First Friday Feature: MightyText: Web and Gmail Texting App

For nearly three years now, the overwhelming majority of text messages I've exchanged with friends, family and colleagues haven't started with my phone, but instead, with my computer, thanks to the ever-improving application MightyText. MightyText links my browser (Chrome, obviously) to my Android phone, and lets me send and receive text messages, including photos and emoji from the Web, and even from Gmail. Considering how much time so many of us spend in our email, adding text messaging is a no-brainer.

If you're a long-time louisgray.com reader (and thanks, by the way), you might remember MightyText initially launched as a Chrome add-on, called Texty, in March of 2011. (See: Texty: Texts From Google Chrome Via My Android Phone) In later months, they rebranded to MightyText, gained visibility from the larger tech blogs about a year later and can now sport hundreds of thousands of users, measuring by their Chrome web store stats. Meanwhile, as their user base has swelled, so to has their feature set.

MightyText's Web UI.

From the very simple interface you can see in my original coverage, MightyText now is best experienced through their fullscreen Web UI, or integrated in Gmail. As I have the MightyText Chrome extension installed, my Chromebook alerts me, often before my phone does, that I have an incoming text or call. I can respond from that notification, from the website or from Gmail, and don't even have to pick up my phone to interrupt my workflow.

Seeing Recent Texts on MightyText in my Gmail.

From the MightyText site, I am greeted with a history of texts, synced with my phone, and the option to keep the conversation going. I can add images from local files on my computer, send emoji (in those rare times I'm feeling silly), and even walk through photos I've sent or received by MMS. And MightyText even has a Pro option for just over $2 a month which brings advanced settings, such as themes, deeper photo backup, group texting and a lot more.

Sending a MightyText with emoji to Maneesh Arora.

But one unsung hero (until now, I guess), is MightyText's companion extension Gtext (find it here). Gtext adds a "Compose SMS" button in my GMail next to where I'd start an email, and brings the same photo and text history from the MightyText site to the place where I already spark most my communication. So from Gmail, I can chat (with Hangouts of course), send SMS or email, all in one spot.

Browsing Recent Photos sent in Text in my Gmail

MightyText even has a tablet client. So I often find myself reading a book or browsing the Web on my Nexus 7, and even if my phone is in the other room, I can browse or send texts, just as easily, even without a 3G connection. So texting isn't something I have to do on one device. It's something I can do from every single device, all synced automatically, with real flexibility.

Awwww... Viewing A Photo I'm Adding to MightyText.

You might call it a New Year's resolution, but in 2014, I've decided to use the first Friday of each month to feature something I use every day - even if it's not brand new. MightyText gets the January 2014 honor. I'm happy to say they were first covered here, before anywhere else, and are a real and growing success story. If you're on Android, and you should be... definitely check it out.

Disclosures: Given I work at Google, I have a bias in favor of great products that include Android, Gmail and Chrome in their ecosystem. You might think about Hangouts possibly competing with MightyText, but I didn't let that get in my way now, did I?

The "Archive" Button Can be Your In Box's Best Friend

You practically can't open your RSS reader or spend a day on a social network of your choice without running into complaints about email. Nobody likes it. Everybody says they have too much of it. People gloat over mass deletions of unread items, or sporting a full in box four or five figures deep. Some people take vacations from it or swear they'll pound through their to-read list in what could be an eventually futile journey toward the improbable in box zero. But for many of those people, it's likely the impenetrable in box is symptomatic of something else - the inability to make a decision the email requires, or the option to escape a discussion and call it complete.

When I joined Google last fall, I anticipated my corporate in box exploding. A notorious information-driven company with cool words in the lexicon such as "centithread", I imagined finally crossing over from my "I'll get to every single message, I promise," mentality, to accepting defeat. But this hasn't been the case. As I had before I joined, the email box has been no bigger a challenge than handling one's updates in Google Reader, or seeing all mentions on Google+ and Twitter.

This is helped by having a practical "always on" schedule, enabling messages to be consumed or responded to from the nearest Android phone or tablet, and the laptop is practically another limb, but the best tool for making sure I don't get lost in a torrent of email, beyond discretion in consuming tangential mailing lists, is the "Archive" button in Gmail.

The "Archive" button is pretty straight forward. If you have determined that an email message or its resulting thread no longer needs any action from you, and shouldn't take in box attention, you just hit the button and it is moved out of your in box. It's not deleted outright, meaning the thread can pop back up again if a new message arrives, and it's still discoverable in search, so you don't have to worry about being able to find it again if you change your mind later.

About 18 months ago, I talked about how one has to hone their stream in what is being perceived as an "attention" crisis, and that the onus is on us to read fast, process fast and decide fast what requires action and what does not. Information overload can be overcome with filtering what you take in, and where you participate. When to archive threads and when to extend threads requires that same level of precision. Guess rightly and you are able to get the right information to the right people at the right time with the smallest amount of effort. Guess wrongly and you could find yourself distracted by off-topic content and miss the important information amid a sea of comparable noise.

If you're a Gmail user, you probably know Google bumped up its storage capacity to more than 10 gigabytes apiece, so the issue of how you manage your email is less about can you store it all, because you probably can, but if you can manage it all. Using the archive button well is a key part of email in box survival.

Disclosures: I work at Google, and naturally, I use Gmail at home and at work.

My Top Ten Favorite Google Products (2011)

Google makes a ton of products. Almost two years ago, thinking about it, I posted my top ten Google products at the time. Google Reader was #1, Blogger was #2 and FeedBurner was #3. Since then, G+ has come into play, I switched to Android and Chrome is on fire. It's time for a rewrite.

The Original Post from Sept. 2009: My Top Ten Favorite Google Products

Here's what I would list now. Eager to hear your own top 3, 5, or even 10.

