techcafeteria

Photo by Mrjoro.

Last week, I shared my impressions of Google Wave, which takes current web 2.0/Internet staple technologies like email, messaging, document collaboration, widgets/gadgets and extranets and mashes them up into an open communications standard that, if it lives up to Google’s aspirations, will supersede email.  There is little doubt in my mind that this is how the web will evolve.  We’ve gone from:

• The Yahoo! Directory model – a bunch of static web sites that can be catalogued and explored like chapters in a book, to


• The Google needle/haystack approach – the web as a repository of data that can be mined with a proper query, to


• Web 2.0, a referral-based model that mixes human opinion and interaction into the navigation system.

For many of us, we no longer browse, and we search less than we used to, because the data that we’re looking for is either coming to us through readers and portals where we subscribe to it, or it’s being referred to us by our friends and co-workers on social networks.  Much of what we refer to eachother is  content that we have created. The web is as much an application as it is a library now.

Google Wave might well be “Web 3.0“, the step that breaks down the location-based structure of web data and replaces it completely with a social structure.  Data isn’t stored as much as it is shared.  You don’t browse to sites; you share, enhance, append, create and communicate about web content in individual waves.  Servers are sources, not destinations in the new paradigm.

Looking at Wave in light of Google’s mission and strategy supports this idea. Google wants to catalog, and make accessible, all of the world’s information. Wave has a data mining and reporting feature called “robots”. Robots are database agents that lurk in a wave, monitoring all activity, and then pop in as warranted when certain terms or actions trigger their response.  The example I saw was of a nurse reporting in the wave that they’re going to give patient “John Doe” a peanut butter sandwich.  The robot has access to Doe’s medical record, is aware of a peanut allergy, and pops in with a warning. Powerful stuff! But the underlying data source for Joe’s medical record was Google Health. For many, health information is too valuable and easily abused to be trusted to Google, Yahoo!, or any online provider. The Wave security module that I saw hid some data from Wave participants, but was based upon the time that the person joined the Wave, not ongoing record level permissions.

This doesn’t invalidate the use of Wave, by any means—a wave that is housed on the Doctor’s office server, and restricted to Doctor, Nurse and patient could enable those benefits securely. But as the easily recognizable lines between cloud computing and private applications; email and online community; shared documents and public records continue to blur, we need to be careful, and make sure that the learning curve that accompanies these web evolutions is tended to. After all, the worst public/private mistakes on the internet have generally involved someone “replying to all” when they didn’t mean to. If it’s that easy to forget who you’re talking to in an email, how are we going to consciously track what we’re revealing to whom in a wave, particularly when that wave has automatons popping data into the conversation as well?

The Wave as internet evolution idea supports a favored notion: data wants to be free. Open data advocates (like myself) are looking for interfaces that enable that access, and Wave’s combination of creation and communication, facilitated by simple, but powerful data mining agents, is a powerful frontend.  If it truly winds up as easy as email, which is, after all, the application that enticed our grandparents to sue the net, then it has culture-changing potential.  It will need to bring the users along for that ride, though, and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
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A few more interesting Google Wave stories popped up while I was drafting this one. Mashable’s Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web gives some concrete examples to some of the ideas I floated last week; and, for those of you lucky enough to have access to Wave, here’s a tutorial on how to build a robot.

Beta Google Wave accounts can be requested at the Wave website.  They will be handing out a lot more of them at the end of September, and they are taking requests to add them to any Google Domains (although the timeframe for granting the requests is still a long one).

“The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).

Google is on a fishing expedition to see if we’re willing to take web-surfing to a whole new level.  My colleague Steve Backman introduced us to Google Wave a few months ago. I attended a developer’s preview at Techsoup Headquarters last week, and I have some additional thoughts to share.

Google’s introduction of Wave is nothing if not ambitious.  As opposed to saying “We have a new web mashup tool” or “We’ve taken multimedia email to a new level”, they’re pitching Wave as nothing less than the successor to email.  My question, after seeing the demo, is “Is that an outrageous claim, or a way too modest one?”.

