Archive for January, 2010

I Want A Better Personal Cloud

January 14, 2010

Clouds by Kevin Dooley

Cloud computing is all the rage.  The big debates are public vs. private, open source vs. proprietary, and SMB vs. enterprise.  While these are emerging trends, an enormous shift that has occurred over the last few years is the start of what a few are calling the “personal cloud”.  A personal cloud is your collection of online service providers that facilitates your digital information creation, sharing, commenting, collaborating, and connecting with others.

Today, our digital lives are increasingly shifting from the home PC to your work laptop and a host of online cloud service providers.  Personal services includes productivity (email, calendaring, instant messaging, etc.), sharing (photos, documents, videos, etc.), and communities (social networks, gaming, travel planning, etc.).  Business service examples are numerous too with LinkedIn, Yammer, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  More innovative services are becoming available daily.  The combination of cloud computing, Web 2.0 productivity, and mobile has exploded the possibilities.

Four challenges worry me most about the current state of my personal cloud:

  1. Our personal information and life data has been spread across each of these services.  A higher level organizational construct (a personal meta-cloud) that can assemble the content from multiple providers is needed.  This would not only assist viewing and tracking but also allow multi-channel syndication of new information out to our multiple services and networks.
  2. The tools to manage the split of information being shared and managed across the public, business, and personal arenas do not exist.  One can only manage data in each silo independently – a huge time sink – leading many users to assume an “oversharing isn’t bad” mentality.  We need more granular controls built into the services and ways to maintain visibility into what information different communities are consuming.
  3. My data longevity is not safe.  Just as take advantage of new services, we are losing data residing in older services.  Services go out of business without a way to extract the data and meta data (e.g., I left MySpace long ago leaving behind my profile and all the conversations).  There needs to be a centralized personal cloud that holds my master data and syndicates it out to my online communities at a granular level, as well as automatically captures, organizes, and archives my content from those communities for long-term storage and potential reuse.
  4. There is no connection back to my physical world.  As we continue to network the home with smart energy, digital security, and home entertainment, we are creating yet another silo of our digital personal information.  A key impediment to bringing this online is connectivity speeds from any cloud-based provider through the last mile.  Users will continue to expect near instantaneous response times with any controllers.

The conclusion is that there is a business opportunity for a vendor to become the aggregator that facilitates, controls, and maintains my personal cloud.  Given # 4 above, there will likely be a home-based IT component for heavier applications like digital home video libraries until the bandwidth issues get resolved.  In the meantime, I would like a personal cloud provider.  Unfortunately I do not think Google is that provider due to their needing to mine data for advertising.  I would be willing to pay for a stand-alone service.

Do you want better control over your personal cloud?  What other issues need resolution and who might be a likely provider?

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Posted in Business Concepts, Cloud, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »

10 Reasons to Switch to Gmail

January 9, 2010

Gmail

Gmail rocks.  Everyone should use Gmail unless they only have very basic email requirements (i.e., are a baby boomer with limited computer skills and need a highly streamlined user experience). Up until about 6 months ago, I used Outlook at work and Yahoo Mail for personal messaging.  While the Yahoo interface is easy-to-use, the poor performance searching contacts and email often frustrated me.

I made the switch.  If you use one of those “other” providers, I know you’ve been considering moving to Google Mail.  Don’t put it off.  It’s easy to transition all your data.  And you will get back hours of your life.

10 Reasons to Switch

  1. Emails are a two-way conversation and Gmail automatically links together all the emails for a topic across the email participants.  Gmail calls this ‘threading’.  Threading saves lots of time searching for old emails to refresh your memory of the latest exchange.  The more diverse your email topics the more valuable this will be.
  2. Spam filtering is far superior.  My old Yahoo account would receive 50 spams a day (yet another medical breakthrough) and occasionally some non-spam would slip in.  That required me to check my Spam folder periodically or risk losing real email (waste of time).  I receive 2 spams a week with Gmail.
  3. Gmail search is incredibly fast and the search results are presented in an easy to read manner.
  4. Gmail provides 7.5 GB of storage making deleting emails unnecessary.  Instead, I ‘archive’ them (although I can easily delete them if desired) in case they might be needed in the future.  Archiving hides the emails so they do not clutter my inbox.  However, search results include these emails making it easy to find the needle in a haystack.  Considering that many people have corporate email accounts and frequently are unable to send/receive due to being over their email size limits, this saves enormous time scrubbing attachments as well.
  5. Calendering is very integrated and the scheduling of meetings with contacts is seamless.  The interface is also easier to use than Yahoo for multiple calendars (e.g., a shared family calendar, contact birthdays, or your favorite sports teams).  Reminders can be emailed or set as pop-ups on your computer.  Labs widgets further improve the usability experience (dim recurring meetings, attach documents).
  6. Gmail email, contacts, and calendaring are easily setup for mobile synchronization on my iPhone 3gs.  Follow these instructions and never worry about housekeeping these again.
  7. You can keep your old email account and send emails from within Gmail with that return address.  Some people may want to keep multiple accounts or their old account in case someone doesn’t receive your update about switching.
  8. Gmail has Google Docs which allow you to create, read, or edit any document, presentation, or spreadsheet online without needing Office.  It is also a powerful collaboration hub to share items with other users and work on joint materials.
  9. Chat is embedded within Gmail and optionally shown on the same page as your email.  This makes online talking easier within the context of your everyday work.
  10. Access to future innovation.  Google continues to innovate faster, as an example Google Wave.  While currently an emerging platform (combining e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking), Google Wave will continue to evolve from its first generation incarnation as people find new ways to apply the platform to specific use cases.  Other recent innovations include Gmail Offline and other Lab widgets.