1. Google+ (Obviously, this is my start page, I am here constantly)
2. Android (The mobile OS runs my favorite tablets and phones)
3. Google ChromeOS (Living in the cloud is a game changer)
4. Blogger (The easiest, most flexible and stable blogging platform)
5. Google Reader (Still the best place to follow hundreds of sites in one place)
6. Google Search (The gold standard for finding anything)
7. Gmail (Finally my default email, and archive. Buzz is a plus.)
8. FeedBurner (Takes my blog to the rest of the Web, powered by Pubsubhubbub)
9. Google Voice (Syncs my phone to the Web with auto-blocking of spam calls)
10. YouTube (If it happened and is worth watching, it's here. Now with movies too!)

Things have obviously changed in just two years. Android, ChromeOS, Google Voice and Google+ were not on my radar much only a short time ago, and now they're essential. Curious to your own insight and what major services (Analytics, Maps, Earth, etc.) I missed.

/via my Google+ Profile.

Tackling My Biggest Impediments to Cloud-centricity

More and more of my activity, both in desktop and mobile computing, is cloud-based. More Web services are replacing desktop applications, while activities that used to be the focus of local storage (including photos, music, video and email) are being delivered from the Web instead. But I'm not totally converted yet, and I can see how even the most forward looking of early adopters could still have some hangups in being fully cloud-enabled. To get to a cloud utopia, work has to be done not just on the operating system side, but on native apps, and peace of mind has to be delivered for users that they will lose no data or functionality in that transition.

In January of last year, anticipating a more cloud-centric future, I moved to a MacBook Air, one that had about half the storage space as my previous laptop, reversing the trend of larger and larger trays of spinning disk. Using the same device 16 months later, I haven't gotten close to using up the 128 gigabytes, although I have to admit I ended up installing a lot more programs on it than I had originally hoped.

Even with this admission, I kept the older MacBook Pro around under the guise of it acting as my "media machine", the master data set of all my music, photos and video. While I walked away from iTunes for music, every few months I'd transfer the latest home photos and videos via USB from the AIr to the Pro. Some got posted online and others not. With Google Music and Picasa offering options to upload all this content to the cloud, I know I'm just a few painful uploads away from finally migrating (once I get a new battery and charge the sucker).

Google's pitch for everything being on the Web is smart and future-looking, but it neglects, for consumers anyway, the story of migration, from one OS to another and also from one frame of mind to another. As Gmail once did with its offering a gigabyte of storage space at a time when competitors offered tens of megabytes, I have to think that letting people copy their important files to the cloud in a personal storage locker would be quite compelling. Steven Levy's "In the Plex" recounts the demise of a Google project "GDrive" thanks to its file centricity, but real consumers have real files and want to know they will never lose them in the future.

For me to truly get to the cloud one hundred percent of the time, I still need to:

1. Convert my DRM-laden Apple iTunes songs to DRM-free MP3 files
2. Synchronize those songs with Google Music and Spotify
3. Upload all my photos from iPhoto to Picasa and/or SmugMug
4. Migrate all my .Mac email archives to GMail
5. Migrate old Word documents and PowerPoints to Google equivalents

#4 and #5 are supposedly easy. Find the right file types and point them to the right place, while making them private. But in practice, these migrations take time. I've had my unfair share of IMAP migrations to and from Mac to Gmail and probably have multiple email copies all over the place at this point, but the deepest archive is in local storage.

#3 touches on emotion as much as data. There's comfort for some in burning old photos to DVD, even if DVD (and CD-Roms and floppies before that) are holdovers to a doomed era in physical media. And songs are songs. I love my Spotify, but I bumped into an old Underworld album I own on iTunes that I hadn't seen in years and was reinvigorated to reclaim all that stuff I've purchased, so I wasn't walking away from thousands of dollars in investment, but also favorite tunes I might not remember later.

I have been using the CR-48 Chromebook more and more lately, using it exclusively at the Google I/O, SXSW and CES events, thanks to its great battery life and ease of access to 3G and WiFi connectivity. I am using the Chromebook more and more at home too, when I don't need to use Photoshop or take partial screenshots - something the Mac still does better than anything else I've seen.

I see the current state of Chrome OS as that of Mac OS X 10.0 upon Apple's launch of that operating system back in 2001. It didn't initially support DVD playing, and scads of programs were missing, forced to boot in Classic mode, including the aforementioned Adobe Photoshop and notably, Quark Express, key for the Mac's design culture. But eventually those holes were filled, and Mac OS X hasn't looked back in a decade.

Can Web apps replace Photoshop and other intense programs outright? Probably not on day one and maybe not even before the end of 2012. Google promised close tie-in with Citrix and VMware, telling the story of virtually connecting to apps outside of the cloud, and using them there. That's a really geeky solution to what would be a standard use case on a more traditional platform. I have to imagine that if Chrome and other cloud-centric options grow, traditional software makers (as Microsoft did with its Web office in response to Google Docs) have to start thinking about getting their apps into users hands on these new platforms, while the earliest users are going to have blood on their hands thanks to being on the cutting edge.

We're in the early days of a true cloud OS, and I've got a lot more room myself to go before I close the lid on my last MacBook. Agreeing in principle that I need to get my important data of rusty spinning disk, I have some work to do, and will keep up this effort. But more messaging has to address the issues of migration, storage space, compatibility and success in places where connectivity isn't pervasive.

AddThis Stats Show Spike in Google Buzz Sharing

Over the last 90 days of available statistics, popular multi-network sharing service AddThis shows few surprises in its top services selected by customers. Facebook dominates all options with nearly 40 percent of all shares, with Twitter and e-mail having just under ten percent apiece. But further down the chart, while most services saw single digit moves, up or down, two Google services are seeing significant growth - with Gmail logging an increase of 76%, and its companion network, Google Buzz, spiking, up 296% from the previous 90 day period. Sharing from AddThis to Buzz was good enough for #22 overall, just ahead of others including LinkedIn, Tumblr and Wordpress.