The early version of Google Wave I saw looked a lot like Gmail, with a folder list on the left and “wave” list next to it. Unlike Gmail, a third pane to the right included an area where you can compose waves, so Wave is three-columner to Gmail’s two.

A wave is a collaborative document that can be updated by numerous people in real-time.  This means that, if we’re both working in the same wave, you can see what I’m typing, letter by letter, as I can see what you add. This makes Twitter seem like the new snail mail. It’s a pretty powerful step for collaborative technology. But it’s also quite a cultural change for those of us who appreciate computer-based communications for the incorporated spell-check and the ability to edit and finalize drafted messages before we send them.

Waves can include text, photos, film clips, forms, and any active content that could go into a Google Gadget. If you check out iGoogle, Google’s personal portal page, you can see the wide assortment of gadgets that are available and imagine how you would use them—or things like them—in a collaborative document. News feeds, polls, games, utilities, and the list goes on.

You share waves with any other wave users that you choose to share with.  User-level security is being written into the platform, so that you can share waves as read-only or only share certain content in waves with particular people.

Given these two tidbits, it occurred to me that each wave was far more like a little Extranet than an email message. This is why I think Google’s being kind of coy when they call it an email killer – it’s a Sharepoint killer.  It’s possibly a Drupal (or fill in your favorite CMS here) killer.  It’s certainly an evolution of Google Apps, with pretty much all of that functionality rolled into a model that, instead of saying “I have a document, spreadsheet or website to share” says “I want to share, and, once we’re sharing, we can share websites, spreadsheets, documents and whatever”.  Put another way, Google Apps is an information management tool with some collaborative and communication features.  Google Wave is a communications platform with a rich set of information management tools. It’s Google Docs inverted.

So, Google Wave has the potential to be very disruptive technology, as long as people:

• Adopt it;


• Feel comfortable with it; and


• Trust Google.

Next week, I’ll spend a little time on the gotcha’s – please add your thoughts and concerns in the comments.

I had big plans for another insightful, deep, break-down-the-walls-of-the-corporate-culture-that-diminishes-use-of-technology post today, but I think I’m gonna save it for a rainy day and write something a bit more useful, instead.  I have a big nonprofit technology conference coming up this weekend, as you might, as well, and I think we should all be resting up for it.

The most important skill for any IT staff person to have is the ability to communicate.  All of the technical expertise in the world has little value without it, because, if you can’t tell people what you’re doing, what you’re doing won’t be well-received.  And there is an art, particularly with tech, to telling people what you’re doing, whether it’s taking the system down for maintenance of upgrading staff from Notepad to Office 2007.

Here are my five rules for crafting an technical email that even my most computer-phobic constituents will read:

1. Let no acronym go unexplained.

   The simplest, worst mistake that techies regularly make is to tell people that

   “The internet will be down while we reconfigure the DHCP server” or

   “The database will be unavailable while we replace the SCSI backplane”.

   Best practice is to avoid the technical details in the announcement, if possible.  But if it’s relevant, speak english: “In order to accommodate the growth of our staff, we need to reconfigure the server that assigns network resources to each system to allow for more connections.”

2. Be clear, concise and consistent in your subjects

   Technical messages should have easily recognizable subjects, so that staff can quickly determine relevance.  If your message is titled “Technical Information”, it might as well be titled “You are getting sleepy…”  But, if it’s titled “Network Availability” or “Database Maintenance Scheduled”, your staff will quickly figure out that these are warnings that are relevant to them. Don’t worry about the Orwellian aspect of announcing system downtime with a message about availability.  The point here is that using the consistent phrasing will grab staff’s attention far more effectively than bolding, underlining and adding red exclamation points to the email (see rule 4).

3. Keep it short and simple

   It’s about what the staff needs to know, not what you’d like to tell them.  So, the network maintenance email should not read:

   “The systems will be down from 4:30 to 9:00 tonight while we replace drives in the domain controllers and run a full defrag on the main document server”

   It should read:

   “The network will be unavailable from 4:30 pm until 9:00 pm while we perform critical maintenance”.