Limitations

While Gmail is the best offering, it does still have some limitations:

  1. Contact management is critical as I have 1300+ contacts.  Google contacts still does not do enough to gear the user interface towards regular contacts.  I also want smart prompting to help me maintain communication with important people on a semi-regular basis.  Xobni is heading in this direction and Google should adopt better social media integration features.  Adding new contacts is also non-efficient as Groups assignment happens as a second operation after adding a contact.
  2. Google also does not allow creation of recurring tasks, something many others are asking for in the enhancement forums.
  3. Another serious gap is Google’s lack of “notes”.  I’ve had to adopt Evernote to fill the void.
  4. The user interface is not as similar to Outlook as Yahoo, making it harder for less technical users.
  5. Privacy.  Actually, I don’t have any issues with this.  Yes, Google will scan your emails and use it to better target advertising at you.  Yes, this is scary if you think a person at Google wants to read your personal materials.  However, most of us are just too boring in the grand scheme to make this an issue.

Did I cover your favorite unique features in Gmail or are there major capabilities that you would recommend?  What are you not happy about with Gmail?  Let me know.

For those that decide to make the transition, see my recent blog on suggested steps to follow.

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Posted in Collaboration, Email, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Steps to Transition from Yahoo Mail to Gmail

January 2, 2010

The process to make the switch from Yahoo Mail to Gmail is not well documented.  There are plenty of pages dedicated to this topic, but mainly are rehashes of the same clicks-and-picks without the reasoning.  To help one make the change from your current online provider, Google has created a simple series of instructions to assist the process.  I found the list lacking of some critical steps as well.  I will detail fully the capabilities that drove me to switch to Gmail in another post shortly.

My recommended process would be to:

  1. Clean-up the structure of your Yahoo account by removing any unnecessary email folders or contact categories.  You don’t need to spend lots of time but make sure the organizational structure of folders and contacts is up-to-date.  These will be used to map to new items in Gmail.
  2. Signup for a Gmail account using first.last@gmail.com (this increasingly is a standard and will be good if you use the account for anything professional or to tie to other social media outlets).
  3. Contacts (access from list in left column)
    • Create Gmail Groups for each of your Yahoo Categories.
    • Export Yahoo contacts to your local computer using CSV and import to Gmail.
    • Check that the same number of contacts is in each system and check a few most-used contacts to make sure the proper contact information transferred.
  4. Email
    • Create Gmail labels for each of your Yahoo Folders from the ‘Settings’ area.  This will allow Gmail to automatically populate assign the label during the import process.
    • Gmail has partnered with TrueSwitch to power the importing of email.  Go to Gmail Settings -> Accounts and Import and follow the instructions.  Note that I did not have a good experience using TrueSwitch to import contacts which is why I recommend the manual process above.
    • Monitor the importing as it will take several days.  Gmail will add a label to the emails for the importing account name as well as the correct Label that matched your Yahoo categories.
    • Create filters to have specific emails by-pass showing up in your Inbox and going automatically to a Label.  This is a bit confusing to do.  Select the email, then action of “Filter messages like these” and the two key selections are to “Skip the Inbox (Archive It)” and “Apply the Label”.
  5. Calendar
    • Yes, you can export your Yahoo calendar and import it easily into Google Calendar.  Follow these simple steps that require first saving to your local computer.

That’s it.  Now you can announce your new email to others as desired.  I would also suggest setting up your email signature (in Settings) and hiding Chat in the user interface if you don’t use it (at bottom of page).

Another decision to make is whether to disable your existing Yahoo account.  I would not.  First, they are always people who do not update their contact information and will continue to email your old account.  Second, there are plenty of services that you’ve signed up for that you will need to slowly transition over to your new email information.  I put these into a new folder and would take 15 minutes every few days to slog through the transition.

Good resources for new Gmail users are the About.com Gmail Overview and Jim’s Gmail Tips.

Have you made the switch and found other steps critical to ensure a smooth transition?  Let me know what I missed or if there are even better resources available.

Posted in Email | 2 Comments »

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