It's tempting to write off the blip as nothing more than a blip - a rule of small numbers. After all, the total percentage of shares to Google Buzz from AddThis totaled .25%, or 1 of every 400 shares. The top 10 services, comprising of Facebook, Twitter, Email, Print, Google, MySpace, Favorites, StumbleUpon, Messenger and Delicious, comprise more than 85% of all shares, leaving scraps for the remaining services - and one knows Google services aren't supposed to be "also rans" outside the top ten in most cases.

Google Buzz Shares Started to Spike on AddThis in Mid September

To dig deeper into the surprising data, I asked AddThis for more clarification.

While the company doesn't yet expose absolute sharing statistics, they reported that the rise in both Google Buzz and its companion Gmail is likely a recovery after a slow summer. The spike in Buzz propels it to the 5th most popular social network overall.

Buzz and Gmail Trending Up on AddThis

"Kids are back in school and sharing up a storm," wrote Justin Thorp, Community Manager for AddThis. "But... even with that, Gmail & Google Buzz are still seeing growth, usage, and excitement."

Aside from the 3-month bump, Thorp reports that StumbleUpon "has been the one that's seen some of the most continuous" growth.

Buzz's Spike Pushes It to the 5th Most Active Social Network on AddThis

Additional AddThis details on Google Buzz reveal that after the United States, which leads by a large margin, the next most active countries sharing to Buzz via AddThis are the Netherlands, India, Russia, Brazil, Germany, China, Canada, the UK, and France.

In contrast, the long since purchased, but still active, FriendFeed statistics show Turkey far outpacing the United States, followed by Italy, India and Pakistan.

While the world awaits Google's next round of social updates, long rumored, but still unclear, the loyal Buzz community eagerly awaits any signs of good news that show engagement and activity in the much-dismissed social sharing network. AddThis' statistics give a glimmer of hope, even if it is small numbers relative to other social tech titans.

20 Halloween Scares to Put Fear Into Every Google Fan

20. The development teams behind Google Reader and Blogger are unified following a reorg, under a new project called "Google Breeder".

19. The Google New project accidentally gets uploaded to the wrong set of servers and overwrites Google News with internal company project updates.

18. Twitter becomes so successful that long-form writing is considered anything which is between 135 and 140 characters. As a result, Google runs out of interesting things to index.

17. Google's goats get an agent, defect to Zynga to promote Farmville.

16. Google's book indexing project fizzles as its realized nobody actually reads any more.

15. Due to an impasse with broadcast networks and cable's fear of Google's growing impact, Google TV traction stalls as only commercials are available.

14. With the founders of Wave, YouTube, AdMob all leaving or changing roles in the last weeks, leaders of all project teams within Google dust off their resumes and post them as shared Google docs with high-priced executive recruiters.

13. Aggressive legalities determine that Google has to take another photo of your home on StreetView if you don't like the current one.

12. Somebody actually asks a question to Larry Page or Sergey Brin about the future of Google Knol or Google Base in a public forum.

11. The code base between Google's new robot cars is mixed with the Android code base, making our phones autonomous beings that call and leave messages with text to speech to anyone in our address book whenever they want.

10. Google Buzz is discontinued after unfavorable press coverage. The Lively team is persuaded to come back, and is given the keys to "social".

9. Eric Schmidt loses a bet to Carol Bartz, is forced to buy Yahoo!. The new company is called Yahoogle. It passes anti-trust scrutiny somehow.

8. Yahoo! is determined to own the patents to Pay Per Click following their acquisition of Overture, Google forced to remove PPC from their offerings.

7. AJAX is the new Flash.

6. Jimmy Hoffa is found buried in Google's famous ball pit.

5. Microsoft cracks the code behind Google's search algorithm. Using SEO, Bing results flood Google's index for all terms.

4. An overzealous team of programmers looking for career advances takes Eric Schmidt's off the cuff remarks seriously, embarks on setting up programs to help people move and change their names at age 18.

3. Paul Buchheit is determined to own the intellectual property and trademarks to Gmail and its underlying code. Thus, Gmail and its users become property of Facebook.

2. Apple's suit against HTC is successful, freezing the development and deployment of Android for all partners.

1. It is revealed that the same 50 people click on 99% of AdSense ads, and most of them are marketers just demoing the product to potential clients.

The Five Stages of Filtering, Relevance and Curation

Tonight's news of Gmail taking on information overload directly, using a combination of intelligent algorithms and your own feedback to build in box personalization is yet another hallmark move to taking on the increasing deluge of content approaching us from all directions - be it our e-mail, static Web pages, audio and video, or the many different social streams which we have subscribed to. There is no question that content creation and sharing is exploding and people are completely incapable of giving every single message and item their full attention. And many smart folks are looking to bring solutions to find the best and ignore the rest.

As I see it, there are five major ways companies and individuals take on the topic of relevance.

1. Editorial Filtering

Loose definition: I am the smartest person. I know best for you, and I deserve to decide for you what is the most important.

Example: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN and most mainstream media outlets today, who for years have been trusted arbiters to find the most important news and bring it to us in the way that they decide.

New media examples: The Drudge Report, which has grown from one man's curation and sorting to a full team, and Techmeme, which was once almost completely algorithm driven, and now is staffed around the clock by savvy editors who pluck the best of the tech Web.

Of course, it is easy for an individual to be a curator. I share a lot of content, manually, through @lgstream on Twitter, as well as on Google Buzz, FriendFeed and Facebook.

2. Global Popularity Filtering

Loose definition: The will of the people can be trusted, and they will decide what is most important, thanks to the most votes.

Examples: American Idol, Digg and Reddit. He with the most votes wins and gains a coveted front page slot.

New media example: Twitter Trending Topics display the most frequent topics and hashtags, not necessarily the most important. Also, you can see tools like Tweetmeme and FavStar which watch for number-driven popularity online.

This would also have included RSS shared items counters of the past, such as RSSmeme and ReadBurner.

3. Social Filtering

Loose definition: What your friends like, you will like. If it's important to them, it's important to you.

