Google Contacts Beta

Dear Google Friends,

The new Contact interface is terrible. Please understand that I'm a strong advocate for Google - some would call me a fanboy. I really want Google to succeed and to demonstrate that a corporation can grow large and successful without turning to evil.

BUT -- the new contacts subsystem is terrible. It's sluggish, it's inconvenient, it's often inexplicable, and it's absolutely NOT an improvement on the very functional and completely satisfactory predecessor that was once integrated with Gmail.

P@$$w@rdS Must Die!

...okay look here.

Every one of us wrestles daily with the problem of both protecting our online assets, and reliably gaining access to them. It's crazy, and as Cloud Computing comes into its own for mainstream use, the problem is going to just get more unmanageable.

Let's talk about passwords a little bit, and maybe we can agree on what's reasonable for the future.

When individual computers used to be a Big Damned Deal, we could rely on some primitive measures to protect them. First, there were only a few people who knew what to do with them, and then they had the only boot disks, so the machine couldn't even start unless they were there.

It's sort of appalling that entire offices actually did meaningful business with one or two "IBM compatible" computers in them, and with these marginally trained jealous harridans to guard them.

But then something happened to change everything...

Why You Should Be Reading Facebook at Work (Pt 3)

We started by looking at why various social media platforms can constitute a vital and valuable part of your business intelligence stream. The principle is that default ways of reading Facebook, Twitter and Google+ may not suffice, but that if you're committed to finding the valuable content, there are ways to get it.

 

This installment looks at how you can use Twitter to be on top of the news at about the same pace as professionals at major news outlets. The two secrets you need are:

• Understanding hashtags
• Using the right tools

Who is this about, anyway?

One of my most long-established pet peeves about web content, and presentation of information on the web is what I call Header Fluff.

Early browsers were often plagued with this unsightly condition. But even if browsers have grown somewhat free of this heartbreaking life challenge, content designers can still succumb to it for their individual efforts.

Here's a page we encountered recently.

The news story is in there somewhere. Even with a generous definition of other parts of this page as useful content, the total proportion of meat is around 15% here I think.

I want this publication to succeed, and I hope they wake up to the imperative that they lead with content.

What's so hot about gmail?

...look, I've been using email since 1985. There were proprietary systems on BBSs and Compuserve, there were clunky big iron mainframe systems at work, and at first there was mailx on Unix.

Later there was Elm, and then Pine, there was Eudora, there was Squirrel Mail webmail, and there was Outlook after that. Thunderbird gave us an alternative to using that evil mailer from Microsoft. Yahoo gave us a reasonable choice for free and online mail, and before long, AOL even got the memo about coming outside the ivy walls and joining the rest of us.

Along the way, I've used a lot of different software solutions for email.

And now I'm using gmail.

Maybe that isn't the sort of proof you were looking for. People who know me personally know that I won't rave about a technoology unless I believe in it, and I won't dis a technology just because of the company that delivers it.

Especially about email, I'm going to talk about what really works. So consider that I have about 50 unread messages right now, and about 140 total in my email box. For most of the people I know, having only 140 unread messages would be a gigantic victory. And I get more mail than most of those people.

I almost never touch spam. By that I mean that I see about one or two messages every couple of days. I get a lot more spam than that, but it gets very effectively filtered by my friends at Google. On the other hand, they don't trap very much of my legitimate mail and mark it as spam. I can't think of the last time I had to rescue a message from the spam trap after someone insisted that they'd sent it to me.

Look, google mail works. The spam filter works, the strategy for mail handling that is implicit with gmail works. The interface works, and I can work with my email just about anywhere.

My friends and colleagues who know what is going on with the web and the internet choose gmail if they choose a "public utility" email service. And I use it!

That's all I should have to say about it, but I want to add just this one more thing.

A friend of mine said, "I like the interface at Yahoo! better."

This is about much, much more than the interface. The core of gmail is a completely different approach to handling mail. Get that and you will be on the path to freedom. Email is supposed to serve you, not the opposite. Reach for the right tool and you will soon be the master of your email box.

You could look at what google says about gmail.

I can just say what I said to start this. I use it.

---v