   If it’s only a portion of the network, but something useful will be up – as when the file servers are being repaired, but email is still available, make a note of that: “While the main servers will not be available, you will still be able to send and receive email”.

4. No ALL CAPS, no exclamation points and go sparingly on the bold

   System downtime might be urgent to you, but it’s never urgent to the staff.  It’s a fact of life.  A reply from the Director of Online Giving that the downtime will jettison a planned online campaign is urgent; not your routine announcement.

5. Tell the whole story

   ...even if this sounds like it conflicts with rule 3.  Because there are two types of people on your staff:

   • The majority, who want simple, non-techie messages as described above
   • The rest, who want the gory details, either so they can rest easy that you aren’t making anything up, or because they’re actually interested in what you’re up to.
   
   

   My approach is to do the simple message and, below it type, “Technical Details (optional reading)”.  In this section I might explain that we’re replacing the server that processes their network logins (I won’t use “DHCP” or “Domain Controller” if I can help it) or that we’re upgrading to the new version of Outlook.

The key concepts here are consistency, simplicity, and a focus on what impacts them regarding what you’re doing.  Stick to it and, miraculously, people might start reading your all staff emails.

I spent a good chunk of December and January writing what I hope is a very complete guide to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and how you (whomever you might be) can use it. The article takes on the ambitious goal of identifying the types of information available in RSS format, the types of programs that can be used to read RSS feeds, and the best ones for different types of use, from tickers to email add-ons to full fledged RSS readers. I’m proud of this one – I think it’s a new approach to the topic that should be helpful for anyone who’s tired of hearing that they should be using RSS and, instead, would like to know why and how. Choose your portal, as it’s at Idealware and Techsoup.

In the last week or two, Google’s GMail app added a bunch of new features, at least three of which are, to my mind, insanely significant. As you probably know, GMail is about three years old, still in beta, and from it’s release, the most innovative approach to email that we’ve seen since the whole folder metaphor was first thought up. The three new features are Offline, Keyboard Shortcuts for Labeling, and Multiple Inboxes. Offline and Multiple Inboxes are added through the “Labs” section in settings;if you use Gmail, you can use the label if you have Keyboard Shortcuts turned on.

I love Gmail because it is designed to do a lot of my maintenance for me, and I can keep all sorts of mail (I’m up to 729 MB) and find anything instantly. Key to all of this is GMail’s gleeful abandonment of the file cabinet metaphor, an imposition on computing from the early days that is intuitive to humans, yes, but not the most efficient way to manage online information. And maybe this is why I’ve always appreciated Google – they got from the start that you don’t organize massive amounts of information by sorting it all into separate piles, an idea that most of their competitors have not let go of.

Here’s how I use Gmail: Using pop forwarding, I feed three separate email accounts into my primary GMail account. I have it set up to reply using the address that the email was sent to, and each account is automatically labeled with a specifically colored label identifying it’s origin. I have 36 labels defined, and 66 filters that primarily label messages as they come in. I “star” messages that relate to current projects, and I try to keep my inbox to less than 50 messages at any given time. Cleaning up the inbox is a matter of labeling the messages that aren’t accounted for by the filters, deleting the ones I don’t want, and archiving.

Offline, of course, simply gives me a local copy of my inbox for those rare times when I’m out of plugged in, wireless, or AT&T 3G range of a connection. But having a local backup of my inbox is, um, priceless.

Last week, Google introduced new dropdowns for labeling and “moving” messages. The “Move To” tab is somewhat ironic, because GMail doesn’t store messages in different places. It identifies them by their labels. New messages, on arrival, are labeled “inbox”, and “archiving” a message is simply the act of removing the “inbox” label. So the “Move To” menu was strictly a concession to those who can’t let go of the folder idea, so I have little use for it. But, in addition to the new dropdowns, Google also introduced a keyboard shortcut. Typing “l” (lowercase “L”) brings up the labels dropdown; typing the first few letters of a label takes you to that label, and hitting “Enter” applies it to the current message or the selected ones. This allows me to select and label messages far faster than was possible when the mouse was required to open and then scroll through the dropdown menu.