New Media Examples: Facebook recommended friends and pages, which display how many friends like them, Google Social Search, which pulls results from your friends content, and FriendFeed Best of Day, which shows the items from your friends that gained the most activity over a time period.

4. Explicit Personalization

Loose definition: You told us what you like or don't like, and since you know yourself best, you know what's important.

New media examples: Netflix's star ratings and TiVo's Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down feedback mechanisms, as well as Kosmix's MeeHive project.

5. Implicit Personalization

Loose definition: Just be yourself. Read what you want, do what you want, and the system will learn from you, continuously updating.

Examples: Amazon.com, my6sense.

There is a time and place for practically all types of filtering. Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits today talked about the serendipity algorithm and what it means to marketers looking to leverage machine learning. With Gmail's announcement, ReadWriteWeb's recent coverage of TrapIt and ChatterApp in an article on consumer information overload, and the high visibility of Facebook's News Feed, against the recent feed, the challenge has grown to a level where you no longer have to convince people there is a problem in filtering, but instead, you need to make a concrete decision as to how to approach that problem.

I believe that there is a role for trusted curators of news, people who have unique access or unique insight, who can get to news more quickly than anybody else, or dive into it more deeply. I believe that social similarities are a good hint at an individual's interests, but they cannot replace your own preferences - which go beyond your ability to fill out a form and try to tell the truth on what it is that you really like. The best systems, as Gmail is trying to do (with some help from your own feedback on whether they are getting it right), happen naturally and transparently in the background.

It's natural I would think this given my work with my6sense, but I have long believed in there being a perfect place for humans to act as curators and guides, while there is another perfect place for machines to provide, to the best of their ability, resources to aid your discovery. So when you are challenged with a mountain of information coming at you from any angle, think of the best way to get it handled. Should you turn to an editor, to the will of the people, to your friends, or to code? The options are all there, and more tools are coming to help you attack the noise - because there's little chance it will fade away any time soon - and a very strong chance it could get much worse very quickly.

Disclosures: I am vice president of marketing at my6sense. ChatterApp and TrapIt are assumed competition. In addition, Kosmix.com is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am a co-founder. I was also previously an advisor to ReadBurner, since closed.

Google Revamps and Simplifies Contacts In Gmail

Gmail's introduction in 2004 changed the way people interact with Web-based mail, moving us away from needing to carefully prune old messages to save space, and introducing a conversation-oriented interface, with new label-based hierarchies, away from the desktop metaphor of folders. But while Gmail's innovation has been clear, Google's approach to Contacts has lagged, making it the target of frustration from many users. Today, the company admits as much, saying it's the thing people "are least satisfied with" about Gmail. They hope a number of improvements, rolling out immediately, will help.

The goal of the many changes introduced to Google Contacts today is to make using Contacts as intuitive as Gmail, bringing keyboard shortcuts, automatic saving, and the ability to undo edits you may have made in error. This way, if you already are a Gmail power user, you will be a Contacts power user as well.

Sorting by Last Name in Contacts

In addition to the "Gmail-ization" of Contacts, the company added the option to sort by Last Name, the ability to add custom labels for phone numbers or other items, structured name fields, for titles and other details, and a more prominent notes field, so you can say just why somebody is in your address book in the first place. Also, with the upgrade, Contacts and Tasks also occupy a more prominent position in Gmail than before, sliding up the left sidebar to the top, just underneath the Gmail logo.

Editing A Contact in GMail

You Can Undo Changes In Contacts

The new Contacts view makes it easy to get all of a person's details from one place, and make edits. You can easily add job titles and family relationships, or "view recent conversations" to see the last time you traded e-mail or chats with the person. This, thanks to the tie in with Google Buzz, also surfaces Buzz posts that match the search criteria.

Merging Duplicates In Gmail

Also, for power users, you can now merge contacts from the "More Actions" menu, if you have made duplicates, or you can choose to "Find and merge duplicates", handy for the many of us who have made imports only to find friends' records multiplying. I myself merged 75 duplicate records, so I don't have names repeating ad nauseam when I go looking for numbers in my Android phone - closely tied to Contacts.

As somebody who was more closely tied to the Apple Mail and Address Book infrastructure, Google Contacts hadn't always taken a front seat in how I manage people and relationships. Moving to Android, adopting GMail more strongly, and seeing the rise of Buzz as a platform has made getting this right increasingly important. Today's moves will make it seem more natural and fluid - as Apple used to always get right, but for the Web, not the desktop.

Google Buzz to Users: Do You Know What You're Doing?

In the company's continued efforts to reduce the impact rising from the initial confusion around Google Buzz controls and transparency following the social network's initial launch in early February, which saw many claiming privacy breaches or unsavory connections related to the initial autofollow feature, Google will ask all Buzz users to reconfirm their settings tomorrow when they enter Buzz. This move, albeit a minor one, is likely another requirement to get the network's house in order after taking numerous body blows in the press - which have helped to sully Buzz's reputation and cloud its success to date.

The settings, which are already available in the Buzz section of Gmail settings, as highlighted in mid-February, ask you to confirm:

1. Who you are following
2. Those who are following you
3. If the connections can be displayed
4. How many sites you have connected to Buzz

The changes come amid the resurfacing of stories around undesired visibility of connections, labeled as "privacy flaws", and the news that congressional representatives are asking the FTC to investigate Buzz for allegedly exposing private information from Gmail to outsiders.

All the bad news, which hasn't seemed to ebb in the two months since the service debuted, has often unfortunately overshadowed the very capabilities of that network and its activity - and has made it hard for Google, a company with assumed tremendous resources, to compete more directly with Facebook and other social sites. In a note from Google's PR team tonight, they promise the setting confirmation screens will roll out gradually to users throughout the day, and a post summarizing the move will likely appear Monday afternoon. They also promise more updates in the future through a number of Google channels including their own Buzz (of course), and on their YouTube account.

