front page of Google?” now.

Discovery motors will quietly, but quickly, replace search engines.

It’s about time (and place).

A Day of Outages or Why I’m Sticking with RSS

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the best way for the web to work is for us all to have our islands of identity that are linked via coral reefs and communication channels.

Today has been a heck of a day for the web.

First Twitter.

Now Charter.

Mediums that we normally associate with stability and user interest continue to disappoint and disgust.

I’ve often talked about how I want to “Bring it All Back Home,” but I’m really close to pulling that trigger and relying on tried-and-trusted RSS as the vehicle to deliver that information rather than a walled island that I have to (or will have to) log in to such as Twitter or Facebook.

RSS – Wikipedia

I don’t trust my identity and my content to 3rd party islands anymore. This is me and for me and hosted by my dollars.

So here’s to a free, open and federated web.

If you want me, I’m here. Grab the RSS.

Twitter APIocalypse

And here we go…

Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API | Twitter Developers: “At the end of June, I wrote about how we’re working to deliver a consistent Twitter experience, and how we would soon introduce stricter guidelines about how the Twitter API is used. I’d like to give you more information about coming changes to the API and the migration plan while offering insights into today’s Twitter ecosystem and why we’re making these changes.”

Sad to see awesome apps get called out:

That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.

This is not your parent’s twitter.

“People are crazy and times are strange, I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range, I used to care but things have changed.”

Hope this is true…

https://twitter.com/parislemon/status/236239840792952833

Wow, what a day.