Google Reader - The Web App is winning

For the last couple of months i've been using the free desktop app Reeder as the client to read my RSS feeds. I've tried several desktop apps but to date Reeder was the one I liked the best. It wasn't perfect, but it was free and it seemed a little less clunky than the native google reader interface. Regardless of what tool I use, its always connected to my google reader account these days. That allows me to pick the best app on each platform but still maintain consistency in keeping up on the news.

The Reeder beta finished and now they want $10. Thats a reasonable price for good software, but since it didn't just switch on ads or cripple the app but literally disabled it I jumped back to the native google reader interface until I could make a decision. And you know what? The native google reader app improved and its hard for me to say the local app is better. So I uninstalled Reeder and went back to the google reader interface wrapped in fluid to make it an app and I haven't missed Reeder yet.

The killer will come when I need to read RSS offline, but these days I don't travel with my mac but with an iPad and iPhone. The other killer is when you buy an app like Reeder on one platform they don't give it to you on the others. I have no idea what Reeder looks like on the iPad or iPhone since they don't have a lite/free version and i'm actually quite happy with the free MobileRSS. If Reeder sold the desktop app on the Mac for $10 and included the mobile versions with that i'd consider it, but otherwise its not going to happen.

When vendors really make their apps work offline with HTML5 it will really but a strain on the local desktop app vendors. And competition is good for the consumers.

Google Accounts

Its been a while again since my last post, but a recent experience got me fired up. I've been meaning to post (gripe?) about the confusion between Google accounts and Google Apps accounts for quite a while. Google made a mistake in the early days in letting you have both types of accounts with the same email address. This created a lot of confusion as people think of their identity as their email address but found that there were multiple profiles and sets of data associated with that email address.

Google is now trying to clean that up and i've had the pleasure of experiencing that. Its not pretty. What they essentially do is if you have a google apps email address that conflicts with a normal google email address they rename the normal google email address to something different, like "foo%domain.com@gtempaccount.com" then for a few of their products they automatically migrate the data over for you. For the rest they have help available for how you can do it manually. Not all of of these solutions work and each is different.

Google also doesn't indicate the odd states you can get in along the way. After the initial migration things were OK for me, not everything migrated, but from the web the things that did were accessible. But all my authentication failed on my iPhone, OSX Apps etc. The applications could no longer authenticate with my Google account because the accounts were in a messed up state. Google provided no help on this and after much searching I found a thread that told me what had to be done. The net is that I had to change that temp email address they had assigned to something else. Once I did that all my apps on the iphone and desktop started authenticating and worked fine. Again I had no indication from Google that I needed to do that, things just broke.

After that I spent an hour iterating through the list of google services and making sure I had migrated their data. The final step is to blow away the Google account (not google apps account) but i'll wait a bit to make sure I have everything I need to do that.

Software development is difficult, predicting future messes is especially hard but for millions of people to go through this is inexcusable. Only because their products are free can they get away with this sort of thing and its part of the reason Google has not really found a way to make money beyond ads.

Gmail - When SaaS fails

I've mentioned before that we use Google Apps for my work and recently one of my colleagues ran into this problem:

Searching around on the net showed that many others have hit this problem and there doesn't appear to be any fix. There are some rumors that Apple's Snow Leopard is causing it to crop up more, and the conspiracy theories that Google is doing this to hurt Apple, but either way its an issue.


What made this problem worse is that once the lockout period expired, what ever triggered the problem re-triggered the problem. The result? He was locked out for 6 days. He is no longer using Gmail except for routing.


If your SaaS vendor can decide on some arbitrary undocumented rule that will cause them to lock you out of their product for 24 hours then there's a problem. Combine that the inability to get any real support from Google other than posting in the littered groups or paying for their "premium" support to get a support answer within 48 hours and you have a disaster. Businesses can't live with vendors that behave this way.


I mentioned previously how I use Google Voice for routing my home phone calls, and it seems that Gmail may only be suited for routing too unless Google wakes up and fixes things like this.


The problem didn't hit me, but I fear the day it does and I have no idea what triggers it. I have at least as much mail as he does, but something about his usage pattern set them off. Who will they hit next?

Thats it. Im going home

A little while ago I mentioned that Google was taking over my life and thats still true. But i'm not buying into web based applications replacing everything. Over the last couple of weeks I moved to using Google apps for all mail, calendaring, RSS feeds and browser. What won and what didn't and why?

• Calendar - Success. Google calendar works, iCal doesnt except for the most basic (non business) purposes. Wrap it in fluid and you have a new life. DELETE iCal and pretend you were never haunted by it.