In my opinion, many of the problems have arisen from standard Gmail users who had Buzz enabled, but either ignored the network or were unfamiliar with it. The promise is to show this screen upon entering Buzz, but I believe it would be even more transparent and effective to show this announcement to all Gmail users - regardless of their Buzz history. That's a big step indeed, but one that could go beyond the series of small steps the Buzz team has had to make to step away from the brink. I have sent an e-mail to their PR team to ask if that is planned.

I know who I am connected to and what I am sharing. You can find me on Buzz here: http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray.

Google Buzz Now Explains Why Messages Hit Your In Box

As promised in a note a little over two weeks ago on controlling Buzzed items entering your in box, the Google Buzz team is now explaining why posts are making their way into your Gmail. For people watching the new social service closely, this is a welcome, albeit small, help, especially as seeing the same items appear repeatedly - following new updates - could get tiresome.

While some are debating the perceived success (or lack thereof) of Buzz, and whether it is seeing engagement, it's no surprise that like most social networks, active people are rewarded with more activity. Engage, and others will engage with you - just like on Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter or anywhere else. But the more I (and others) would participate, the more posts would be delivered to my in box from Buzz. Now, I can just peek at the latest, and see the most recent comment that bumped it to my attention, rather than scrolling all the way to the bottom to get caught up, as was the previous way.

One Buzz Item's Explanation (via a Linda Lawrey Comment)

In the same note, posted March 11th, the Google Buzz team promised settings to control what items hit your in box (which are live in GMail now), the aforementioned explanations, and a "mute" link to stop further comments from getting to your in box. The mute button's not there yet, so far as I can tell, but we can expect that is coming soon - given the appearance of the other promised features.

Buzz Inbox Control In Your Gmail Preferences

On another note, I have already seen people publicly comment on the perceived slowness of innovation from the Buzz team relative to expectations. Without making excuses for them, making change at the scale of Google is proving to be hard. As the team wrote in their March 11th post, they need to make sure these features work across all 50+ Gmail languages, and as I was told at SXSW, "Gmail code is sacrosanct" and nobody wants to increase latency or worse... downtime. With Buzz and GMail being intertwined for now, we can expect movement forward to be with caution.

You can, of course, find me on Buzz here: http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray

Gmail Failures, Crazy Ideas and Wave's Leapfrog

On the Web, there is a lot of confusion over where Google Wave fits alongside the recently-introduced Google Buzz, or even if Wave is supposed to be a companion or competitor to Gmail - which could potentially cannibalize the company's extremely visible (and profitable) e-mail business. Today at the SXSW conference, the team leading Gmail said the company has to take risks, learn from mistakes, and yes, even sometimes build products that are in conflict and may replace one another - in the name of keeping competition from doing it themselves.

As it was described this afternoon, Google Wave, which debuted in early beta last year, is a "leapfrog project", which goes beyond today's environment, but is set to impact a future Web. The team working on Wave, as discussed with the product launched, is looking to do more than just build a collaborative service, but to possibly even replace e-mail itself, something the GMail team recognized might seem at conflict to their core mission.

"When people ask if we are cannibalizing our own services, we would rather cannibalize our own services than have other people do it," said Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz.

Putting significant resources into disparate product lines that may come to future conflict might seem crazy, or even a bit paranoid, but it sounds like that is par for the course for the team, which said it likes to take big risks, which might not ever see the time of day, or die when they do. In fact, we learned today that Google Buzz's original incarnation began several years ago.

"Most of the things we try fail," said Jonathan Perlow, software engineer on the Gmail front end, responsible for GMail Chat and Mail Goggles. "We have lots of things that are false starts. We recently launched Google Buzz, and it had some false starts before it launched. We started something like Buzz around when we launched chat four years ago. Good ideas live on, and you figure it out."

Figuring things out for the Gmail team can be very quick. The team boasted of a close-knit engineering environment where ideas can be discussed and coded quickly, and where meetings are the exception rather than regular practice.

But while most failures for Gmail have occurred in testing and not made it outside of the walls of Mountain View, the initial failures for Buzz happened thanks to the team making some core mistakes and not having a testbed of real-world users, relying too heavily on their open corporate mentality.

"Gmail thought that e-mail and chat networks were also the social networks, and we missed the boat there," said Jackson. "(Autofollow) worked really well within Google in a trusted environment. Googlers rarely used block."

While Gmail's focus has changed over the last six years with the additions of Chat, Buzz, user interface updates and other features, the product initially aimed with three main goals: enable users to never delete e-mail, have a spam filter that really works, and build a Web interface with the level of quality of a desktop application - concepts that nobody knew how to do, but wanted to accomplish anyway.

"One of the lessons I learned is that when we start with ideas that are crazy at the time, but we thought we could do, they would be pretty great for users, said Perlow. "They had no idea how to build these things, but had to figure it out."

GMail's Invite Marketing Coup Was a Myth

For the last six years, marketing teams and Web services have pointed to GMail's invite-only approach as on of the most successful examples of driving user demand in a time of scarcity. At one point, GMail invites were so sought after that account-holders were selling off their spare invites on eBay. In fact, that's where I bought mine, as well as a never again used account ID for Orkut, way back in 2004. Today, at SXSW, we learned the move to make GMail an invites-only platform was not a marketing strategy, but instead one driven by fear from engineering, who thought they might not be able to scale under tremendous potential demand.

As is well-known, Gmail's debut on April 1, 2004 was not a massive April Fool's joke that promised a gigabyte of Web-based e-mail at a time when competitors like Yahoo! offered a comparatively measly 50 megabytes. Combined with a new Web-based interface that echoed the quality of desktop apps, and integrated anti-spam, the team thought potential customer demand for the new platform could outstrip available resources - and the engineers pushed for the invite only system.

"People were selling their souls on the Internet for invites," said Arielle Reinsten, Product Marketing Manager for GMail, at SXSW Interactive today. "But it wasn't a marketing idea at all (to offer invites). We were worried about capacity. It was an engineering decision that was seen as marketing."

