Google and Python and you know what else

...so one of the reasons I've been so quiet lately is that I've been programming and writing a new course. In doing so I learned a lot about myself -- perhaps far more than about the subject material I set out to teach.

It's long been my intention to offer workshops for developers who are interested in working on the new emerging platforms. This means workshops where they get to learn to work with various open-source and open-architecture platforms.

Google Wave is on!

...so people around you will begin now, to brag about having received their Google Wave invitation. The geekier-than-thou crowd will start to tell you why it's "just like X" or that it's "not really anything new..." or whatever they want to tell you to counteract the pain of admitting that they don't have a login to the system yet.

It's just like X, that's true! It's a veritable post-modern social networking tool. It combines the best of email, IM, web pages, blogs, wikis, and whatever you didn't think of yet...into a new domain for expression.

Yes it's chaotic, yes it's underpopulated as an information space, and yes some of the parts don't work completely yet. But I'm telling you that this will be the Twitter of next year. It won't replace or supplant Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. Each of those has a purpose. This is the tool that will begin to solidify the trend for convergence.

All of those things will begin to come together among the waves! Get someone to invite you. If you're a person who loves to be there first, this is for you.

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful

...hate me because I'm successful, effective, and because I give my customers what they ACTUALLY want!

I'm not talking about myself here, I'm talking about Google.

Now first of all let me point out that I don't work for Google, I don't get paid by them in any way. I have no vested interest, nor a personal agenda that would have me defend Google.

Why are we here?

...it seems like no week goes by anymore without me getting a message from someone who is inviting me to become a part of their social network on some new flavor-of-the-day community site.

This is not really new, but it's reaching heroic proportions now, and it has me wonder what will really happen next. There are three or four key primary networks that people want to be a part of right now, and a half dozen special function platforms that are particularly inviting.

Without going into too much detail on any one, I thought I'd list the platforms I frequent, those that I visit semi-regularly, and a bunch of others that I don't visit very much -- but for which I have an account.

Connection is next!

...if you listen to some of the hot-rod analysts who are looking into what's next for Social Media space, you hear talk of an age of inter-operability. That's what's exciting about the emergence of Google Wave. It threatens to allow inter-connectedness between pieces of the platform on an individual level.

This includes Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Yelp! as well as other mundane sorts of sources like calendars, databases, CRM systems and so forth...

So what there is to watch for next is how well systems offer to fit together. This is why I think it's silly to engage in silly conversations like "Which is better, Facebook or Twitter?" The answer to that question is simply, "Yes!" I use them both together. And each one is better than the other.

Waves with Force.com

One strength that Google brought to the changing world is the ability to create classification out of chaos. Rather than rely upon a carefully crafted (and failure-prone) system of classification, Google's strategies stem from finding order in the meta-data derived from the chaos.

Instead of carefully filing each bit of information away according to some personal system of logic, we pile it in a big mass at the center of the room and search it. When a player finally understands this freedom, the game changes.

Or to say it another way, "databases ARE indeed cool, but they're so '90s!"

So we can imagine that the Wave could become a fundamental storage element in a CRM system like force.com. And of course, further decomposition of waves into the component blips will yield even more useful "implicit meta-data" that will aid in classification and search. (For instance, the number of times Joe replies in a Wave, or the number of blips created within a time frame might become an interesting criterion. Certainly those facts contain information that supports analysis and matching.)

So perhaps developers who are adept both with development of resources to work with force.com would also benefit from a careful study of Waves.

Just a thought.

---v

Wish List: MS Word

...I've had the dubious pleasure recently of working on a project that demands the use of MS Word. It reminded me of a few things, and reinforced my affinity for the level of polish that Microsoft eventually brought to the world's most common word processor. (It feels weird to use that term: Word Processor.)

I'm not a Word hater. I hate giving money to Microsoft, given the amount of money they've taken from me without my choice (Such as licensing agreements with my computer manufacturer or my Enterprise client. In the former case, I paid for a computer that has the cost hidden in the purchase price, in the latter case I'm forced to buy a copy of the software in order to do business with my client.)

No. Word is just about as good as it gets for word processing. The interface is easily accessible without too much new learning on my part. The feature set is powerful and useful to me as I author complex documents, and the responsiveness of the software is acceptable to me when I'm in a hurry to deliver a document on deadline. (Although my business partners may be thinking, 'you deliver a document on deadline Vincent?) At least the software doesn't hold me back when I use it properly.

But there are some things I would love to see as an author and power user.

Style sheet management

I'd like two key features related to style and style sheets for a document.

I'd like the style dialog to present a filter options so that I can search for a named style easily among the many that accumulate as documents get written and shared with others. Right now my access to work with paragraph styles is a toolbar/window that lists all the possible styles in the document. After a while, especially when the document is shared in a chaotic environment, a large number of styles are present and I need to be able to find the one I need easily without having to scroll through a lengthy list.

I'd also like to have a tool that allows me to display my document with these two categories of paragraphs highlighted for my attention:

• paragraphs that use "local" markup not represented by a formally named style
• styles that do not comply with a specific stylesheet (ie. those styles that have been applied ad-hoc by a tired or careless co-author)

I love the spell checking and grammar checking inline, I actually find the auto-correction to be useful and mostly it does the right thing.

MS Word is not that bad. But it could be made better without changing the native file format or the fundamentals of the user interface. The truth is that although about 65% or 70% of computer users don't need the power of Word, the people who do need that level of support will be hard pressed to find an equivalent alternative.

Just sayin' what I see.

---v