• Browser - Success. So far Chrome is faster, more responsive and more extensible. I especially like the idea of removing ads in Chrome -- using googles browser to block google ads, something about that just makes me happy. The only thing i've missed is reasonable 1Password integration. There's something there now but its nasty and incomplete. There are some cool plugins for it that i'm using and i'm sure a ton more:
• Google reader notifier - shows how far behind you are on your RSS reading
• Chromed bird - watches for twitter updates for you
• AdBlock - as mentioned
• Google Voice - notifies you of waiting voicemail
• ClickWeather - temperature at a glance and details at a click

• Google Reader - Partial success. Its fine for now, i'd need real OSX Google Gears or HTML5 support to be a believer for offline access, but the interface is ok and i'm not missing NetNewsWire (which essentially became an offline reader for Google Reader). Any lag from a web app is tolerable because, lets face it, RSS isnt mission critical.

• Mail - Failure. I tried it in a browser. I tried it with MailPlane. I tried it with Fluid. Its an ad-riddled interface covered with text and extra information with not enough control and odd lags as you try to move quickly through your mail. Sure search is nice, but since i'm using Gmail underneath IMAP I can always hop over to a browser if I need better searching. I found myself trying to get Fluid to act like mail - Growl, drag and drop attachments, no ads etc. MailPlane offered some of that (not ad removal) and was not free and so close (and in some ways behind) what you can do with fluid that it wasn't an option. Attaching something and pressing send should be an instant experience so you can move onto processing the next thing while things happen in the background. Until that works with these web based mail apps and works well, count me out. It especially didn't help that we had network slowness/outages during that time but thats also part of the point. I shouldnt have to care.

So i'm back to Apple mail. It fast, its clean and best yet its asynchronous. Sometimes I have no idea what its doing, but I can still get stuff done and in the end thats what these tools are for.

Google is taking over my life

If you've been following my blog for a while you've heard various stories on my approach to mail and calendaring at home and at work. I'm now that the point where both mail and calendar for each are on Google Apps. I'm still not there on address book or chat, but its definitely heding in that direction. I also started using Google Chrome and its actually real competition for Safari. Firefox never had a chance with its long load times. 

So now comes the big question: If you're using web apps, why use desktop clients to access them? This week I made the jump and went to the extent of making Fluid apps for google mail and google calendar, giving them the same icons as the Apple mal/cal icons and removing the regular apps from my doc. I'm still learning the idiosynchronices of the google interfaces, but so far so good. 

When I travel i'll have to revert to imap or try the very early Google gears on OSX, but there are options.

Its hard to beat free, especially if the free stuff is doing a good job (and in some cases better than the paid stuff). 

Google is slowing winning me over. I don't agree with all their choices, or how they've handled data and data management but starting to take sips of their cool aid. I dont buy that they'll replace desktop OS's with web applications anytime soon. There's just too much data (video, pictures, music etc) and too much need for offline access in todays world, but they will win on some key fronts like email.

Google Calendar very broken

Back in June 2008 I wrote about a nasty problem with Google calendar where it reminded me and others about events on a calendar I had deleted. Well, since almost 2 years have gone by since I disabled calendars on my google apps domain (crickers.com) I tried it again. And guess what? It immediately reminded me of events on a calendar that didnt exist.

Searching around on the net shows this to be a real problem for others too. What bothers me most is that there's data for me that exists in google that has triggers to do things to me and other people that I have NO access to. 

The solution? Shut off google calendar for crickers.com again. Just means my home calendars have to be hosted elsewhere.

But do you really own and control your data when its on google? It would seem not from the evidence.

Google Voice - not moving?

I was excited by Google taking over Grand Central, I thought it was finally going to start going somewhere. There were some short term changes but after that... nothing. Google for many years behaved like a startup and its products and ideas moved quickly. In recent years Google has begun to stagnate with fewer changes around the applications it delivers to the consumers and more focus on monetizing its work. Sure, thats not surprising, they have to make a living. Buts its a shame that they had to slow down their innovation so much as they chase the precious dollar. Google Voice is just one more example of google slowing down. Disagree? Let me know.

Cloud Reliability

Building stable cloud services is a difficult thing. Even google is

struggling:

Google Searchwiki

I must be out of touch, I was wondering what these extra buttons were in my search results and then I find out its this new google searchwiki stuff. While the concept is cool I just don't see any value for me and I like less on my screen. I think its a mistake not to let people shut it off. And no, I don't want to log out of my account just to turn it off.

Google/SaaS

Recently I had the opportunity for some business related reasons as well as for some personal related reasons to try to collaborate on some word processing and spreadsheet documents. I figured this was a good opportunity to try the whole Software as a Service (SaaS) model and started using the Google Docs. 