With GMail now having passed the initial time of scarcity, open to all, the company now focuses on how they can leverage word of mouth from happy customers, and push for activities like viral videos and fan-building activities. Reinstein did say GMail was advertised widely in 2007, in part of a wide push to highlight it's built-in spam protection, but "it was a drop in the bucket compared to the organic growth and the viral growth GMail is known for," she said.

Google Buzz Integrating With Apps Still Pending

Editor's Note: This version replaces a prior one that suggested rollout had already started.

When Google Buzz debuted a month ago, integrating a new social network into your GMail, it did not roll out to business accounts running GMail on Google Apps. At the time, the company promised Apps customers would see Buzz added "within a few months." A premature promotion of the mobile version of Buzz to both consumer GMail users and Apps users made some see Buzz erroneously, before its time.

On Tuesday, as Susan Beebe's showed, many Apps users saw Buzz appear as "New" in their GMail settings, with a description of the new service. But that excitement proved to be short-lived, as explained by Todd Jackson, GMail Project Manager at Google, late Tuesday night.

"Nope, we haven't released Buzz to Apps customers yet. We had a small issue this afternoon where we mistakenly promoted the mobile version of Buzz to both consumer Gmail users and Apps users, but this is now fixed," he said.

When Buzz actually does go live for Apps, the social sharing service, which took some initial criticism for aggressive connecting and transparency, taking a step into the corporate world, will need to do so tentatively, as discovery of partnerships, let alone recruiters or other relationships, is more dicey than familial or casual friend connections that dominate most GMail activity.

Buzz Rolling Out to Google Apps?

Susan showed screenshots of Buzz appearing in the mobile version of Susan's GMail account, where Buzz is marked as "New", and features a short description of the service, as letting you "see what's going on nearby and post messages for your friends tagged with your location."

Susan Shows Google Buzz In Her Apps-Enabled GMail.

Whether you use Apps or not, you can find me on Buzz here. TheNextWeb also reported similar early deployment, which has since been explained.

A Month In the Cloud Shows Potential

At the end of January, I told you how I had recently picked up a MacBook Air to replace my aging MacBook Pro, and as part of that process, I would try to do as much as I could online instead of through desktop applications, leaving much of my rich media on the old laptop, and choosing the Web over hard disk as often as possible. A month in, it seems there is still much room for the cloud to grow, but despite the general trend for massive data growth, I still haven't used more than 30 percent of my spartan 128 GB solid state hard drive - a back of the hand measurement of how little data I am keeping with me and not leaving in the air.

As I mentioned last month, one of the first decisions I made was to keep iTunes and iPhoto data on the old laptop. I recognized I needed to keep Microsoft Office, for pure sanity purposes, but left Adobe's CS suite on the other machine.

Those applications I have downloaded have been rare, letting me tap into the cloud itself - for example, Skype, for audio phone calls and podcast recording, the Sonos controller to power the home stereo system, and Spotify, to access the on demand music network.

The goals are multiple. First, can I do a test run at being operating system agnostic, maintaining the flexibility to move toward a promised Chrome OS when it ships? Second, can I make the actual hardware insignificant, treating the new Air as a "disposable" machine, making migration to a newer device in the future simple? Third, and most important, can I find major weaknesses that continue to exist with an all cloud strategy?

At the end of February, my 128 GB solid state disk hard drive, much smaller than the 200 GB SATA disk it replaced, has 91.36 GB available, or just more than 71% of total capacity. This includes all system files, the pre-installed iLife applications from Apple, and preferences for many of the pre-installed apps. In fact, the one place I expected to consume a lot of data, with client files and PowerPoints, has proven to not be much at all. The folder for Paladin, with all client folders, is actually less than a single gigabyte.

Are there any headaches to going cloud-only (or close to it)? Sure. For somebody who uses PhotoShop a lot, the lack of PhotoShop has me reaching for it often. In the interim, for images for the blog, I've relied on lots of screen captures, and small editing in Preview. Anything stronger pushes me to the media machine. But the problems have been extremely rare. If I had an Office competitor that made it easy enough to edit all my files and save them remotely, I would be happy to give Microsoft Office the boot. But it's not there yet. And in the meantime, I am using GMail more and my Mac e-mail account less. I have been taking Zoli Erdos' advice and moving my Mac e-mail to the cloud, but that process isn't yet completed. I'll keep you posted on that, promise.

My new-ish MacBook Air isn't just lighter in terms of weight. It's massively lighter in terms of data too. It makes sense that in the future, so long as we have one place to put all our rich media, the rest of us really only need thin clients. We're getting there.

GMail Ads on Buzzed Reader Items Attract Controversy

Given the ease of distribution of content from site to site and network to network, with RSS or any other model, it's no surprise that scrapers galore are stocking away our unique copy and then trying to make a quick buck from ads surrounding it. Even though the copyright is not theirs, they are trying to make an end run around the system. As new aggregators and networks have hit the market, those of us creating the content have had to reevaluate what constitutes good practices, and what constitutes bad behavior - whether well intended or otherwise. Google Buzz, which has gained its unfair share of criticism for perceived security holes in the weeks since its launch, has finally gained a more valid critique, from Jesse Stay, who alertly noted, as I had earlier in the week, that the act of putting Buzz in one's GMail meant that content too can flow through Buzz, with Google pocketing cash on ads around your content, without the content originator getting a dime. It's the latest twist in the evolution of content and copyright in a fast-changing Web.

One Shared Item from Me on February 21st in GMail, With Ads

As you know, I don't try to monetize my content here on the blog. I don't run advertising, and I have long said that I don't mind if my content gets shared here and there for more comments. I want my content to be shared, as information, wherever you are comfortable. But yes, scrapers bug me. They mess up search alerts, and negatively impact the perception of this mirage-like image of a personal brand.