Multiple Inboxes allows you to put as many boxes of messages meeting specific criteria (“has label”, “is starred”, “is a draft”, any search criteria) on your GMail home page. For users with wide displays, these can be placed to the right or left of your inbox. Since I work a lot on my 15” laptop screen, I chose to add inboxes under the main inbox. To start, I’ve added starred items in a box under my inbox, which lets me keep things that don’t need immediate responses, but should be handy to refer to, right where I want them. Another creative use (as tweeted by Sonny Cloward) is to have a box with all items labeled “task”, but I actually use the recently-added “Tasks” function for that.

Regardless, you’ve heard me rave about Gmail here if you follow my communication posts, but that was all before they added these features, making GMail another 33% more awesome than the competition to an information management geek like me.

My big post contrasting full blown Microsoft Exchange Server with cloud-based Gmail drew a couple of comments from friends in Seattle. Jon Stahl of One/Northwest pointed out, helpfully, that MS sells it’s Small Business Server product to companies with a maximum of 50 employees, and that greatly simplifies and reduces cost for Exchange. After that, Patrick Shaw of NPower Seattle took it a step further, pointing out that MS Small Business Server, with a support arrangement from a great company like NPower (the “great” is my addition – I’m a big fan), can cost as little as $4000 a year and provide Windows Server, Email, Backup and other functions, simplifying a small office’s technology and outsourcing the support. This goes a long way towards making the chaos I described affordable and attainable for cash and resource strapped orgs.

What I assume Npower knows, though, and hope that other nonprofit technical support providers are aware of, is that this is the outdated approach. Nonprofits should be looking to simplify technology maintenance and reduce cost, and the cloud is a more effective platform for that. As ReadWriteWeb points out, most small businesses—and this can safely be assumed to include nonprofits—are completely unaware of the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization. If your support arrangement is for dedicated, outsourced management of technology that is housed at your offices, then you still have to purchase that hardware and pay someone to set it up. The benefits of virtualization and fast, ubiquitous Internet access offer a new model that is far more flexible and affordable.

One example of a company that gets this is MyGenii. They offer virtualized desktops to nonprofits and other small businesses. As I came close to explaining in my Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine post, virtualization is technology that allows you to, basically, run many computers on one computer. The environmental and financial benefits of doing what you used to do on multiple systems all on one system are obvious, but there are also huge gains in manageability. When a PC is a file that can be copied and modified, building new and customized PCs becomes a trivial function. Take that one step further – that this virtual PC is stored on someone else’s property, and you, as a user, can load it up and run it from your home PC, laptop, or (possibly) your smartphone, and you now have flexible, accessible computing without the servers to support.

For the tech support service, they either run large servers with virtualization software (there are many powerful commercial and open source systems available), or they use an outsourced storage platform like Amazon’s EC2 service. In addition to your servers, they also house your desktop operating systems. Running multiple servers and desktops on single servers is far more economical; it better utilizes the available server power, reducing electricity costs and helping the environment; and backups and maintenance are simplified. The cost savings of this approach should benefit both the provider and the client.

In your office, you still need networked PCs with internet access. But all you need on those computers is a basic operating system that can boot up and connect to the hosted, virtualized desktop. Once connected, that desktop will recognize your printers and USB devices. If you make changes, such as changing your desktop wallpaper or adding an Outlook plugin, those changes will be retained. The user experience is pretty standard. But here’s a key benefit—if you want to work from home, or a hotel, or a cafe, then you connect to the exact same desktop as the one at work. It’s like carrying your computer everywhere you go, only without the carrying part required.

So, it’s great that there are mission focused providers out there who will affordably support our servers. But they could be even more affordable, and more effective, as cloud providers, freeing us from having to own and manage any servers in the first place.