I found the word processor easy to use but with Safari it had some odd behaviors at times in rendering the page and some basic copy/paste operations. Generally it worked and I liked the auto-save and accessible anywhere model. As you'd expect the word processor is severely stripped down from a MS Word or Apple Pages but for basic documents its ok. 

For the spreadsheet I was surprised at how well it worked given the more advanced problems you run into with rows and columns, formula and spreadsheet tabs. To do things like graphing you need to get plug-ins and I didn't have a good experience with that. I was was just looking to do a basic line graph over time and it was a real pain. But again for basic spreadsheet functions it worked well and again I could get at  it anywhere.

Along the way I also found a nice hack in that if you import a protected Excel spreadsheet into Google Docs it essentially unprotects it for you and you can re-export as Excel. I think Microsoft should rename that "Protect from idiots" since there are so many ways to remove spreadsheet protection.

 

After I had some content I tried to collaborate with others and thats where SaaS failed for me. I ran into a number of issues:

1) Just accessing the document as I sent the share invite seemed to be a problem for ALL of the people I tried to share with. The interface is simple, pick a document, choose share and then enter an email address or addresses. People get an invite with a link etc. Clinking the link lets them see the document (in the case of spreadsheets at least not all of the document) but they can't edit. 

2) To edit/collaborate they need a google account. Despite what Google thinks, not everyone has (or wants) a google account. I can understand why they needed to link the docs in somewhere but this is asking people to create a new identity etc and adds a barrier to them using it.

3) For those that got past the two above there were problems with the interface oddities, understanding the new applications and as we tried to collaborate we found the tools weak in the areas of comments, suggested changes, side by side versions etc. Ultimately we gave up. 

So to me the current SaaS offering from google with Google Docs is appropriate for single user document editing when you need access anywhere and assuming you have a google ID and are willing to learn new tools. If you need to collaborate i'd look elsewhere. 

With the personal need I fell back to the tried and true method of email Excel spreadsheets around. For the business related need i'm currently using DropBox. More to come on that experience.

Google cross platform?

Is the web giant really OS neutral? Take for example long term app Picasa. To this day its still windows only. And now the new browser, Chrome. A windows only launch initially. Is this because there is such a large Windows market/user base? Or because they have no good cheap/free solutions? Perhaps both. With iPhoto and Safari on the mac do we really need or care what Google has to offer for the mac? So google slowly edges out Windows but tries to compete with better made, long established apps for the Mac. Should be an interesting battle. 

Google Calendar

I wrote a while back about using Google Calendar as my main calendar
source and then BusySync to sync it to my home and work Macs. Well
that worked pretty well until I got a strange email one day from an
admin at our office. "I got this calendar reminder from Google and I
think its related to you, can you please stop sending me emails from
outside the company network?"

Strange. I looked into it. It seems Entourage sync'd to iCal. Google
subscribed to that calendar (I didn't want more than a 2 way sync for
this flakey Entourage stuff) and then Google has taken it upon
themselves to send notices to all meeting attendees about upcoming
meetings. It was an option I had no control over at all. I tried
turning off all the settings and thought I had it licked, and then I
got another email from a colleague saying the same thing.

Ok I thought, this is ugly, I deleted the Entourage calendar from
Google, now only my personal calendars were on there.

Another week or two goes by, and then an email (from my boss's admin)
asking me to cease and desist.

Google, your calendar app is sending emails about calendar events in
deleted calendars to my co-workers. This is unacceptable.

My only fallback was to disable Google Calendars for my domain.
Fortunately i'm the only one in my domain using them. It seems that I
will never be able to re-enable the calendar service on this domain as
Google somehow is caching deleted calendars and events and sending
unwanted messages to people.

I only hope that now with the Calendars disabled it no longer sends
the messages, if it does I have to nuke the domain and hope that
works...

Meanwhile i'm back to iSync for my calendars which is marginal at best
and since Entourage doesn't work its now hard to get a consistent view
of all my calendars in one place. Im hoping that the new iPhone and
Snow leopard release fix this disaster.

Gmail

I love Gmail. Google has made a completely free mail system that supports IMAP and has a great web UI and has the best spam filter on the planet. But even Google makes mistakes. This link is a good summary.

GCal has more issues and has a lot of growing up to do.

And the docs, well they're cool and its amazing what they've managed within a web browser, but they don't come close MicroSoft Office.

Google Earth

Ok, if you haven't seen Google Earth yet (http://earth.google.com/)
you need to. Its one of the coolest things i've seen in a long time.

For the record

For the record http://maps.google.com/ is cool. Especially the hybrid
mapping mode -- satellite pictures mixed with route information.