I don't believe for a moment that a new network like Google Buzz is an intended scraper, any more than I thought Shyftr was trying to steal comments from your blog when they offered shared comments on full feeds. But, thanks to Buzz living in your GMail, and many people, like me, pulling Google Reader items through Buzz, you can see how one's full content could feature advertising that benefits Google and not me. To some, this is the definition of a scraper.

Another Shared Reader Item from Me In Buzz in GMail With Ads

As a huge Google Reader advocate, and fan of the nascent network, Buzz, I do not mind in any way that my full content is being distributed. I love RSS. It is fantastic. But when I saw the ads in my GMail against others' content this week, it did strike me as odd, because it violated the unspoken rule that it's something you flat-out don't do.

I recognize that "fixing" this perceived flaw is hard. If I am the Buzz team, the act of removing ads against shared Reader items in Buzz while in GMail is probably non-trivial.

But I also can see their potential response. In theory, they cannot prohibit somebody from forwarding your content in full by e-mail, and GMail is an e-mail system. In theory, Google Reader shares are equivalent to e-mail forwards, and thus, the same as any other content being shared in this way.

Jesse asks, "Google, how is this not evil?", calling it copyright infringement. Unlike the overreactions this month, he's a lot closer in this criticism than others. I still hold that Google is not evil and is not trying to be evil, but it's more in the gray area than we would like. I assume if this holds, then we as content creators are going to need more re-education in terms of what the new rules are, and how we should adapt.

UPDATE: Jesse Stay reports the "scraping" issue will be solved early next week.

Google Lets Fearmongers and Unbelievers Opt Out of Buzz

Google's expansion and knowledge of the many things you do online collectively has some corners of the Web distrusting every move the Mountain View giant makes - even when they tell you in advance what they are doing, and how it might effect you. The company's moves toward openness and embracing of standards, though lauded by the tech community, haven't converted the confused masses who often at times seem to be blindly following a Pied Piper of fear, making them think the big G is reading your e-mail, sending updates to the NSA, and really cares whether you look at porn sites or not in your Web history. Take this simmering population, sprinkle on an aggressive push toward converting a private network (GMail) to a public one (Buzz), and the overwrought cries of fear and anguish were as predictable as rain. And now, after ten days of being thrown under the bus by head in the sand privacy-shrieking luddites, Google has had to backtrack again, repeatedly apologizing and now, letting you extract Buzz from your GMail like shrapnel from the field of battle.

Practically without exceptions, the hue and cry around Buzz, beyond those of us who embraced the new social network, was made by people who were not impacted by Buzz' move to "auto follow" in the first place. The examples given, from business partners, or potential headhunters, journalists' sources, psychiatrist clients and other possible unwanted revealings, were conjecture based on a complete lack of reality that ignored the fact that the majority of business e-mail is done through Microsoft Exchange, or if on Google's own products, in Apps, which doesn't yet support Buzz. Professionals leveraging free Web e-mail, which Gmail continues to be today, despite being exponentially better than its other free competitors, are getting what they pay for.

You Can Opt Out of Buzz If You Think You'll Get Stung

In comparison, the real potential problems with Buzz's gaining attraction, including assumed noise, and lacking of perfect integration into all networks on Day One, have been outshouted by the same people who squirm every time Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team move more toward public sharing and search discovery, and away from walled gardens. But again, the shrill minority has taken its pound of flesh, as Google's momentum with Buzz has taken body blow after body blow, primarily from an older generation of tech bloggers and business journalists unwilling or undesiring to embrace today's world of active sharing and aggregation.

After mea culpa following mea culpa, the Buzz team has released the option to disable Buzz outright, deleting all your posts, disconnecting your sites and users you are following. You also have the option to hide Buzz from your GMail (which doesn't make it go away, but hides it from you), in the event you suffer from severe distraction and interruption disorder.

You can find the new setting in GMail, where there is a new Buzz tab, letting you also hide those people you are following, either for your own sake, or theirs.

Amidst the din of the pack clustering around the body of Buzz, kicking at it like a group of children at a 6-year-olds' youth soccer match striking at a ball, some folks have seen beyond the tin foil hat nonsense and told people to look forward to something new. Thomas Hawk says to not listen to the naysayers, adding "they're wrong". But as I said Google blinked at the end of 2007, when the Reader team capitulated to the mob, a recalcitrant public is once again getting caught up in a world of old rules and ideals.

Knowing this nonsense would spring up, I asked Google vice president Bradley Horowitz on the option of "public" and automated friending when getting a preview of Buzz the Monday before its launch. His answer is as useful today as it was then:

"One thing that I have learned is that there are people who will always dislike a change you have made, including not making a change," he said. "We don't want to be prescriptive and say everything is public now. Sometimes it is an intimate sharing of an experience with coworkers, family and giving it to the right audience. The world is not going to abandon one form, but we would like people to have the right tools to make decisions for themselves."

Now the decision is truly in your hands. Want out of Buzz? Go to your GMail, click "Settings" and click "Buzz", and you can opt out of what is proving to be a very interesting network. Should you choose to instead embrace innovation, you can find me here: http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray

Google's Buzz Brings Social Sharing, Aggregation to GMail

Google's growth from its roots as a spartan, but highly effective, search engine has been as transformative as the changes the Web itself has seen over the last decade-plus. As the Web has evolved to include more rich media and social connectors, so too has Google evolved, as the company now operates not just the most popular data discovery engine but also some of the Web's most popular data creation and sharing engines, including Gmail and YouTube. But the company, so far, has struggled a bit in connecting its wide array of properties and making them feel personal and social. Today, with the launch of Google Buzz, the company aims to change that, making Gmail, and its sister sites, including Google.com and Google Maps, new places to share information of all types, with your friends.

Google Buzz is more than just another status updater. The world has seen plenty of those already. What Buzz aims to do is help Gmail users share content with connected friends, extending the popular messaging platform further from its roots, to a high quality multi-media social experience. And lest anybody fear that Buzz has Twitter in its sights, Twitter is supported from day one, so your updates can feed into Buzz and be part of the conversation.

Google Buzz Connects You to Friends and Followers

Starting today, all Gmail users can see the Buzz icon just below their Inbox. Clicking the Buzz icon places you in a familiar-looking aggregator, where you are immediately connected to those people you e-mail and chat with the most frequently in Gmail, giving you an instant start to a new social network. Within Buzz, you can share text, or more importantly, videos, photos and links - taking the product beyond Twitter and into FriendFeed territory. (Now also Facebook territory)

Add Social Services to Buzz

For veteran FriendFeeders, the look and feel of Buzz is an extremely familiar one. Every Buzz entry features the option to comment or like it, and shared items can be toggled from public to private, meaning Google can start indexing the shares into its search engine, or ignore them outright.

At launch, Buzz supports a few major services, including Google Reader, Flickr, Picasa and Twitter. Unlike many other aggregators we have covered in the last few years, Buzz isn't looking to pull in all links from dozens of different social sites, but instead, aims to make the act of sharing more commonplace for the mainstream.

Photos Shared On Buzz With Likes, Comments

Some of Buzz's main attributes include the product's attention to detail. Photos shared in Buzz are very high quality and can be viewed quickly. YouTube video shares play in line, and interestingly, links that are shared as status updates give the option to share any images from the page, much like FriendFeed's bookmarklet - only without the need for the user to install any JavaScript code on the browser.

Recommended Content from Buzz From a Friend of a Friend

Additionally, thanks to Buzz being partnered with Gmail, the e-mail in box is hardly the second cousin to the social experience, as it is with many other networks. Rather than simply being a repository for follower notifications and daily summaries, Buzz messages in your in box are live conversations, which are updated in real time with comments from friends as they flow in. You can get notifications to your in box when there are comments on your items, when others comment in conversations where you have been active, and when people send conversations to you through an @Reply feature, which autocompletes in Gmail.

In a conversation I had with the team behind Buzz on Monday at Google's headquarters, the developers said they focused on five major elements of Buzz:

1. Auto following, which prevents you from starting a network by scratch.
2. A rich and fast sharing experience.
3. Public and private sharing to mark individual posts or global settings.
4. Inbox integration.
5. Just the good stuff.

So what is the good stuff? Google wants to avoid the problems that have befallen other networks, which can be overrun with irrelevant, nonsensical updates, often from people you don't know. Buzz looks to surface content from those best connected to you, and will lower the visibility of inactive items. More active items, receiving comments, will bump to the top while others sink.

Embedded YouTube In Google Buzz Plays In Line

At the end of 2009, I aired my thoughts about how aggregation has thus far failed to set the world ablaze, with sites like FriendFeed, Cliqset, Arktan and others yielding comparatively lower user numbers than more simplified offerings. One of the major reasons for this, in my opinion, has been the need for a dedicated, or new, social network to follow. An advantage Buzz has in this case is that many millions of people are already using Gmail for their e-mail and many more use the company's contacts, maps, RSS reader and search software.

Buzz is a first major step in making Google more social, and setting up ways for users to share their external content with friends. It's not looking to kill other services, but to make these services available in a new place.

Google's Mac Mail Uploader Taunts Would-Be GMailers

Tonight, I thought I saw the final missing piece fall into place that would let me take my gigabytes and gigabytes of e-mail off my hard drive and put them in the cloud, setting the stage for a long-discussed, but never fully implemented, move from my decade-old Mac.com e-mail address to a more Web savvy GMail account. An update on Google's Mac Blog introduced a new software option that promises to take all your Mail files from your personal computer, and take them to Google Apps. A free utility, the quick download looked like it was going to get me one step closer to a Web-centric experience, moving to the cloud. But it looks like I am still on the outside looking in, even though the product's release is extremely promising for an eventual solution.

More than two years ago, I talked about the potential attraction of GMail to corporate users who have long been tethered to the world of Microsoft. I said that Importing PST Files, or e-mail archives common to Microsoft Outlook, could be GMail's secret weapon. In the ensuing years, tools have been made to help upload e-mail from Windows, and to migrate Web mail to Google e-mail accounts. But tonight's announcement was the first for Mac users, who, despite the many synergies between Apple and Google, often find themselves last served, behind Windows and Linux users, by the Mountain View company.

101,000 messages to upload over 28 hours. Do it!

So, of course, I downloaded the application immediately. Without any configuration on my end, it found my Mail.app e-mail and the correct hierarchy, looking to move more than 100,000 messages I've been hoarding since the mid 1990s to the cloud, with appropriate labeling. The expected move time for these 100,000 messages? Almost 30 hours. But at least it was something.

Unfortunately, as many good things tend to have, there was a catch. The e-mail uploader "currently can upload only to Google Apps email accounts, and not to gmail.com or googlemail.com accounts", so the planned migration, once again, seems to be on hold.

Curses! No upload to GMail! Can I hack this?

Given the wording of the post, the author, Greg Robbins, seems highly aware of the issue, having called it out, and the word "currently" is promising that a solution may soon arrive. But until that time, I will continue to keep using my Mac.com e-mail and storing my data locally. For me, the archives are almost as important, and in some cases, more important, than my most recent data. If I could upload my 100,000+ e-mail messages, with appropriate labeling, to GMail and have the search functionality and all other great items offered in GMail, I would have started the process tonight, but the restriction to Google Apps keeps us on the outside looking in, still.

The promise of the move is tempting enough to open up a new Google Apps account, but I'm not interested in further forking my e-mail experience with more and more accounts to check. It's already a challenge to get work e-mail with multiple clients, and my various online accounts. I have been wanting a real Mac-friendly E-mail uploader to GMail since shortly after its debut, and almost six years after GMail shocked the world with its invention, I still don't have it. So Greg, I know you want what I want, so how can we make this happen?